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Behind the Lens with DA PENNEBAKER |
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Written by Josh Baron
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Tuesday, 08 May 2007 |
 When you talk to DA Pennebaker, the man responsible for some of rock’s great documentaries— Don’t Look Back, Monterey Pop and Ziggy Stardust among them—there’s still a lust for life in his voice. “I wanted my movies to be like Ibsen plays,” says the 81-year-old from his home. And while his musical subjects range far and wide—Jerry Lee Lewis, Branford Marsalis, Depeche Mode—he’s also turned his camera to politics (the Oscar-nominated War Room), the environment (Energy War) and feminism (Town Bloody Hall). We checked in with Pennebaker on the occasion of the Monterey Pop Music Festival’s 40th anniversary, which sees the re-release of the film and soundtrack.
Did acid have an impact on Monterey from your perspective?
I could see people who were swimming around in their minds. It didn’t seem outrageous. It had nothing to do with me. I wasn’t a big pill head or acidtaker. I was too busy loading cameras to get into that.
Was the sequence of performances linear?
Ravi Shankar, for us, was the end of the concert. You couldn’t go anywhere after that. At the beginning, I didn’t really have great hopes for sitar music coming in after Hendrix, Otis Redding and The Who. It seemed to be that it was going to be a letdown, somehow. Everybody was so into that film. Every day when we would look at rushes, people would come in. Clapton, people like that, would just sit and watch. And of course they’d all have a toke or something. I was always worried that I was going to get busted.
Hold on—Clapton?
Yeah, he asked and I said sure, come on in. Those days he had a big hairdo, like Dylan; a big round thing around his head. He watched everything. Everybody watched everything and we stayed up all night. We’d go home at seven or eight in the morning. It was an amazing period of just ingesting music.
You said of Don’t Look Back, “With this kind of filmmaking, you begin by knowing that you’re going to miss 90% of what’s going on.”?
You just shoot what you can. If you’re filming, you can film how you found out about it. There are ways of filming it so it becomes a real event. If you were going to do a film on John the Baptist, you’d probably miss having his head taken off but you might get it coming in on a tray with people banging for more salad or something.
Have you ever failed or not succeeded in a way you wanted to?
There’s always that. If you put some kind of jam on your toast and it’s something you don’t like, you can’t tell yourself, “Well, I’m going to like it now.” But the fact is that the less you try and direct what takes place, for whatever reason, if you make a film about somebody... That’s why I bailed on Janis—I couldn’t make a film about people into drugs. And I don’t know why. I wasn’t morally opposed to it. You pay a terrible cost if you really got into drugs but people pay a lot of costs when they get married! I just didn’t know howto deal with it in terms of filmmaking.
Are we ever going to see any of it?
I didn’t film enough of her to really make a film about her. We just both decided that it was not going to be a film that she wanted to make or that I wanted to make. It was a peculiar thing. Her parents were sort of strict and she had a little, younger sister that she didn’t want to demolish. It was a complicated life that she was in the middle of. The drugs were not helping her.
What does DA stand for?
My first name is Don Alan. It’s Welsh. My mother put it on me and it’s been a problem all my life. Shirley Clarke, who was briefly a partner and a person I really like, she said “Don Alan won’t fly, get rid of it.” I said what do I do? Go down to town hall and change my name? She said, “No, just get rid of it—use the initials.” So I did. But I do have this problem of when people say DA I don’t know who they’re talking to.
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 08 May 2007 )
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