I first met Björk over Skype, which is how I generally meet people these days. It always feels like a paradox: peering into someone else’s room yet knowing they are thousands of miles away. Vomit was the first subject to come up, because I had just recovered from a wretched bout of food poisoning. It felt too sudden to talk about the project in question, which meant other stuff came up, such as our record collections. Crass, Little Annie, Current 93, Chris Watson, and especially Swans, were all mutual loves. No direct relevance to Biophilia, but it helped us to confirm a shared sensibility.
Before this point, I had never considered directing a concert film. When I heard about the logistics of this one, it sounded especially daunting. To film a low stage in the round, 16 cameras would be needed, and my experience was limited to one. Despite my great admiration for Björk, I was apprehensive.
Serving someone else’s vision, however, alongside a co-director (the supremely talented Nick Fenton) felt strangely refreshing after having spent all my adult life directing or attempting to direct my own scripts. Sharing the project with Björk and Fenton meant I could get some air instead of festering in my own head. Plus, if it all bellyflopped, I could blame it on them.
My knowledge of concert films is patchy, to say the least. I know the classics such as Jonathan Demme’s Talking Heads film, Stop Making Sense, but I’m more familiar with those that merge musical performance and documentary, such as Penelope Spheeris’s The Decline of the Western Civilization, Part Two: The Metal Years – which is incredibly funny, affectionate and sad. My favourite concert films tend to be home-made affairs, such as Faust’s Nobody Knows If It Ever Happened, in which Jean-Hervé Péron plays guitar naked and the band gas the audience at the end.
For a fleeting moment, I considered incorporating behind-the-scenes reels for Biophilia, but that kind of thing always gets my back up as a viewer. The world has seen enough “exclusive” footage of celebrities playing kiss chase backstage. It’s not endearing and the party pooper in me just wants to turn up with a pin and burst their balloons. Björk had no problem bypassing the backstage razzmatazz and we agreed on a pure concert film.
The main spark, when planning the movie, was our mutual love of Theresa Sauer’s Notations 21, a book of illustrated experimental musical scores, and of Hans Jenny’s cymatics experiments exploring audio waves. Björk had planned to incorporate these onstage in the basslines of Cosmogony, Hollow and Moon, but the sonic vibrations that would be needed to make an impact on a big scale could potentially rupture eardrums.
Most of our conversations were by email. She wrote of the need for every generation to place themselves visually in the universe, along with her hope that technology can collaborate with nature. I introduced her to Jordan Belson’s short films from the 1960s, which are unparalleled cosmological raptures. She introduced me to Drew Berry’s biomedical animations of cellular and molecular life.
When I sent her my treatment, Björk focused mainly on what she didn’t want. Any romantic or didactic approach to the natural world was to be abandoned in favour of a more neutral presentation of both innermost and outermost wonders in all their benevolence and malevolence.
Fenton and I needed archive footage in order to illustrate some of the many ideas in Biophilia, but we didn’t want to confuse the palette too much. With the help of many people, such as the Wellcome Trust and Adam Rutherford, we had access to both footage and knowledge that could assist us in judging the balance of scientific verisimilitude against pure aesthetics.
As for the concert itself, our cinematographer, Brett Turnbull, with his crew of 15 fantastically grizzled cameramen (several of whom were The Stones in the Park veterans), had the tricky task of disrupting neither audience nor musicians.
For the gig in London, Fenton and I sat in a Portakabin with monitors for each of the 16 cameras. We felt more like security guards than directors, with our doughnuts and radios to give instructions, though half the time the cameramen couldn’t hear us.
As our purpose was to serve Björk’s vision, we were surprised how hands-off she was. In hindsight, she laid out all her thoughts in the emails prior to the shoot. Once she felt comfortable with Fenton and me, she let go and trusted us.
One treads a fine line with concert films. It didn’t seem right to put any stamp on Biophilia. This was not out of deference to Björk – I would have done the same for Chas & Dave – but purely because we are serving another vision, no matter who the musician is. Concert films often fall into the souvenir category, but I think that’s OK if that souvenir is executed with rigour. The imagery evoked by the lyrics and sonic textures on Biophilia offered an extraordinary scope, which means that this can only be what I hope is an illuminating peek into that world.
• Björk: Biophilia Live is in UK cinemas from tomorrow and on DVD and Blu-ray from 3 November.
