In the past decade, the songs of Bill Withers have enjoyed a resurgence of sorts, popping up in films, television shows and commercials. "Grandma's Hands" appeared in this year's THE HANGOVER; "Use Me" in ANCHORMAN; "Aint No Sunshine" in MUNICH, just to name a few. His most famous song, "Lean on Me", is an anthem of its time that has been often covered and, of course, referenced in the John G. Avildsen film of the same name. Melodies and words nearly four decades old that you recognize and can hum along with.
Withers was an artist of interest for me, personally, because we come from the same small West Virginia town and I was curious not only how he went from point A to point B, but why in the world he dropped out of the spotlight and stopped recording twenty five years ago. With the new doc STILL BILL, filmmakers Alex Vlack and Damani Baker seek to answer the seemingly simple question, "Hey, whatever happened to Bill Withers?"
STILL BILL will screen at the Bloor Cinema in Toronto on Friday, October 23. More screenings are scheduled in Philadelphia, Denver and Europe among others. If you can't make those, you can HOST YOUR OWN SCREENING. For more information, visit the film's website (http://www.stillbillthemovie.com).
Vlack and Baker took time to answer questions for AICN.
[Elston Gunn]: For years I had hoped someone would make a documentary on Bill Withers, see what he was up to and discover why we haven't heard from him in a quarter of a century. What was the catalyst for this project?
[Alex Vlack & Damani Baker]: His music and his lyrics. When you really listen to what he's saying, he's so profound and so personal, you feel like a close friend is speaking to you. When we started doing some research and there was hardly any information about him, we just got more and more curious.
[EG]: Part of what makes Withers so interesting is that he's a genre-defying artist. One could slap an R&B label on him, but that would be lazy. He didn't have any interest in horns or intros, as he mentions in the film, and the Appalachian influence is there. He could've just as easily been a folk star in Greenwich village, or part of the Bakersfield country music scene, or early Stax Records funk. He's really a writer at the end of the day.
[AV & DB]: We feel like the most important thing to Bill is songwriting. He loves good songwriting, whether it's country, soul, whatever. He loves Hal David and Leiber & Stoller. Of course, he's into Marvin Gaye like everyone else in the world, but what he respects and admires more than anything is the ability to write a good song and tell a good story.
[EG]: STILL BILL's unique take is the artist's struggle with the notion of continuing to work. Not a lot of artists get to have a Third Act, but you see it starting to happen a little more now. Johnny Cash is one of the more popular examples. But what's fascinating here is we see the back-and-forth in his mind of whether or not he really has any more to say - or perhaps the revelation that there are no revelations.
[AV & DB]: Well, the thing about Bill is that his life can't necessarily be defined by "acts", and certainly not by music. He's a complete human being with or without music. The fact that he happens to have made (and continues to make) such good music is one aspect to his character, but not his defining characteristic - not by a long shot.
[EG]: It feels like Cornel West states the thesis of the film when he poses the question to Withers, "What is it you want your legacy to be?" Did you have an idea of the narrative as you were shooting it or did you find it in the editing?
[AV & DB]: Sometimes we had an idea of the narrative, but like backpackers with an itinerary, we threw those ideas away every time he surprised us. We had less a secure sense of the narrative than a sense of the themes: humility, honesty, respect for everyday people, family.
[EG]: Withers also doesn't seem like the kind of guy who, at 70, would be willing to hand the creative reins to a young hot producer to achieve some kind of "relevance" that you are seeing more often now - and which can sometimes backfire.
[AV & DB]: After knowing him for a few years, we can honestly say we have no idea what he might do. He keeps us on our toes.
[EG]: You were able to incorporate a lot of cinema verite into the film, as opposed to a lot of music documentaries which heavily rely on the talking head "he's a genius" material, which gets tiresome. Were you very conscious of how you wanted to approach your subject?
[AV & DB]: Yes. We have one talking-head section (other than the interviews with his family) that we deliberately kept in one place rather than spread it throughout the film. The main goal was to feel like you're in Bill's mind for a little while, to understand where he's coming from, to hear his wisdom and his stories form him and no one else. When you hear from his family, it's because they're the closest people in the world to him. We wanted it to feel, in a sense, like his music: simple, profound, soulful, emotional.
[EG]: In dealing with an artist's past, it's usually recounted in either a romantic or condescending way, but here it's presented more honestly.
[AV & DB]: His past was only interesting to us when it informs his character, not as a history lesson. If you want to know facts about Bill's career, you can go to his wikipedia page or his website. For us, it's the story of who he is as a person, not the story of his musical career.
[EG]: For most people who know his music, his battle with chronic stuttering syndrome may be surprising. Do you think those challenges and triumphs say more about him than his native town or even some of his creative output? Was this something he was less candid about at first?
[AV & DB]: He was always candid about his stuttering. Bill is never afraid to discuss his weaknesses and has spent a long time thinking about the blessings that come from struggle. As far as what in his life says something about him, it's just all of it - the challenges, the achievements, being in the Navy, the music, raising a family - it sounds obvious, but all of it is 100% Bill. In that sense he is both larger than life and just like everyone else.
[EG]: What lessons did you learn personally, from Withers and in general, working on STILL BILL?
[AV & DB]: He says in the film "On your way to wonderful, you're going t have to pass through all right. And when you get to all right, take a look around and get used to it, because that may be as far as you're going to go." It seems like everyone has - or will have - that moment when they realize that about themselves. It may be a single day, or a whole period of your life; but the basic lesson of humility, and acceptance, is all part of the Bill Withers experience.
[EG]: It's nice to witness some of Withers' process of co-writing and recording a song, as he does here with Raul Midon. Was this a lucky break for you? I imagine you had hoped you would be able to document him writing and recording.
[AV & DB]: It was a lucky break that we helped make happen. We should say, we helped make it happen as much as anyone can regarding Bill - since he always does his own thing and doesn't do anything just because someone asks him to. But we told him about Raul and we had a bit of a relationship with Raul. And Bill had wanted to write something in Spanish. So we helped facilitate it. The lucky part was that Bill let us be around for it at all, since he's private about the process of creating music. But that luck extends to the entire time we spent with him - he gave us nearly three years of his life.
[EG]: Do you think there will be new Bill Withers material forthcoming? Did the film and activity surrounding it help to propel him one way or another?
[AV & DB]: Again, we cannot tell you what Bill will do. And he doesn't do anything on our accounts - not musically, anyway. Perhaps he was able to see first hand how deeply obsessive some people are about him!
[EG]: Sometimes, too, it seems like home recording studios can be a tricky factor. It gives some artists the opportunity to be prolific while it allows others to meander and lose focus.
[AV & DB]: Bill has a lot of music no one's ever heard - that's all we can say about that.
[EG]: You didn't go too much into it, but it's referenced a couple of times that the music business didn't treat Withers very well. (You cut to him looking very uncomfortable waiting for the intro to finish on "Just The Two Of Us" during, I think, an "American Bandstand" performance.) How so, and how much of this factors, do you think, into his reluctance to return to performing?
[AV & DB]: The music industry treated him badly from a business point of view as well as a creative point of view. Business-wise, it's a long story; suffice to say it was cold. Creatively, everything that drives the industry - showmanship, dancing, glitziness - is antithetical to everything Bill stands for. It's embarrassing to imagine that people actual told him to go out onstage and dance; it shows how profoundly people misunderstand artists and try to fit them into a mold to get sales. The funny thing is, his songs became hits all on their own - so why try to fix something that's working?
[EG]: What did you use to shoot and edit it? How big was your crew?
[AV & DB]: We shot with 2 HVX200's with one incredible sound man, Alan Barker. We cut on Final Cut Pro.
[EG]: How many hours of footage did you have to sift through during post-production?
[AV & DB]: 350.
[EG]: I was surprised at the length of the film. You didn't try to pad it out to 100 minutes. The story is what it is, and if it's shorter than usual, so be it.
[AV & DB]: Bill jokes that he's able to tell a whole story in three minutes, so we're trying to follow his lead.
[EG]: Talk a little bit about your distribution plan. Obviously the landscape is still changin and smaller productions like this could fare better depending on how you release and market it, or it can get lost by the wayside.
[AV & DB]: We are distributing the film in North America through B-Side ((http://www.bside.com/), which we're incredibly excited about. The standard model with a small film like this, when they get picked up, is they get placed in a few art house theaters in a few cities, hope for some reviews, then sell DVD's - and then the filmmakers spend a long time recouping the marketing budget the big studio spent on posters, etc. With B-Side, they get the film onto as many screens as possible for a few months before the DVDs and digital release, through theatrical releases, and self-hosted screenings. You can go online and order a screener and show it to five friends or five hundred. You can show it in your church as a fundraiser. We want as many people to see this together as possible, not just in a few small art houses. It's an amazing thing to see how people react to it, especially in a screening environment - everyone laughs and cries, it's really special. B-Side is smart. They're the future. It's the Radiohead model for movies.
We also have an amazing agent for foreign sales - which will mostly be television, we imagine. We'd love to have a TV deal.
[EG]: What kind of practical advice do you have for aspiring documentary or independent filmmakers?
[AV & DB]: It takes a lot of time. It takes time to learn the craft, and time to stick with a story. Don't do anything the easy way, it's not worth it. Don't make a documentary just because you're interested in a subject. If you're interested in a subject and want to make a film about it, approach filmmaking with the same rigor and passion you would painting, writing, or investment banking. It's not easy - and that's why it's worth it.
[AV & DB]: As filmmakers and freelancers, we are always working on ten things at once. Some are old, some are new, some are just glimpses at the future. Our main focus is working with people we respect and love, and creating a place where we can all make great stuff. We have a kind of pool of talented people that we think of as family that work on a ton of projects together. There's Damani's ongoing project about his personal history during the invasion of Grenada; a new project with Andrew Zuckerman and Archbishop Desmond Tutu on music; commercial work; a script in the works; content for NGO's... the list is long but the basic ethos is that we are always creating and working in an environment we love with people who bring rigor to their work.
[EG]: Alex, you wrote and produced HIGH FALLS (http://www.highfallsthemovie.com/), a short film which stars Peter Sarsgaard and Maggie Gyllenhaal and was featured on an issue of the DVD magazine Wholphin (http://www.wholphindvd.com/). What was that experience like for you and are there any more shorts or features in the pipeline?
[AV]: It was an incredible learning experience, mostly as a producer, but also somewhat as a writer. I have a long way to go as a producer - it's a complicated craft and I was just beginning at that time (and am still just beginning). There is a feature script now that Andrew and I are doing together.
