Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here.
Although director Rodman Flender had never made a documentary in his career or a feature film since 1999's IDLE HANDS (the film that introduced many in the world to Jessica Alba), when recently ousted talk show host Conan O'Brien decided that this moment in his life needed to be captured for the world to see, he called on his old friend (who also directed such classics as THE UNBORN, LEPRECHAUN 2, a couple episodes of "Tales from the Crypt," and a few "Party of Five's") to chronicle O'Brien climbing out of his downward spiral by going on a North American comedy and music tour.
The concept was solid, and the film feels like the best kind of intrusion, capturing O'Brien with his staff, event planners, and a host of famous faces that guest starred at various stops on the tour. But this is not your standard-issue tour or concert film. This is the story of a guy trying to get his mojo back by putting himself where he feels most at home--in front of an audience of his faithful. The movie is funny, emotionally honest, sometimes raw, and features a soundtrack of great tunes. Does Conan lose his shit from time to time? Absolutely. But he comes across as guy with a great deal of (mostly self-generated) pressure on his shoulders, and deals with it about as well as any of us would.
It's a fascinating movie that Flender was given complete access and creative control by O'Brien, and the result is well worth seeing. I should add at the beginning here, that just as the publicist was about to put Rodman on the phone, I heard the director ask (presumably after the publicist mentioned that the next call was from Ain't It Cool News) if he would be talking to Harry Knowles. This will explain my first comment. Please enjoy Rodman Flender…
RF: Hi Steve, it’s Rodman.
Capone: I'm not Harry Knowles, by the way.
RF: [laughs] I know that. She just went, “This is Steve with Ain’t It Cool News,” and I was just telling her how Harry was always incredibly supportive. I ran into Harry at SXSW earlier this year, and a movie I had done about 10 years ago called IDLE HANDS was going on in this weird political shit storm, and Harry was just really supportive and was a voice of reason at that time. I let him know that when I saw him just how much I appreciated that.
Capone: Cool. We love IDLE HANDS.
RF: Well, thank you. I appreciate that.
Capone: You introduced the world to Jessica Alba, how could anyone not.
[Both Laugh]
RF: Are you based out of Austin yourself?
Capone: No, I’m in Chicago, but I was in Austin for that same screening at SXSW. It’s kind of funny, there’s not really a template for telling a story like this one. How did you decide the best way to sort of document what is essentially the lowest point in a famous man’s life?
RF: Turn the camera on and get out of the way. That’s basically what I did. I was interested not so much in documenting the lowest point in a famous man’s life, I was interested in seeing what he was going to do next. I was interested in seeing how he was going to use his art and his comedy to work through the lowest point in his life, that's what was interesting to me. If he hadn’t done the tour, I would not have made a movie. It was the fact that he was using this outlet, that’s what was interesting to me. If I were just filming someone experiencing the biggest disappointment of their professional career, that’d be really grim, wouldn’t it?
Capone: Yes.
RF: That wouldn’t be fun at all, but the fact that he couldn’t stop and the fact that he kept going and was performing anyway he could… Legally he couldn’t be on TV, so the only way he could perform was live, and the fact that he took advantage of that and made something huge out of that made me wonder what motivated him to do that. What was that process like? That’s what was interesting to me and that’s why I did it.
Capone: The title of the film seems very deliberate, because it really is about a guy who, without being in front of people, is really at a loss, and the film really captures that.
RF: And he says really early on in the film, he says, “I’m like Tinkerbel--without applause I die.”
Capone: For lack of a better word, it’s a form of addiction, so it’s kind of like watching a guy jonesing for that feedback.
RF: That “fix of applause”?
Capone: Yes, exactly.
RF: That’s your analogy?
Capone: Yes and then basically building an entire performance to feed that need. Talk a little bit about the initial discussions that you had with him about creative control and access. Were there any limits placed on you?
RF: There were no limits. I follow him into the shower at one point. I was very upfront with him. Right from the get go I said, “I don’t want to do a 'Conan O’Brien product,' I don’t want to do a puff piece. I don’t want to show how you've been wronged. I don’t want to do something by or for Team Coco.
Simultaneously, I’m not out to get you. I don’t have an agenda. I don’t have an axe to grind. I’m not Nick Broomfeld or Michael Moore, I have nothing to prove; I just want to capture what happens. If there’s some great funny stuff, terrific. If there are some moments that aren’t so pretty, I want to capture those too.” Having said that early on and letting him know that that was my intention, he was okay with that. He knew that was the kind of movie I wanted to make, and hopefully that’s what I wound up with.
Capone: Admit it, there were a couple of scenes in this film where he gets genuinely frustrated and even maybe angry. Were you a little excited about him feeling comfortable enough in front of the camera to show that?
RF: I’m glad he felt comfortable enough in front of the camera. I guess that’s the advantage of being a one-man crew. It was very, very difficult, but on the other hand I find that it contributes to that sense of intimacy that you see. He never said, “I don’t want you to film this” or “You have to leave the room now.” He would say, “please turn the camera off,” and it wasn’t about anything specific, it was more just a general exhaustion and tiredness of me being around so much. And whenever he said that, that’s when I knew I had to get an extra camera battery and keep going to get him at his rawest.
Capone: Speaking of his fans, he’s got some of the more rabid fans of any sort of comic performer today. Were you at all excited at the idea of showing them something, a part of him that they had never seen before?
RF: I hope so. You know like I said, I didn’t make this for his fans, but I hope they enjoy it. I hope they get something out of it and I hope they see and enjoy a side of him that they may not have seen before. I mean having known Conan for a while, sometimes the funniest Conan is not necessarily the Conan you see on TV every night. So I was happy to expose that Conan as well. I think his fans get a kick out of that, I’m happy to get to share that with them, but I didn’t make this specifically for them. I made it for a much wider audience.
Capone: I think I might even go so far to say there might be a little bit of myth busting going on here, being able to see him at maybe the most human we have ever seen him up to this point. It’s a very funny movie pretty much from top to bottom, but there are some really almost painful to watch moments.
RF: I’m curious, what was painful to you?
Capone: The scene that pops in my head is the one where he is meeting one of his back-up singer’s families after he’s made it very clear that he doesn’t want to do exactly what he’s being asked to do--autographs, pictures. And it’s not those moments are painful; it’s what he does right after that where he just kind of blows up and says “Okay, anybody else we need to cater to?” That was like “Oh, ouch.” I can see people watching that and going “That’s not very nice,” but I understood it.
RF: Yeah and like I said, maybe it’s not pretty, but he’s certainly very nice to her and to her family and he poses for every picture that’s asked of him, so if anything is exposed that isn’t nice or isn’t pretty I think it’s just what it means to be a human being. I think if you do a show and you give it your all and you're generous and you're exhausted and people want more and more and you give it to them, I think if you’re not a little cranky, then what are you? You're probably a robot or something, you’re not a human being. I think the film shows him being a human being.
When you see him on his show or hosting his show, he’s doing a job and he’s doing it very well, but the person who does that job is a person and is funny and generous, but gets tired and gets cranky and gets impatient and is loyal and is all of the things that make a human being--supportive but is impatient and every color that goes into a human emotion. I just think he’s probably braver than most celebrities in admitting that, that he's human.
Capone: And letting you document it. You mentioned it just now. To Conan, a lot of this is work, but he doesn't see work as a bad thing. He finds value and identity in his work, and that’s a very blue-collar ideal, and I love that about him. Some of the artists that I admire the most have that same sort of ethic: This is not just something you do every now and again to kill time; it’s something that he needs to identify himself through. Did you get a sense of that as well?
RF: Yeah, he’s always had a very strong work ethic. I remember reading something on the internet, someone on one of his fan pages said something like “I deserve to be famous, please put me on your show,” and the commenter wisely said that you know Conan is a guy who has worked for everything. He didn’t have a family who was in show business, there’s no nepotism. He worked. Everything you see that he has, he worked for, and it’s a combination of talent and hard work and that work ethic. He’s always had that and he wouldn’t be where he is now without that.
Capone: Did he have any say whatsoever in the editing?
RF: No. It was a challenge to get him to see the movie. He didn’t want to relive that time and who could blame him?
Capone: So what was his reaction the first time you actually showed him the film?
RF: He said, “I feel like an alcoholic who has to go apologize to people.” It was hard. As you said when we first started talking, I was documenting him at a very low point in his life. He's not there anymore, so it brings you back. Good actors when they are doing a scene of pain or something, they have to get themselves in a mental and emotional state to be there. I think any one of us who would be unfortunate enough to have a camera document a low point of their life to then move on from that point and a year later have the filmmaker say, “Hey, sit down and watch this!” Who'd want to do that? That seems like a form of torture to me.
Capone: Yeah. Were there certain behind-the-curtain tour films that you kind of looked at and said, “That’s an honest portrayal of an artist on the road, that’s kind of the vibe we are going for.”? Were there any films like that?
RF: Yeah, there were a few. Obviously DON’T LOOK BACK, the Pennebaker movie. We talked about obviously GIMME SHELTER, which is probably the CITIZEN KANE of these kinds of movies, although no one got murdered in our movie.
[Both Laugh]
RF: There was a movie that’s very hard to see, and I hope it becomes easier to see called JANE, which was another Pennebaker movie made in 1962 about Jane Fonda’s debut on Broadway, and the show is a flop. [Laughs] Maybe that’s why she’s not happy with it and doesn’t want it out there, but it is a terrific document of putting a show together with a big star. Conan’s show was obviously very successful, he was at a difficult time in his life. In the movie JANE, she’s at a very high point in her career, but the endeavor is unsuccessful. So that’s a terrific movie, and I hope that some day sees the light of day. That was very inspiring to me.
Capone: Were there any genuinely surprising moments for you in putting this together? Did you learn something about Conan that you didn’t know going into this?
RF: I’ve known Conan for a long time, we’ve never worked together, and I always knew he had a strong work ethic, but I had never seen his process in front of my eyes like that. That was interesting to me to see the writer’s room, to see that level of how high he sets the bar for those around him and himself. Do you know what I mean? He sets the bar highest for himself, so I think when he teases his writers or gives them grief it’s not something he doesn’t do to himself first, and that was interesting for me to see.
Capone: You worked for Roger Corman early on, right?
RF: Yeah for a few years.
Capone: I always love hearing people tell stories about working for him. What were some of the vital lessons you learned about filmmaking and editing from working with him?
RF: Well pace for one thing. I mean a couple of people have asked me if there was anything I brought from my experience working for Roger to this project, and even though the end products are very different, the tools and putting them together are very similar, and the lessons I learned are very similar. Pace for one thing. What I learned about pace from Roger explicitly applied to my editing process of this film. I really wanted to keep the pace moving. The pace of the tour was so breakneck, and I hope the film reflected that, but standing on its own, I think the worst thing a movie can be is boring. I’ve seen some movies that are catastrophes, but they're interesting; they are not boring. The fact that they are such fiascos sometimes is what makes them interesting, and then I’ve seen other movies that are just boring, and that’s the worst sin I think a movie can be is boring.
Capone: Yeah. So are you working on anything else right now? Anything new?
RF: I hope the next thing I do is a fictional film. I like to bounce back and forth between documentary and narrative films. I want Werner Herzog’s career.
[Both Laugh]
Capone: A lot of what you have done before now for film and TV has been very scripted. Did you have to school yourself in shooting and editing a documentary?
RF: You know, I never went to film school, but I studied documentary filmmaking as an undergraduate at Harvard. I studied with Ross McElwee.
Capone: Oh sure, I love him.
RF: So he was sort of my documentary mentor.
Capone: Ross McElwee, not always the master of pacing.
RF: Well, for his films they are appropriate.
Capone: They're great. I absolutely love his movies yeah. Rodman, thank you very much then. It was great talking to you.
RF: My pleasure. Thank you so much. Again, send Harry my best and my thanks for his support.
Capone: I absolutely will.
RF: Thanks.
-- Capone capone@aintitcool.com
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