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PaintingSound:Music,MotionandMontageinfactualfilmmaking—aninterviewwithJamesMaycock
Throughout his directing career, James Maycock has used the moving image to tell the story of sound. His documentaries have used a number of techniques to bring music to life, show it in a different context, and tell the stories behind a huge range of songs and artists.
Below, we spoke to James about his career and his craft, alongside hand-picked examples. These clips will be available to view for three weeks.
Voodoo Rhythms
New Orleans Voodoo Rhythms sequence, from Rock and Roll: Worship (Sky Arts).
Voodoo Answer
We’ll start with Voodoo Rhythms. How did you decide on the footage to accompany the interviews and the music? And how did you go about getting it?
A lot of the documentaries I’ve made are quite archive-heavy, but directors who make these kinds of archive-heavy films are often longing to shoot more of what we call “specially-shot” material. So, to use far less archive and to get away from – as good as it is, as skilful as it is – that talking head / archive dynamic, which certainly dominated the BBC4 style back then. We saw this series for Sky as almost the opposite, the very antithesis, of a BBC4 music film.
So this Voodoo Rhythms chapter is all specially-shot. Every single frame. We shot the interviews, GVs, the show-and-tell, the musical performances and more. And within that 12 minutes, you’ve only got two interviewees. So everything has to breathe. But the pacing out of the music & images, the cinematic combination of those two elements, allows that happen. It creates that space to breathe.
I wanted to create a heavy, sultry Louisiana/New Orleans-style atmosphere, which is not difficult when you’re filming there. It’s a unique location. And of course the distinctive New Orleans music all played a very important role, too.
We shot the hell out of the bayou, which was wonderful thing to be able to do. Some US states and cities really do have an atmosphere of their own. That’s what I wanted to tap into, and I knew the music from that location would help to bring all this to life. There was a decent budget for this – a whole afternoon filming down the bayou from a motor boat.
In the edit, I didn’t want to cut it fast. That would have gone against the grain of the mood I wanted to create. In fact, we deliberately slowed it right down. But that didn’t matter, because you’re drawing people in to the narrative with music, atmosphere, engaging interviewees, and amazing images: whether that’s a mysterious white crucifix stuck into the muddy banks of the bayou, abstract reflections on the water’s surface, or alligators slithering through the bayou. It’s that cinematic quality we aim for – combining the right music with the right images.
There was a term you used there, a “show-and-tell”. What do you mean by that, and how does it work in this scene?
JM: A “show-and-tell” is really filming a musical demo, rather than a full performance. It’s when a musician sits down with his instrument and talks you through a piece, whilst playing sections of a song. When filming Dr. John it was extraordinary. It was like having my own personal Dr John jukebox. There he was, set up with his keyboard on that little jetty on the bayou. I was literally naming Dr John songs for him and he would just knock them out. We eventually cut that with what he’d already said in his interview under the porch.
Then there’s that nice transition – we glide from Dr John into Charles Neville. We’ve already introduced Charles as a character earlier in this chapter. But now Charles takes over as principal character from Dr. John. Sometimes in documentaries you just don’t quite know what’s going to happen – which is part of the magic of film-making. He’d brought his saxophone along. Luckily Charles said, “Yes, I’ll play.” And he improvised beautifully.
I had a very good cinematographer, Geoffrey. The editor, Chris, was brilliant too. The Charles Neville sequence just floated in from the Dr. John sequence, and that’s what was different about this music series. We didn’t include much exposition, if at all. The audience is intelligent enough to understand what’s going on. It didn’t need to be spelt out – often a mistake. The pacing is slow, but it still sustains your interest and intrigue.
You talk about using that slowness. Is that something you’re thinking about before you get the footage, or is that coming together in the edit?
We all have dreams of how some things might work before shooting. Then you get to the coal-face of the edit, and think: “Mmmh! That didn’t work quite as well as I thought it would!”
Now, “Cleo’s Mood” is an example of a plan working out…
The Motown Invasion
Tale of Two Cities: Liverpool and Detroit sequence from The Motown Invasion.
Motown Invasion Answer
Let’s look at the use of “Cleo’s Mood” in The Motown Invasion (BBC Four).
I wrote The Motown Invasion pitch, a film about the notoriously tough Motown Revue tour of the UK in 1965, which featured The Supremes, The Temptations, Martha Reeves and Stevie Wonder.
I knew I wanted to use “Cleo’s Mood” by JR Walker & The All Stars, another Motown act. It’s an instrumental, and instrumentals often help because there are no lyrics to clash with contributor sync. If you have vocals & lyrics fighting over what the interviewees are saying, that can be problematic.
I always thought “Cleo’s Mood” – which doesn’t have that classic, uptempo Motown sound – would be great as a kind of aural accompaniment to images of a rain-soaked Britain, as the Motown tour zigzagged around the UK. In the film, we include a few narrative tangents back and forth between Detroit and the UK. “Cleo’s Mood” was meant to be an aural signifier for the audience: we’re now back in the UK, as the film revealed how the young Motown artists dealt with mid-sixties, provincial Britain: the weather, service stations, fish & chips wrapped in newspaper, the fine art of drinking tea.
Eventually, I had to strip back the use of “Cleo’s Mood” in the edit. It was in too much. It’s all a balancing act in the edit, and sometimes we needed to energise the road trip. The mood was different. And commercial music can, of course, inject energy into a film, accelerate the narrative – but faster music will also “eat up” images, unlike slower songs. At one point we cut pretty hard from ‘Cleo’s Mood’ to ‘Nowhere To Run’, the famous Martha Reeves & The Vandellas track. We did so using a ‘whip-pan’ effect with archive footage. The archive ‘whip-pan’ transports us, briefly, from Liverpool back to Detroit. At one point in that sequence, as we enter 1960’s Liverpool in archive footage, we see a bus drive through a tunnel, and there’s a bit of reverb on “Cleo’s Mood” – just as you would hear it if you were going through a tunnel.
That must have been very satisfying.
Well, the reverb wasn’t my idea. It was the sound mixer’s. But absolutely!
Sweet Home Alabama
Plane Crash/Ronnie Van Sant's Death sequence from Sweet Home Alabama: The Southern Rock Saga (BBC Four).
Sweet Home Alabama Answer
Let’s go to Sweet Home Alabama next. How did you arrive at the song selection for the quite sensitive scenes in this clip? The other thing is lyrics, how they intercut with both narration and interview sync, and what the challenges are there?
Absolutely. Well, an unbelievable tragedy happened in 1977 when the small plane flying Lynyrd Skynyrd around the US during their tour ran out of gas. The plane, quite literally, dropped from the sky into a forest below. It’s horrific. A lot of people die – including the charismatic vocalist, Ronnie Van Zant. Amazingly, some survive.
When we were making the film, our archive producer said: “You won’t believe it, I’ve discovered footage of the actual immediate post-crash – scenes from the hospital. It’s never been seen before.” And of course, initially, it sounds very exciting – to use archive that’s never been seen before. But eventually we weren’t allowed to use it – due to rights issues.
Ultimately, though, I was very pleased we couldn’t use it. Because, instead of offering up something realistic and graphic, in the edit we created something far more moving and melancholic. It was a very useful lesson in how to emotionally depict death in a film.
Musically, the choice of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Simple Man” was obvious to me. I loved that song but it also seemed right for this moment. It has a poignancy to it. And it also felt autobiographical – for Ronnie Van Zant who wrote it. It simply wouldn’t have worked with the more graphic footage at all. Ronnie Van Zant was considered a blue collar Southern poet. He was also seen as a straight-talking, no-nonsense Southerner – but with a sensitive soul.
In the edit, cutting between the music/lyrics and the contributor sync, became a kind of dance, sometimes bringing down the volume levels of the lyrics of “Simple Man” whilst bringing up the volume of a contributor’s voice. You’re kind of conducting or choreographing the interplay between the lyrics and the contributor’s sync. Then, at the end of the section, there’s the musical crescendo – “I’m just a Simple Man” – so right at the end, you bring up the music levels – and louder than it’s been throughout that sequence. And this signifies a kind of finality to that sequence. The film is about to move on.
Visually, we used Spanish moss that I’d shot on Super 8. That was then slowed down. And we also used a photographic still of Ronnie Van Zant glowing with health & smiling. I always think is a bittersweet way of showing someone when they’ve just died in a film. So, picturing them as healthy & happy then contrasts with the sense of loss as well as the poignancy of the music. Both the image & the music work together to heighten this emotion.
When you’re putting all that together, who are your collaborators in creating that moment?
Myself and the editor, really. Of course, you’re always speaking to the archive producer, asking: “What have you got?... We need this… We haven’t got quite enough of...” They’re essential. You’re trawling through the archive footage that they would have come up with. But ultimately, it’s myself and the editor who will be creating that.
Summertime Miles Davis
Miles Davis’ Car Ride sequence from Gershwin’s Summertime (BBC Four).
Summertime Mile Davis Answer
Let’s go on to Gershwin’s Summertime. Here we have two clips, and you’ve used them to portray different sides of the song. How did you manage that?
Firstly, I really loved the song. Some friends thought I was crazy to pitch a whole 60-minute film about just one song. How was I going to not make it feel repetitive? A valid point. But luckily, it was very well received and still gets repeated to this day.
I had terrific contributors that helped bring the narrative to life. But making a film about one song wasn’t easy. It was a challenge. I learnt there was a certain art to giving a film about one song variety – and to keep the narrative engaging & progressing.
One way to add variety to the film was to use little medleys of the “Summertime” song. So, my excellent editor, Simon Battersby, and myself would put together a short section in which you’d hear, within a 30-second burst, 4 or 5 versions of “Summertime” – like a medley of R&B / doo-wop versions. It was meant to be fun, but it was also about keeping it moving, revealing the scope of the song – the variety of sound, tone, all sorts of things. Luckily, there was so much variety in the song.
Regarding the Miles Davis clip, in the clip we have the jazz critic, Stanley Crouch, being interviewed. He sets it up the sequence, saying something like: “Miles Davis’s version is the perfect sound for a car ride somewhere in the summertime”. That “somewhere” allows us to be quite vague, so we created a kind of mini music video. Miles Davis’s version is incredible. It has a floating quality and so the footage does, too. Music and footage go together in that respect.
BBC archives have some of the most staggeringly brilliant shots of New York, especially in the 1950’s and 1960’s. The archive decisions are informed by the feel of the music, and I think the footage has an elliptical quality to it: it’s cars on a hot day, gliding on the freeway, sun sparkling off their rooftops. Then: people playing on urban basketball courts – and shot from very interesting high angles. Then: a girl walking on a rooftop in the summertime, flying a kite on a roof. Birds in flight – and in slow motion. So, everything is flying, everything is floating. It’s all in black and white. All archive. All beautifully shot. A lot of it, I think, we put in slow-mo.
So, it goes beautifully with Miles Davis’s track. The sequence ends with that wonderful shot: a young woman on a bicycle. She briefly looks at the camera, then looks away, exiting the camera frame – and that’s the cutting point. It all has a dream-like quality.
Summertime Surfers
Summertime Surfers sequence from Gershwin’s Summertime (BBC Four).
Summertime Surfers Answer
Tell us about how that contrasts with your other clip from Gershwin’s Summertime?
With regards to the “summertime surfers” sequence, it’s in there simply because I loved that footage. So did my editor, Simon Battersby. And I also loved The Walker Brothers’ acapella version of “Summertime”. We knew both the clip and the song had to go in to the film. But where? So we eventually used it as a bridge, a transition from one act to the next.
In the clip, you have the hypnotic black & white footage of the surfers combined with an hypnotic version of “Summertime”. It was one of those moments where, when you cut it, you know it’s cinematic straight away. That’s exciting. There are some very gentle sound-effects of surf and sea bubbling underneath the soundtrack, which we added in the dub – but not too much to distract from the song itself.
There are a lot of interesting versions of “Summertime”. In the film, I deliberately used Albert Ayler, the free jazz saxophonist – and his discordant version for the “summer of hate” sequence. It shook things up. Then there’s a very moving gospel version by Mahalia Jackson. The contributor, Bonnie Greer, does this incredible, but also credible, lateral link between Mahalia’s version, connecting it directly to the terrible racist murder of Emmett Till in the mid-Fifties. Then, from that very sombre sequence, we decided to shift the mood – that’s when we included the late fifties uptempo R&B, doo-wop medley.
This is what I discovered was one of the secrets to making a film about one song: you’ve got to build in those surprises. Just when the audience is beginning to think they know what to expect, you have to beat them to it. But I also think that idea applies to all factual film-making – what, how and when to reveal things.
James Maycock is an award-winning & award-nominated freelance factual television director / producer, based in London. Find out more about James and his work at www.jamesmaycock.co.uk.