While in town for the Sydney Film Festival, I caught up with Oscar winning cinematographer Dion Beebe and his wife and director Unjoo Moon to talk about their work on the new documentary The Zen of Bennett.
Larry: So how did you find your way into Tony Bennett recording studio?
Unjoo: Well we’ve known the family for about 5 years, Dion worked on the 80th Birthday Special, which was a television special done with Tony’s Duets 1 album, it was directed by Rob Marshall, who is a director that Dion has worked extensively with.
Dion and Rob did some Academy Award recognized films like Chicago and Nine, and Dion won the Academy Award for Memoirs of a Geisha, so we had stayed in touch with the family through that process. In the 5 years since, we’ve gotten to know them really well, celebrated birthdays with them, gone to weddings, we knew about the births of the grandchildren that had happened, they’d very much stayed in touch with us, I think our first son got his first electric guitar from their family.
That’s pretty cool!
Unjoo: That’s very cool, yeah, and when Tony was going to make his Duets II album for his 85th birthday, Danny (his Son and Manager) really felt strongly that he wanted to make a film that was going to portray his father in a very different way that the rest of the world regularly sees him.
There’d been some documentaries made and I guess from the family’s point of view, there was nothing that really captured Tony’s philosophy, or his artistic process in the way that they had witnessed it, and when Danny spoke to us about the idea, we were really excited because the film would be primarily made with the cooperation of the family… we knew that it would give us this unrestricted access that we wouldn’t normally get with any other artist.
Well the result is extraordinary in that respect, the insight is something you don’t normally get to see.
Unjoo: I think what was really interesting about making the film was it wasn’t really just the making of an album, it was sort of Tony’s life story as well. It’s a portrait of Tony Bennett more than it is of making an album, he’s 85 years old, he’s lived through many generations of music in a way that many, many people haven’t. It was really fascinating to try and capture all those stories that he knew about the early days from people like Nat King-Cole, then here is in present day working with Lady Gaga, so it was really interesting capturing the stories with him, and me as a director I kind of had to go and encourage him to get those stories out of him, and they’re stories that he’s probably told many, many times but we wanted it to sound fresh, and we also wanted the whole film to feel like you were there in the moment with Tony, we didn’t want anything to feel created.
Dion: Very conversational…
Unjoo: …yeah it was very conversational we didn’t want it to feel like he was putting anything on, like it was created… we really wanted to feel like the audience was very much there, being kind of like a fly on the wall listening in on these conversations, and really feeling like you got something that was very private and personal.
Well there is definitely that feeling like this is natural, it all so seems so natural to him, like this is sort of his every day life almost.
Dion: Yeah well it sort of was…
Unjoo:…it is, except that the condensation of what he tells you is shot over a 6-month period. So there would be days where we would film and there would be very little said, and maybe the first couple of days where we filmed, there was not a lot of material for us to use, but I think that as we went on the journey with Tony, and as Tony got to feel more comfortable with us, and he got to feel very used to having a film crew around him the whole time.
It wasn’t just one camera, sometimes we had 5 cameras, so as he started to feel really comfortable with it, he started to feel more relaxed about opening up as well, and that was an agenda that we had, we just wanted him to feel really comfortable with everything that was going on, because without that he was never really going to come across as being as authentic as he comes across in the film.
Was there anything in the making of the film that surprised you about Tony? Or about music in general?
Dion: I think about Tony, he has very strong opinions, he’s lived a life and he’s seen a lot of stuff, and he’s very liberal in his outlook, and not in the Australian political sense of liberal, but the true sense of the word, very sort of forward thinking, more left leaning… he was part of the civil rights movement early on, and his attitudes towards sort of drugs, decriminalizing drugs, and he his opinions on the war, in Iraq, he never shies away from putting forward his position.
I sort of admire that, because there’s so much tip toeing around subjects, you know not wanting to isolate your position of your political leanings, he quite clearly states where he stands.
Unjoo: I completely agree with that, because in the years that we’ve gotten to know the family, and we’ve met Tony at various dinners, and a lot of the stories of his life were things that we had often discussed or heard or we’d been exposed to, but I think that getting to know him over that time, that was very special, because he’s such a humanitarian, and in a very genuine sense of the word. It’s not a show, it’s not something that he does because it gives him a better audience, he genuinely cares about everybody in the world, and he has this great quote from Ella Fitzgerald where he talks about now we’re all here, everyone is here, and he takes that approach in whatever he does.
He’s considered towards everybody, because he really believes that we are all in this together, and he tells a wonderful story in the film about when he’s with… I’m pretty sure it was Louis Armstrong… and they’d been recording for a very long time, and Tony was one of the few performers that would tour with African-American performers. It just wasn’t done in those days. But he saw no distinction and he told this great story about how they were all outside a club, and Louis Armstrong had just performed and when he came out somebody came to give him the keys to valet park the car, and just the way he tells these stories it’s just done in such a natural kind of way, and it’s such a part of his make up and who he is, and I think that that’s why you really feel it in the music, because when he sings, he genuinely cares abut what he’s singing about, and he cares about what’s going on in life.
The other thing I really got out of working with Tony is that he’s 85 years old, but he sees himself as an eternal student. Most people would think he’s seen it all, but he really still sees himself as just learning now, and it’s not a saying, he genuinely lives that. We travel with him through many cities, we were in four different American cities with him, we went to Europe, we went to London with him, we were on a lot of flights with him, and it’s really interesting because he gets himself into situations and he’s excited, because he wants to know about things, and for us, watching somebody who’s at the pinnacle of their career, who’s considered a legend, to be so excited about new things really taught us a lot.
One day we were in Nashville, and we recorded with Faith Hill for maybe 6 hours, and he went and did a live interview, then he went to the Nashville performing arts centre, and did a sound check, then he performed in front of 3500 people, he went and greeted 75 people in his dressing room, at one o’clock in the morning, I was dancing with him at a Honky Tonk bar, and he was eating a fried pickle, I was exhausted, and he was still so strong. And I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a Tony Bennett show, but he’s 85 and he does a 2 hour show with no intermission, and I’ve seen that show many, many times now and each time it’s still really special…
Dion: I think that’s also the way he performs, he never just sings basically the same song twice.
Looking at the post-process, when you’ve got 6 months of footage to play with, I mean I assume you weren’t filming every day for 6 months but it was probably bordering on it, how does the post production process work for you?
Unjoo: When we were shooting it was really clear what elements were going to work and what weren’t… you know we’d have days where we had really strong material that really covered Tony’s life, and there were certain recording sessions that were obviously stronger than others, and that really depended on the chemistry between Tony and the Duets artist.
You know some recording sessions were just beautiful, you know, I think about that recording session he did with Alejandro Sanz, who’s a Spanish singer, he’s one of the biggest southern Spanish singers in the world, and that track that they recorded together was really one of the most beautiful tracks that we heard, but from a drama point of view there wasn’t a lot else that happened, so I think that it was really clear when we were filming which artists were going to cover certain areas of Tony’s life…
Dion: …there were performers that were sort of pushing the drama forward, we recorded 16 artists, and I think there’s maybe 8 of them in the film, only half of what we recorded in the studio with various artists essentially made it into the movie…
Unjoo: …and when we got to the post stage, we sort of already knew the journey of Tony’s life and the things we wanted to include so we were really searching for that in the material that we’d shot, and initially the structure of the film was really loosely constructed around the recording sessions, but it just seemed like a really natural flow in terms of the information you would get in Tony’s life, but then also in the post-production process we had to be very honest, very respectful to what the family wanted. This film is very much a legacy film in some ways, and we love doing this because it gave us such access to Tony and these musicians, but ultimately the film is produced by the family, so there were going to be restrictions in the edit process.
Did that make it difficult at all?
Dion: More challenging…
Unjoo: I don’t think I would use the term challenging, I think we kind of always knew that, and we knew that there would be certain things that they wouldn’t show, which we really respect, but I think that what you end up seeing on the film is very much the film that we shot.
Dion: …it’s very authentically Tony, and his journey, and his life.
Unjoo: It wasn’t constructed, we hadn’t gone in there and storyboarded things, it’s a film that’s impossible to do that with, and even though there are many moments, and there are lots of created shots, and lots of conversations of Tony that I went in to seek out with him, I wasn’t just sitting there waiting for him to say something, but at the same time we wanted it to feel like you were there in that conversation with Tony. I mean we both come from drama backgrounds, we’re both used to constructing things in a very precise way.
Dion: But that said, we took a very deliberate approach to the visual style that Tony has. We made some clear decisions early on about how we were going to shoot it, how we were going to construct the recording sessions, all 16 of them had that distinct feel, mood, that was appropriate to the song, to the artist, and that was a challenge in terms of creating a different feel inside a recording studio.
Unjoo: And you know what recording studio’s are like, they’re very unglamorous, they’re really ugly most of the time.
Dion: But I think what helped us through those recording sessions was the way that Tony records, because he records with a 3 piece band and it’s live, it’s not everyone in isolation booths, you do your track, I do my track, then we’ll record the musician separately, and produce it… for him it’s old school, you’re in the studio the band is live, the singing is live, and particularly for us it made it more interesting because of that, because the stakes are a little bit higher, and the artists, a few of them were a little bit like, “Whoa, are we really going to do this live?”.
Unjoo: We actually took every track with the artist and went in there and almost created the studio environment, so a lot of those songs that you see, they’re all in the same studio but we re-littered different ways, and re-set dress places and created environments because we found that in the initial phase when we weren’t doing that. We started off in LA, it didn’t create the mood and the atmosphere that we thought the film needed, so as we went through each of the different cities, we were very specific about creating the certain feel about the studio.
Dion: And we were very clear about that from the get go, one thing we didn’t want to do was have 16 artists in sort of bland looking recording studio’s with headphones recording how many hours of footage, it would just be sort of monotonous.
You’d end up with a 15-minute film.
Dion: Yeah we had to kind of create an interest, in each of the recording studios.
Unjoo: Yeah but in creating that interest it helped the artists when they were performing with Tony, and it gave them things to talk about, you know.
Dion: And when Tony came to look forward to how we would interpret the next song, because he’d come into the stage and see how we’d dressed and littered and what that atmosphere was, he’d say “you guys are coming with me whenever I record”.
So what’s the rest of the year holding for the two of you? Is this still going to be touring around to other festivals? Or is this the end of that period for you?
Unjoo: Well tonight this film screens at the Sydney Film Festival and it also screens in the Tuscan Film Festival, which is where Tony is at the moment, because he’s doing a tour of all the music festivals, for his album.
The film itself moving forward is going to be the first of Netflicks’ original programming, Netflicks were involved in the early stages of the film, and I don’t know what that means for its festival life, we were excited to bring it to Sydney because obviously Dion and I we weren’t to film school here, we met at film school here, Sydney is a really important place for us, and we get a chance to screen it to family and friends while we’re here. But I think that once it goes on the internet it kind of reduces the festival film of the life, but if it screens on Netflicks its kind of considered a cable television station. So it’s an interesting path for the film to go on, it’s a non-traditional path, but it’s probably going to be a path for many films in the future, so you know the theatrical life of a documentary like this is always kind of limited, but once it’s on the web it just gets an enormous amount of attention. Each of the music sessions we shot ended up being almost like music videos, or performance records, which all ended up on the internet.
I remember seeing a TV special about the record.
Dion: Yeah that’s basically all the performances.
Yeah and the Amy Winehouse one as well, I remember seeing that.
Unjoo: Yeah the Amy Winehouse one has something crazy like 20 million hits or something. And we always get asked about working with Amy as well.
Has it overshadowed the film at all do you think?
Dion: I don’t think so, I don’t think the family ever over emphasized that, there was a lot of discretion knowing that weeks before she did die that the approach was to really not overplay it and not oversell it, and be really respectful to the family. You know of course people became aware, and there was a growing awareness, but it kind of grew out of knowledge and not out of any attempt to publicize it or anything.
Unjoo: What I love about the day that we shot with Amy was that she was at her absolute best that day, she walked in and she was funny, so funny, smart, and she looked absolutely beautiful, and she records the song and at the end it’s this really extraordinary track, and I feel really lucky that we managed to capture that moment for her….
Dion: …because it’s a really positive moment…
Unjoo: …yeah of a really unique artist, and I think that maybe that’s not the way a lot of people remember her, but that’s our memory of her…
Dion: …and thankfully this is really a record of that, that she came in just excited to record with Tony, you just see her process which is extraordinary.
And nervous as well, I mean a few of the artists seemed quite nervous!
Unjoo: Yeah well they were all nervous I mean how do you not be nervous in front of Tony Bennett?
Dion: Yeah but particularly Amy was nervous, but also it’s because of the recording process, it’s the live recording, it’s not like you just get a chance to run a few different versions in your isolation booth, you’ve got to play off the other artist.
Unjoo: Yeah and I guess the other thing about Amy is that there’s nothing controversial about what we shot about Amy, except for the fact that it’s very truthful for that day, she was really spectacular.
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Transcript by Ross Hetherton
