It's a good time to be a Jane's Addiction fan. I remember in 1995 riding around in convertible blaring Ritual de lo Habitual. All of sudden it hit me, THIS IS AN OLD ALBUM. I felt like I was living in the past, man. But now its cool again with the release of their all new album, Strays, and finally the documentary Three Days is being released.
Three Days was filmed with an array of formats ranging from 35mm, Super-16mm, 16mm, Super-8 and digital video. It combines gritty backstage drama with rare musical performances; the film begins with concert footage from Jane's Addiction's Halloween show in New York City and proceeds fearlessly through highlights of the U.S. tour. For the tour, the band recruited bass guitarist, Flea, from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Together with singer/lyricist Perry Farrell, guitarist Dave Navarro and drummer Stephen Perkins, the 1997 incarnation of Jane's Addiction was virtually unstoppable.
I got a chance to talk with co-director, Carter Smith, who used to hang with the Party Monster himself Michael Alig. Smith has directed videos for Fishbone, 311, Bush and the video Jane Says .
Check out Jane's Addiction website.
Daniel Robert Epstein: How was it to watch Three Days again?
Carter Smith: For the ten thousandth time? I think it was great. Jane's Addiction is a band that's pretty timeless.
DRE: It's going to be disappointing to all the bootleggers on ebay.
CS: I've heard about some of those copies and supposedly they're pretty awful in terms of quality. Triple dubbed copies.
We also changed it a teeny bit for this release from the ebay cut.
DRE: Some critics have compared this film to Gimme Shelter [about the Rolling Stones]. It's pretty amazing to be compared to Albert Maysles.
CS: I was pretty psyched about that. I also heard comparisons to The Song Remains the Same [about Led Zeppelin] a few times which is even wilder to me.
DRE: What's it like to have created something that will be around so long?
CS: It's great and if we keep releasing new material then we can keep adding it to the movie for 20 years. Keep doing different director's cuts.
DRE: So how did you end up directing Three Days?
CS: I had a mutual friend that knew their manager. So we had been talking about shooting some Porno for Pyros stuff but that didn't work out when the guitarist got cancer and they broke up. We sort of kicked and screamed our way into doing the documentary. Sometimes I call it a little cosmic web weaving. All said and done I hope everyone was happy with us for beating down the door.
DRE: Three Days does not look like it was easy to do. There was like five or six different formats used.
CS: Well that was always my style even before doing this. It's like painting in a sense. We always tried to keep it that onstage would be film and offstage would be video. The film onstage is the dreamy rock god sequences and then the video backstage shows the reality of the lunacy. It was very hard to do. Everything was a nightmare
DRE: What about shooting the footage backstage? Was it like Sodom and Gomorrah back there?
CS: It was a little bit. You have one side going off into the dark and another side going into the light with the Judaism then everything in-between. I don't know if the band didn't care but they let us show everything. We love them so we tried hard to not make them look bad. So even if things were weird we tried to make them look good. At least we passed no judgment. Let them do all the talking and let the public judge, as Dave [Navarro] says.
DRE: I saw that Dave is the only member of the band that is credited as producer.
CS: Yeah he saved us a few times. Throughout the whole time of making this we didn't really have money for it. We just kept getting money piece by piece. We were definitely egg and cheese starving for a long time. At one point during editing he got us money and saved the editing equipment for us. He got a producer credit because of stuff like that.
DRE: Any reason Perry or Stephen [Perkins] wasn't able to step in and help out?
CS: Perry sort of had the Gift and that was his movie. He didn't get involved politically or aesthetically with what we were doing. I'm not sure Perry likes to see himself on film. Perry had a big switch with this film when he changed from debauchery to Judaism and studying the Kaballah. We were editing just down the street from where he lived. He would come by and talk then we'd go surfing. Stephen was helpful because he's the archivist of the band so we'd go to him and shoot stuff from his archives. So Dave wanted his movie with the band so he took the financial risk.
DRE: Where did you start off?
CS: At the rehearsal show at the Grand Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles. Then we flew to New York to edit it and then flew back to show it to Perry. We had to show it to him at the hotel right before he flew to New York to do the Halloween show. In LA the manager stopped us at the hotel and said this probably won't happen because Perry won't want you to. We already had a $100,000 crew waiting at The Hammerstein Ballroom to shoot the Halloween show. We showed him the tape and he loved it. He loved that Cinque was the main part of it and that people were afraid of Cinque.
DRE: I remember that the Halloween show was the one where people had made hundreds of fake tickets.
CS: Yeah it was the largest bootleg ever in New York.
DRE: You've worked with so many people. Is there any band any nuttier than Jane's Addiction?
CS: Definitely not. I've worked with some of the lesser known Wu-tang guys and they can get pretty crazy but it's a different kind of crazy. I've never worked with a band as intense as Jane's and I think I never will. They are the last bastion of sex, drugs and rock and rock that our generation will know.
I shoot a lot of bands now that don't even drink. No pot or nothing. That's not necessarily a bad thing but it's definitely a new thing.
DRE: A lot of people were saying for years that Cinque wasn't a real host. What's the deal with that?
CS: Well it is a movie [laughs]. Some of it is real but a lot of the scenes with him are pretty much set up.
DRE: What made you want to set up scenes?
CS: We knew we needed something besides the band in the movie because there is a lot of lag time in a tour. So instead of waiting around we at least had something we could shoot on the side to go along with the movie. We were also referencing other rock music movies like the ABBA movie. Setting up scenes is what we do. A director is not just a documentarian. The scene with the bouncer wasn't real. A lot of it was real also like where he was going to different venues and talking to people.
DRE: How was it when Three Days premiered at Slamdance?
CS: Great. We had such a crazy response that night that we had to add a second screening. When you get a good crowd watching the movie it's an amazing experience. It becomes more like a concert than a movie.
DRE: What took so long for an official release?
CS: Lot of politics. We did have offers the first night of the festival but we went into making the movie without a contract. I wouldn't recommend anyone doing that unless you have no choice and we didn't. If we waited around for contracts we'll still be waiting. Then the manager got fired then the president of the record company got fired and everyone got fired. Some liked the movie and some didn't. Lots of lawyers, management and record companies made us wait this long.
DRE: It must have been disappointing.
CS: It was but it was a good lesson in patience. I always knew it would come up but we would have to wait for the right cosmic timing. It was a good thing to wait until this new album came out. All said and done it's a good thing.
DRE: What did make it come out now?
CS: Sanctuary Records' President, Merck Mercuriadis, really got it and he wanted to put it out. But Jane's is on Capitol Records right now and they had their issues with Sanctuary putting it out. So there was a lot of politics between them.
DRE: Are you one of those guys who has done a million music videos?
CS: No but I've worked with Bush a lot doing their live concert stuff. I've shot still photos of everybody, Snoop, Iggy Pop, Mary J Blige. Hopefully with Three Days out I'll get to do a lot more videos.
DRE: Where did you grow up?
CS: In Manhattan.
DRE: What about college?
CS: The University of Hartford in Connecticut. I knew I wouldn't make it if I went to school in the city. I was a crazy club kid back then. But I didn't want to go far so I couldn't come to the city for parties. I helped start the film studies program at the University of Hartford.
DRE: How did you get into making films after that?
CS: After school I went out to California and worked with Mark Romanek as an intern at Propaganda Films about 1991. Then a friend of mine, Dimitri Falk, went down to Cuba and made a movie called Midnight in Cuba. It got a small release. It was like being on the moon and making a movie. We had no resources, anything we wanted someone would have to fly it down to us. That's the official world of guerilla filmmaking.
DRE: How did you get into doing music videos?
CS: I've always been into music videos especially after working with Propaganda. Its hard game out there now.
DRE: Why is that?
CS: The budgets have gone down so much. Unless you're a huge star most videos are low budget. Now you have these huge music video directors who are used to huge budgets and now and are now doing low budget videos. You can't fight for jobs against these big directors.
DRE: So were you a real NYC club kid?
CS: I was a skater club kid. But my girlfriend at the time was best friends with Michael Alig and his posse so I was with them almost every night.
DRE: That must have been wild.
CS: It was outrageous and it was the last bastion of the club scene in New York.
DRE: Did you kill anyone with them?
CS: Nope didn't kill anyone. I hung with them a lot.
DRE: Did you dress up?
CS: No I was in my skater clothes but no craziness.
DRE: So were you a troublemaker?
CS: I was into hip-hop, graffiti and breakdancing. My whole crew was mostly skaters, homeboys and messengers. The whole Washington Square Park scene. My life was like the movie KIDS just a few years earlier. The trouble that they got into was what we did minus the AIDS scene. That was a little after us or at least in the heterosexual world. Jumping turnstiles, shoplifting 40s and stuff like that.
By Daniel Robert Epstein
Three Days was filmed with an array of formats ranging from 35mm, Super-16mm, 16mm, Super-8 and digital video. It combines gritty backstage drama with rare musical performances; the film begins with concert footage from Jane's Addiction's Halloween show in New York City and proceeds fearlessly through highlights of the U.S. tour. For the tour, the band recruited bass guitarist, Flea, from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Together with singer/lyricist Perry Farrell, guitarist Dave Navarro and drummer Stephen Perkins, the 1997 incarnation of Jane's Addiction was virtually unstoppable.
I got a chance to talk with co-director, Carter Smith, who used to hang with the Party Monster himself Michael Alig. Smith has directed videos for Fishbone, 311, Bush and the video Jane Says .
Check out Jane's Addiction website.
Daniel Robert Epstein: How was it to watch Three Days again?
Carter Smith: For the ten thousandth time? I think it was great. Jane's Addiction is a band that's pretty timeless.
DRE: It's going to be disappointing to all the bootleggers on ebay.
CS: I've heard about some of those copies and supposedly they're pretty awful in terms of quality. Triple dubbed copies.
We also changed it a teeny bit for this release from the ebay cut.
DRE: Some critics have compared this film to Gimme Shelter [about the Rolling Stones]. It's pretty amazing to be compared to Albert Maysles.
CS: I was pretty psyched about that. I also heard comparisons to The Song Remains the Same [about Led Zeppelin] a few times which is even wilder to me.
DRE: What's it like to have created something that will be around so long?
CS: It's great and if we keep releasing new material then we can keep adding it to the movie for 20 years. Keep doing different director's cuts.
DRE: So how did you end up directing Three Days?
CS: I had a mutual friend that knew their manager. So we had been talking about shooting some Porno for Pyros stuff but that didn't work out when the guitarist got cancer and they broke up. We sort of kicked and screamed our way into doing the documentary. Sometimes I call it a little cosmic web weaving. All said and done I hope everyone was happy with us for beating down the door.
DRE: Three Days does not look like it was easy to do. There was like five or six different formats used.
CS: Well that was always my style even before doing this. It's like painting in a sense. We always tried to keep it that onstage would be film and offstage would be video. The film onstage is the dreamy rock god sequences and then the video backstage shows the reality of the lunacy. It was very hard to do. Everything was a nightmare
DRE: What about shooting the footage backstage? Was it like Sodom and Gomorrah back there?
CS: It was a little bit. You have one side going off into the dark and another side going into the light with the Judaism then everything in-between. I don't know if the band didn't care but they let us show everything. We love them so we tried hard to not make them look bad. So even if things were weird we tried to make them look good. At least we passed no judgment. Let them do all the talking and let the public judge, as Dave [Navarro] says.
DRE: I saw that Dave is the only member of the band that is credited as producer.
CS: Yeah he saved us a few times. Throughout the whole time of making this we didn't really have money for it. We just kept getting money piece by piece. We were definitely egg and cheese starving for a long time. At one point during editing he got us money and saved the editing equipment for us. He got a producer credit because of stuff like that.
DRE: Any reason Perry or Stephen [Perkins] wasn't able to step in and help out?
CS: Perry sort of had the Gift and that was his movie. He didn't get involved politically or aesthetically with what we were doing. I'm not sure Perry likes to see himself on film. Perry had a big switch with this film when he changed from debauchery to Judaism and studying the Kaballah. We were editing just down the street from where he lived. He would come by and talk then we'd go surfing. Stephen was helpful because he's the archivist of the band so we'd go to him and shoot stuff from his archives. So Dave wanted his movie with the band so he took the financial risk.
DRE: Where did you start off?
CS: At the rehearsal show at the Grand Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles. Then we flew to New York to edit it and then flew back to show it to Perry. We had to show it to him at the hotel right before he flew to New York to do the Halloween show. In LA the manager stopped us at the hotel and said this probably won't happen because Perry won't want you to. We already had a $100,000 crew waiting at The Hammerstein Ballroom to shoot the Halloween show. We showed him the tape and he loved it. He loved that Cinque was the main part of it and that people were afraid of Cinque.
DRE: I remember that the Halloween show was the one where people had made hundreds of fake tickets.
CS: Yeah it was the largest bootleg ever in New York.
DRE: You've worked with so many people. Is there any band any nuttier than Jane's Addiction?
CS: Definitely not. I've worked with some of the lesser known Wu-tang guys and they can get pretty crazy but it's a different kind of crazy. I've never worked with a band as intense as Jane's and I think I never will. They are the last bastion of sex, drugs and rock and rock that our generation will know.
I shoot a lot of bands now that don't even drink. No pot or nothing. That's not necessarily a bad thing but it's definitely a new thing.
DRE: A lot of people were saying for years that Cinque wasn't a real host. What's the deal with that?
CS: Well it is a movie [laughs]. Some of it is real but a lot of the scenes with him are pretty much set up.
DRE: What made you want to set up scenes?
CS: We knew we needed something besides the band in the movie because there is a lot of lag time in a tour. So instead of waiting around we at least had something we could shoot on the side to go along with the movie. We were also referencing other rock music movies like the ABBA movie. Setting up scenes is what we do. A director is not just a documentarian. The scene with the bouncer wasn't real. A lot of it was real also like where he was going to different venues and talking to people.
DRE: How was it when Three Days premiered at Slamdance?
CS: Great. We had such a crazy response that night that we had to add a second screening. When you get a good crowd watching the movie it's an amazing experience. It becomes more like a concert than a movie.
DRE: What took so long for an official release?
CS: Lot of politics. We did have offers the first night of the festival but we went into making the movie without a contract. I wouldn't recommend anyone doing that unless you have no choice and we didn't. If we waited around for contracts we'll still be waiting. Then the manager got fired then the president of the record company got fired and everyone got fired. Some liked the movie and some didn't. Lots of lawyers, management and record companies made us wait this long.
DRE: It must have been disappointing.
CS: It was but it was a good lesson in patience. I always knew it would come up but we would have to wait for the right cosmic timing. It was a good thing to wait until this new album came out. All said and done it's a good thing.
DRE: What did make it come out now?
CS: Sanctuary Records' President, Merck Mercuriadis, really got it and he wanted to put it out. But Jane's is on Capitol Records right now and they had their issues with Sanctuary putting it out. So there was a lot of politics between them.
DRE: Are you one of those guys who has done a million music videos?
CS: No but I've worked with Bush a lot doing their live concert stuff. I've shot still photos of everybody, Snoop, Iggy Pop, Mary J Blige. Hopefully with Three Days out I'll get to do a lot more videos.
DRE: Where did you grow up?
CS: In Manhattan.
DRE: What about college?
CS: The University of Hartford in Connecticut. I knew I wouldn't make it if I went to school in the city. I was a crazy club kid back then. But I didn't want to go far so I couldn't come to the city for parties. I helped start the film studies program at the University of Hartford.
DRE: How did you get into making films after that?
CS: After school I went out to California and worked with Mark Romanek as an intern at Propaganda Films about 1991. Then a friend of mine, Dimitri Falk, went down to Cuba and made a movie called Midnight in Cuba. It got a small release. It was like being on the moon and making a movie. We had no resources, anything we wanted someone would have to fly it down to us. That's the official world of guerilla filmmaking.
DRE: How did you get into doing music videos?
CS: I've always been into music videos especially after working with Propaganda. Its hard game out there now.
DRE: Why is that?
CS: The budgets have gone down so much. Unless you're a huge star most videos are low budget. Now you have these huge music video directors who are used to huge budgets and now and are now doing low budget videos. You can't fight for jobs against these big directors.
DRE: So were you a real NYC club kid?
CS: I was a skater club kid. But my girlfriend at the time was best friends with Michael Alig and his posse so I was with them almost every night.
DRE: That must have been wild.
CS: It was outrageous and it was the last bastion of the club scene in New York.
DRE: Did you kill anyone with them?
CS: Nope didn't kill anyone. I hung with them a lot.
DRE: Did you dress up?
CS: No I was in my skater clothes but no craziness.
DRE: So were you a troublemaker?
CS: I was into hip-hop, graffiti and breakdancing. My whole crew was mostly skaters, homeboys and messengers. The whole Washington Square Park scene. My life was like the movie KIDS just a few years earlier. The trouble that they got into was what we did minus the AIDS scene. That was a little after us or at least in the heterosexual world. Jumping turnstiles, shoplifting 40s and stuff like that.
By Daniel Robert Epstein
VIEW 6 of 6 COMMENTS
you tell 'em
i saw them play in my town on thursday night
fucking awesom
can't wait til tomorrow
film comes out in UK