Stewart Copeland

It is a deeply over upholstered comfy seat, it is the producer’s couch. It is where the producer normally falls asleep.

I’m snoozing even now.

Great, I’ve been flogging for several months now and the whole cycle fires up again next month in Europe when it comes out there. I’m completely blown away by the escape of my little toy from the playpen out into the world and becoming a monster.

It took me about a year and a half because I was learning the software, as well as earning a living. I was doing it just as a hobby; well actually my hobbies tend to be obsessive. But it was just a home movie that I was making pretty much for Sting and Andy and the rest of the road crew and everyone who was there. It was Les Claypool who suggested I take it to Sundance. We were talking on the phone as we do these days while Googling stuff and he says “let’s go to Sundance”, so we both Google up the application form and I paid my 35 bucks. I had to think up a name for the movie which at that time was Behind Andy’s Camel but of course that didn’t get past the marketing. But I sent my 35 bucks and forgot all about it. Then when Sundance came back and said “You’re in,” everything changed.

Yes, mainly for peace of mind, for mental well-being. It’s really difficult to feel good about yourself unless you’re earning a living. There’s a friend of mine who won a big court case. His lawyer was so good that not only did they pay his damages but he got huge punitive damages of tens of millions of dollars. So this guy could just retire and he was a musician but he always wanted to paint, so he started painting. He didn’t have to work anymore but since there was nobody buying his paintings, he lost interest. It was a strange thing. Unless there’s somebody paying you for it, unless there’s some kind of connection with the real world, it’s just pissing in the sand. So I still like music and everything like that but it just feels better to be writing for a purpose.

Yeah because around then I stopped shooting. It was a conscious decision one day when we were in a Lear Jet doing barrel roll and I was attempting to film the experience as I did everything else. Then I realized you can’t shoot something inside of a plane and get any idea of what’s going on here and it was too dark anyway. We were just about to land and I missed that exciting moment. I realized I missed a lot of exciting moments because I was fussing with the camera instead of living life. So I resolved in that moment to burn it in my brain cells rather than onto film and I regret that decision today. But we were already playing stadiums and we were already at the top so the story is complete even though when the film finishes, we actually go on and do another whole album even bigger than the previous album and another tour bigger than the previous tour.

No, that thought never crossed my mind. However, it is certainly true that the film shrinks the band down, to no great loss for anybody. But the film doesn’t puff the group up like “The band conquered the world and sold X millions of records” In fact in a couple places I cut out of the band bubble so you can see what the band looked like from the outside for just a minute. Since because it’s so intimate, you’re hardly even aware of the hubbub outside the cocoon and it diminishes the mystique in a way. This is not a puff piece. It’s a whole different thing. There are the MTV videos and other shows about the actual contribution of The Police to the music of the 80’s and the creative dynamic within the band, how many Grammies did we win and all these important facts and figures. My movie doesn’t have any of that. It’s just a personal experience.

I didn’t have narration at first. The film that I sent to Sundance had very, very little, and at the time I was stuck on how to tell the story for the people who weren’t there. At first I made it as a film for people who were there. It didn’t need any explanation. But as soon as it got into Sundance I realized I was going to be up against movies that people were taking really seriously and here I am with my little half formed home movie, so I got serious. I started writing narration which grew and grew. For some things I just didn’t want to hear a voice come on the screen at certain times so I used a card.

Yeah, they both were completely cooperative, Andy particularly because he’s the star of the movie. That little fucker got a standing ovation at Sundance. He’s not going to be in my next movie.

Hey look, we sold out the minute anybody would pay us a dime. Let’s get that absolutely clear upfront and on the table. Our music actually took us over. It came welling up. It turned out that in spite of our Machiavellian scheming, there actually was real music there. Who would have thought?

Yes.

Yes you can ask and yes I did. We were both laughing hysterically at the time.

In a way, drunk with the high of conquering America. That happened on the stage of Shea Stadium and all the hordes of British press were there because it was a very big event in England. After we did the sound check we were horsing around. I had a New York Times and Sting grabs it and I grab it back and he grabs it back and we’re playing tug of war with this thing. To get my newspaper from his clutching grasp, I had to apply a knee to the ribcage. I got my newspaper back just at the point when there’s a cracking sound and Sting goes “Ow.” I’m like “aw man, what’s up, what’s up.” We played the show that night but a few days later it was still hurting, so we took an X-ray and sure enough, his ribs were cracked. What’s funny is we didn’t fight all the time and one time we do and I broke his rib. We goofed off all the time but there were the occasional shouting matches.

Well the shouting matches never came to blows. We did indulge in recreational emotional violence, mostly gratuitous. The big shouting matches were specifically over music. Sting was then and is now, a complete composer. When he writes a song, he writes it from the top to the bottom. In the early days, he was incomplete. He would have a couple chords in the lyric and he’d bring it to us immediately and we’d smash it up. From our third album on, we were all showing up at the studios with platinum demos, fully recorded, fully realized, and fully arranged demos. It became more and more difficult for Sting to compromise on those because the idea of the composer collaborating with the players is kind of a new fangled idea. Mozart didn’t have to negotiate with the brass section. By this time we were all fully accomplished producers. We learned with each other. So when he conceived of a song, he heard the whole thing in his head and when he brought it to the band, he would have to compromise on the beauty of his vision and he did compromise at first, but less and less. It became more and more of struggle for Andy and I to get a word in edgewise when it came to the arrangements of the song. That’s what the battles were about. With the wisdom of hindsight, we could fully understand Sting’s point of view and I think he could understand ours. It was a valid disagreement, so we parted company. I’m very grateful to Sting for sticking it out. We got eight years out of his life and five albums out of it and did rather well. So if he doesn’t want to make those compromises anymore, he’s free to go.

Yeah but as soon as I saw it, I kind of remembered it. There are a few shots I’m not sure which city we’re in but I kind of remember the moment. It wasn’t a walk down memory lane because the whole Police memory was hashed and rehashed so many times decades ago. There’s not much angst left in those memories. I remember it fondly and everything but it’s not like I get all worked up. There was a lot of emotion which was the emotion of excitement as a filmmaker. It could have been someone else’s band. Just looking at those images, I was excited as a filmmaker to be making a film which such images. The film was shot by a 25 year old rock star and edited by a 50-something father of many.

Yeah, at last count.

Not really, no. There was one shot of Andy and [The Police manager] Kim Turner regaling the camera with a night of lust from the night before, which is hysterical. Half the people will find it funny, another quarter will be insulted and outraged; there’re so many funny Andy shots. I cut off Andy’s dick too.

That’s a conversation stopper. There’s a shot in the movie where Andy pulls out his rod and I cut away to a shot of Andy’s face right at the crucial moment. It would have scared people. I thought the best part of the shot anyway, was the look on Andy’s face afterwards when the camera pans back up his stomach up to his face where he’s already got this shit eating grin saying “Oh fuck, you’ve got me Copeland.” He’s already regretting it.

Yeah but my battery was running low. There are places where the sound goes funky and that’s because the battery was running down while I was shooting. These cameras were domestic grade where the frame was the size of your little pinky nail. The magnetic strip on that celluloid is a tiny little pencil mark of magnetic tape, so the sound is really delicate and not a high grade. But I was able to goose as much as possible here in the studio. But about that shot, Sting had already written the song, he’s just showing it to Andy. About an hour after that shot, we have had the song recorded. We learned the songs in the morning, figured them out, fought over them and had the backing track done by lunchtime.

Two impulses. One because I thought I was Cecil B. DeMille, but the main impulse was that I was a tourist. All this incredible stuff was happening in front of me so I wanted to scrape it off and stuff it in my suitcase so I can play with it later, which is what I did. When you go visit the Taj Mahal or the pyramids or something, you look at it, you burn it into your brain and think “this is a wonderful thing”, but there is an impulse to think “not good enough, I want to scrape a piece off and take it with me.” So you snap off a picture, which is basically what I was doing.

I did make a film called So What years ago but I didn’t know what I was doing. I was on tour at the time and it was an abomination so I withdraw it from my oeuvre.

Making it was a blast. Professionalizing it was a real pain in the neck, by which I mean legalizing it. Once it became product and went out into the world, I had to go back and get releases from everybody in it, all the music, all the faces, everything, even the logos. Sting wears a Mickey Mouse t-shirt so I had to contact Disney. All of that took three or four months. Then when that was all done, I had the DVD authoring business, which is quite difficult. At least it’s creative but it’s still pretty dry.

I had to have different kinds of mixes and different formats. They’ve got to have the HD version, the mono version, the no narration version, the no subtitles version, all this stuff; plus all this paperwork and that was a big pain in the neck. I finally finished all that and the thing is out there. One of the liberating concepts that enabled me to cut those 50 hours down to 75 minutes was the concept of extra DVD material. So having made the movie and had all my fun and everything, now I’ve got to do the DVD and actually cut more stuff and work more on the extra DVD material. I had to coax Andy over here to do the commentary which was a lot of fun. Now I’m in the final phase which is selling the damn thing, which is actually much better because I’m enthusiastic about the mission.

He wasn’t around. I actually have commentary that I wish I could have cut in but it wasn’t on point. They got the three of us around the mic about four or five years ago to do audio liner notes, for some kind of re-release thing. Andy and Sting were at this palazzo in Italy and I was in California. It’s evening, their time and they’re getting drunker and drunker and it’s mid-morning my time and I’m getting more and more caffeinated, kind of a classic Police dynamic actually. We reminisced about every single song that we ever recorded. Oh man, we got on a roll. It’s hysterical. Andy’s really funny and he gets Sting and I going. I wished I could have used that but it wasn’t about the shots on the screen, it was something else all together. But I would have loved to get Sting because we met up at Sundance and we had a great reunion there and we still just light each other up. The name Police gives Sting the heebie jeebies but when the three of us are together, we always have a laugh.

Dead Like Me was fantastic and Bryan is way out there. He imposed very strict limitations on the music. He didn’t want to hear any guitar, electric or otherwise, or any rock and roll instruments. He was allergic to them, which actually pushed me in interesting directions because I would have fallen on those easy peasy type instrumentations had he not forbade it. That show had that dark morbid humor that really worked for me. I did that for two years and really enjoyed the hell out of it. That was one of the most fun gigs I’ve ever had actually. It wasn’t the greatest show in the world but it was really fun to do. You establish the sound and your music is part of the whole look and feel of the show. After the first four or five shows, they stop giving you any kind of hassle at all and you’re just following your instincts.

Yeah, well that film was so far out of his métier but it was really cool. I scored a pilot of him one time that never flew unfortunately.

No I haven’t. You’ve got to send it to me.

I actually like that film. It came out and it was pretty universally despised but I got into it. Actually I wrote a blog about working with [director] Angelica [Huston].

Well you should read my blog. In the forum, there’s a section called Yo and that’s all my reports of my ventures with the Foo Fighters, my ventures with Incubus, a day in the life of a film composer, scoring with Anjelica. I’ve got some of my Eurythmics anecdotes. Basically Stewart’s dinner tales.

Well I haven’t done any for the last year because this fucking Police movie has eaten my life.

I’ve got a couple things actually in the hatch. Most of them are sort of real so I can’t talk about them. One that is less real that I can talk about is the Super-8 footage I have of all the other bands. I’ve got all these bands from Suzie and the Banshees, Adam Ant, The Damned, Talking Heads, B-52, as well AC/DC and Robert Palmer. All the footage is right on the cusp between old wave and new wave. I had access no one else can have. I can go into their dressing rooms, I could go all over the stage while their playing, nobody would stop me. They had a rapport with my camera that MTV would never be able to get. So that’s my next movie. The hassle is, that’s going to be a licensing nightmare.

But this time I’ll have my licensing before I make the movie. That was my mistake this time. It’s very different to go to somebody and say, “I’m thinking of making a movie, I’m thinking of putting your shot into my movie, if you would like to be in my movie, sign here.” It’s a different conversation from “I’ve made a movie, it’s coming out soon, please sign here.”

Jeremy Piven.

That’s because he’s my favorite actor and he’s an old buddy of mine from Very Bad Things. I think he’s the new Peter Sellers. He is so fucking incredible. With the magic of films they could make him into a tall blonde Californian.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck