Martin Scorsese loves all kinds of music. “Opera, classical, country, blues, rock, it’s all a big part of my life,” he says. But there are some musicians that are closer to his heart – the ones who have been with him since he first discovered them back in the sixties. “Bob Dylan, The Beatles, The Stones – always the Stones. They’re always there for me.”
Although he didn’t actually get to see The Stones live until the early 1970s, Scorsese vividly remembers the huge impact that songs like Gimme Shelter had when he first heard them.
“The vocals and the instrumentation created a special energy – a sound – unlike anything else. In effect, the sound was like a character – a persona in the dramatic narrative of the story – like the voice of a poet reciting an epic or a shaman’s incantation. A distinct personality and voice which speaks only to you… to me. And the message is specific and immediate and a product and comment on the world you live in, and that I live in… sometimes funny, sometimes sarcastic, tender but brutal and honest – an acceptance of a darker side of human nature, often poetically. Their persona – and really, it was their persona, a joint creation - became part of my subconscious.”
When he made Mean Streets (the first of several Scorsese features rightly regarded as classics) back in 1973 he used two Stones songs on the soundtrack, Jumpin’ Jack Flash and Tell Me.
“The Stones’ music has remained a wellspring of inspiration. When I finally got to make the film I wanted to make, I said, ‘I’m going to make the film I want and I’m going to make it the way I want and I’m not going to make any compromises’. And this became Mean Streets. The Stones’ music was all over it. I wanted more but we couldn’t afford it.”
Scorsese’s love of music has been central to his career as a filmmaker. He was an editor on Woodstock, the seminal documentary which captured the last, great festival of the ‘60s. He directed The Last Waltz, a vivid document of The Band’s last concert and perhaps the greatest of all live rock‘n’roll movies. More recently, he directed the highly acclaimed Dylan documentary No Direction Home: Bob Dylan. Future projects include films on George Harrison and Bob Marley.
Shine A Light is a beautifully shot and dynamically edited record of the Stones in concert at New York’s legendary Beacon Theatre. Filmed over two nights at the Beacon during The Stones’ 2006 Bigger Bang tour, Shine A Light is a concert documentary interspersed with archive footage of the band and it offers a fascinating insight into the preparations building up to this very special Stones gig.
“If we’d made a documentary on the Stones and their history, then that would have been a very different movie, about not just them but also their times… their history,” Scorsese says. “This was always first and foremost a concert film. I wanted it to be about the music, the performance.”
He also wanted to film them close up and in an intimate setting.
“I’ve been to see them many times over the last few years and the last time I saw them in a small venue was in the late ‘70s, at the Academy Of Music on 14th Street in New York, which no longer exists.
“So every time I’ve seen them in these giant arenas, they become these little figures. It’s often a very effective and enjoyable show but I literally couldn’t see them. And when they’d bring me down on stage, I’d look up and say to myself, ‘I wish I had a camera here’. I couldn’t help it.”
The line-up is classic Stones – opening with Jumpin’ Jack Flash and closing with Start Me Up, Brown Sugar and Satisfaction – with some surprises along the way: a riveting duet with Jack White on Loving Cup, a rollicking, sexy version of Live With Me with Christina Aguilera and a show-stopping performance of Champagne And Reefer with blues guitar legend Buddy Guy. Keith was so riveted by Guy’s performance that he promptly handed him his guitar to keep after the song ended.
The logistics of filming an unpredictable, organic event – which is what a Stones gig is – would be daunting for any filmmaker. Scorsese employed 18 cameras and a vastly experienced crew in order to capture The Stones strutting their stuff.
“Once we finally got our two machines working together - the Stones machine and then the movie machine - and all these cameras and the lighting… I can’t describe the adrenaline, and the heartbeat during the actual two hours of the concerts.
“The first song started and then it seemed like it was over in less than a minute. It was like a whirlwind was hitting. I was seeing 18 images in front of me. I’d zero in on one camera and talk to a cameraman to be careful to move in here or there. It was a pleasure – absolutely terrifying, but a great pleasure.”
The Stones come across in the film as a powerful force.
“True. A force of nature… A friend of mine said, ‘It’s your most upbeat film’, and that was very nice to hear. I think it’s a film about doing what you do until it’s over, and it’s only over when it’s over, at the very, very end. You know, going back to making a longer documentary, that’s very tempting. But I realised that what I was really compelled to do was cover their performance. I’ve seen them on stage often over the years because Mick and I have been working on a project together on the music business, a feature film, and this is something I’ve always had in mind, consciously or unconsciously.”
Shine A Light is now showing.