Us + Them: Sean Evans Directs Roger Waters
Interview by Ben Briand
In October 2019, filmmaker Sean Evans, in collaboration with Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, released one of the greatest rock documentaries ever made: Roger Waters: Us + Them.
It’s an incredible film that follows Waters on his 2017–2018 world tour, reinventing the concert film genre in the process. Being a filmmaker, Sean is a bit, you know, filmmakery, so we thought who better to interview him that another filmmaker? Our friend, the Australian filmmaker Ben Briand, is a filmmaker, so we gave him Sean’s number and said, ‘You’re a filmmaker—give him a call.’ Ben is in Los Angeles these days, going to meetings with Hollywood types and wearing sunglasses and telling lies. Sean, on the other hand, is in New York, freezing his tits off. ‘Ring-ring,’ went Sean’s telephone. Who could that be? He answered. ‘Hello?’ he said, and Ben said hello back. And then they started talking about film and filmmaking.
Hey Sean, so you’re in New York?
Yeah.
Is that where you live?
It is when I actually am in one place. But I’ve lived in Brooklyn now for twelve years or something like that.
So, you’re clearly a music lover. What was your relationship to music when you were growing up? Did you play instruments or anything, or did you just admire it from afar?
Oh yeah. I grew up in record stores and I spent all my money on buying albums from the time I could walk. When I was in kindergarten, an aunt of mine went into a record store and said, ‘Hey, I need to get a record for my nephew,’ and they gave her Black Sabbath’s Greatest Hits. My aunt gave me that when I was, I don’t know, how old are you when you were in kindergarten? Five or six or something?
Pretty young.
But yeah, music has always been huge in my life, and there was a minute there where I was dicking around in bands and making music. I play a little bit, but I found I needed to just focus on doing visual things and things that fed back into… I just had too many interests. I could spend my whole day writing or I could spend my whole day with a camera, or I could spend my whole day animating in 3D and all of those things are just bottomless pits.
Right.
Actually, I was hanging out with my brother over the weekend; he’s a full-time musician and he was like, ‘Check out this thing,’ and he’s showing me some crazy granular synth on the iPad and I got sucked in. It’s like, ‘I can’t. I can’t. It’s too much.’
Speaking of Black Sabbath, I noticed on your Instagram you had a couple of pictures of Slayer, and I was wondering if the Larry Carroll album artworks like Reign in Blood and Christ Illusion had much of an effect on you growing up?
Oh, yeah. And the Garden of Earthly Delights; that thing is fascinating to me. Hieronymus Bosch, which is akin to all the Slayer stuff. But yeah, Slayer is another one that I grew up with. I actually got to do some stuff with Slayer and Kerry [King, Slayer guitarist]. I’d done a full package for God Hates Us All, and then they switched labels and went with different artwork. But it’s funny, there was a version of their logo that I’d done, the same classic Slayer logo, but I did a really cut up gnarly one and they still use it. It’s on all the merch everywhere, which I’m always happy to see.
That’s great. That’s the Holy Grail, the Slayer logo.
Yeah, so it’s funny to see it still in use. It’s cool. But I mean, it’s funny when you get to work with guys like that because they’re just dudes, especially Slayer. They’re just fucking guys and it’s just like, ‘Okay, well I’ll hang out with these guys and make some stuff. Why not? It’s fun.’
It’s interesting when you grow up mythologising certain people and then all of a sudden, you’re collaborating with them.
Yeah, it’s definitely trippy. But I’ve always been a fan of the music and the words and the vibe, but never the people. I mean, I honestly have a lot of respect for them for what they do, but I could give a shit. They’re just people. I’m not going to be reading the fan magazines about what they do on the weekends or eat for breakfast. I don’t really care. They’re just dudes.
The images of Thom Yorke on tour that you photographed, they’re super frenetic and candid, and with an artist like Yorke and his stature, there’s this mystique around him. How do you develop that trust and intimacy to be able to capture that?
I mean, I’ve known him for a while now, but he’s a very private guy and I respect it. It’s like, we’ll hang out and chat and if we don’t, we don’t. I’m not going to be all up his butt. He’s a guy and I’m sure when he’s got five minutes to himself, he wants five minutes to himself and just leave it be. I made a video, a music video, with those guys a while ago… I don’t know if it’s his last record or two records ago, so I wasn’t new to the picture. I don’t know that they would just let someone who was brand new in the sphere like that. But it was a blast to do that. It was a lot of fun, and they were very cool about it, about letting me run around and be a weirdo. But it wasn’t like I was like, ‘Hey guys, nice to meet you.’ I sort of already knew everyone. I know the tour manager.
Do you ever feel worried when you’re doing visuals for a group that it might disrupt or throw off the sound or the artist’s flow as a visual experience?
Yeah, I mean, it’s a weird thing to gauge. For example, if you do a music video and it makes you want to listen to the song 500 times, then you’re doing something right. Whatever it’s doing—if it’s complimentary to the rhythm or against it or a slower pace or whatever—it just needs to bring it to a new place. It can’t just be doing exactly whatever is going on in the music. It has to be complimentary. It has to be adding something to it or else, what’s the point?
Right. And to that point, I had the pleasure of watching the Roger Waters The Wall film that you guys made, which has 100 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes. Congratulations.
Does it really?
Yeah!
That’s amazing.
It must be tricky to pay respect to the legacy that comes with an artist and carrying the weight of that into a new era. Do you find yourself being precious or having to try and pry the past away from other hands when you’re bringing this stuff into a new decade?
No, no. I mean, Roger, especially, he’s all about tearing it down and doing something new. And that film, in particular, has such a rich history to pull from. But it’s nice to approach something and say, ‘Hey, we can’t just completely bank on the past. We’ve got to do something new.’ I feel whenever I do something with someone like Roger, it just has to be new. It has to be a new take on it. The last tour that we did with them, we turned the stage into the cover of Animals more or less. And yeah, Animals has been around since 1977, but to do something that was such a big scale interpretation, and animate it and have it come to life… That record has been around for thirty years, but here it is in this new, weird version that you couldn’t have done in 1970. It’s individual to each project, too. Something will speak to you about a [particular] project that makes it interesting and makes it stand out and be unique for its own reasons. That story in The Wall where Roger goes to visit his dad’s memorial that he’s never seen. I mean, that just screams to be part of [the film] because that was the impetus for him writing the record in the first place. For him to be seventy-something and to never have gone… it was obviously a really emotional thing, which seemed like an important subject to weave in. It was exactly what the show was about.
What’s interesting is that the movie feels very intimate as well as very grand. And those moments where there was a mix of fabricated real life and documentary in there… would you describe it as a documentary?
I mean, that was a weird thing because it’s like, what are we doing? It’s not really a documentary. We’re telling a story, but we didn’t write the script. They’re ad-libbing and we’re doing this road trip for real and he’s real and all the reactions are real. It was a weird film experiment to be doing.
Especially for someone like Roger, where there’s the mystique and the aesthetic and the album, the album artwork, and all of these things that fed into the way people respond to it. I remember when that Metallica documentary came out many years ago…
Oh, that was fucking great. It is another great example because I grew up listening to Metallica and it’s like, ‘Look at these fucking idiots. I can’t believe this. This is amazing. I love it.’
I watched it again recently and I forgot how much of a big deal it was for them to bear their souls in that way.
Yeah, that’s true, and it’s a great example. Those bits where Kirk Hammett’s talking and… How old was he when they started Metallica, sixteen or seventeen? He’s forever frozen as a seventeen-year-old kid. That’s the thing about these guys: they’ve never had normal, structured jobs. I mean, not that what you or I do is a normal, structured job. It’s pretty bizarre. But from however old they were when they started—a lot of these guys were in their teens—they’ve had people screaming their names for years! I mean, that’s got to do something to your brain. It’s pretty weird.
Yeah.
And to never… I don’t mean this a detrimental way, but it’s this weird, frozen-in-time, arrested development thing. It’s like I’m hanging out with a fifty-something twenty-year-old. It’s really weird.
Did you see the Nick Cave 20,000 Days on Earth documentary?
No, but I’m a big Nick Cave fan. I have a list of films to see that I’m just way behind on. There’s not enough time in the day.
Right? That’s what happens when your job is the thing that you love, it falls behind. The interesting thing about that Nick Cave film is that even though it’s quite constructed in some ways, it exists in this unusual space as well… The private and public Nick Cave are sort of mushed together. Is that similar for Roger?
Well, Pink Floyd have always existed in the shadows. In recent years… Well, sort of in the new Wall era, [Roger has] been more public and outspoken and appears on camera and stuff. But before that, they were always the band that would play in the dark and in the shadows. There wouldn’t be any spotlights, so it was when you thought of Pink Floyd, you thought of the cover of Dark Side of the Moon or Wish You Were Here. You didn’t think of the band members. That wasn’t the imagery that came to mind, which I think is part of the draw for me. It is funny to have that be the draw and to make a concept film where it’s like, ‘Okay, we’re going to point a camera at the band playing the song now,’ because how do you do that and keep it feeling magic?
It feels very magic. And there seems to be a pretty strong political message in the film. The ‘TRUMP IS A PIG’ graphic from the live show was amazing. But how does the anti-Trump message go down in the red states?
You get some reaction to that kind of thing. That tour started, I think, in Kansas City, and we were nervous about it, but you got some people that are flipping off the screen and you get some people walking out. But honestly, it’s like, ‘Meh. Good. See you round.’ But there wasn’t really anything too bad. You hear some boos in there, but it wasn’t horrible. And I think—or hope—the overall message leaped over that. That the be kind to humanity and love each other message would be more important than supporting a Republican or a Democrat. It’s not about that. It shouldn’t be about that. The weird division that’s going on in America right now is pretty obscene. It’s weird. It’s like rooting for a football team now, the way that people root for their political party. But he’s clearly not fit to be in public office. And now, to be in America in an election year after the impeachment and acquittal, the country is even more divided now because that’s all he does: divide, divide, divide. But no one is going to be quiet about it, that’s for sure, so it should be interesting.
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