- 2 days ago
Co Directors/Producers Susan Lacy & Jessica Levin talk to The Inside Reel about stitching time, sociology, perspective and the journey of an artist in regards to their new 2-part HBO Documentary Film: “Billy Joel: And So It Goes” on HBO and HBO Max.
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00:00I think music saved my life.
00:13It gave me a resident live.
00:15I don't care what you say anymore, this is my life.
00:20Everything I've done and everything I've lived through
00:22has somehow found its way into my music.
00:26The score of the film is stitched together through Billy's music
00:34and it says a lot about Billy's catalog and the depth of his musicianship
00:40that we were able to underscore these emotional moments with his music,
00:44which is very inspired by classical, it's very inspired by Broadway.
00:48His music is very cinematic.
00:50And take Billy the Kid, for example.
00:52Take Street Life Serenade, for example.
00:54Those songs are expansive and cinematic, and because of that
00:59and because of the depth of his catalog, we were able to do exactly what you said,
01:05which was use the deep catalog to underscore in certain places.
01:10Stop in Nevada is a perfect example, as Susan Well pointed out.
01:14It's about their journey.
01:16And when you have that music to underscore, it really adds an entire new layer.
01:22It's Billy's own musical voice telling the story.
01:26So that's part of the story and the reveal of Billy is what his entire depth of his catalog is
01:33just by listening.
01:34If you just close your eyes and you just listen to the lyrics and the music,
01:38you understand what he was going through.
01:39I mean, California, very influenced, as he says, by the Sanger Sanger movement,
01:44by Jackson Brown, by the Western, the idea of the West, Billy the Kid.
01:49You know, these songs came out of his experiences that he was living in these different phases of his life.
01:58Some folks like to get away, take a holiday from the neighborhood.
02:01I'm in a New York state of mine.
02:03And the minute I got back to this rented house and I saw my wife, I said,
02:08do we have a piano?
02:09Yeah, it's upstairs.
02:10Let me just go up to the piano.
02:12Ran up to the piano and wrote the song probably within about an hour.
02:16It just came out.
02:18I don't know what I'm needing and I don't want to waste more time.
02:26I'm in a New York state of mine.
02:34New York state of mine, that one stood out.
02:36It was a phrase that I heard my dad say all the time with his friends.
02:42And I thought it was a more sophisticated, brilliant phrase.
02:45Out of touch with the rhythm and blues.
02:51An innocent man, as you talked about, since that was your first touch point with Billy.
02:55And I think that's very true for a lot of people.
02:58When they discovered Billy, you know, was in a particular phase of Billy and they connect with that Billy.
03:04That 70s Billy, that stranger Billy, that innocent man Billy, the stormfront Billy.
03:09And because we had this rich archive, we were able to see the evolution of the man live and in person, right?
03:18As he goes through his different phases, the times that he was with Christie Brinkley, the MTV Billy, you know?
03:24I mean, there are just so many Billy's.
03:25And so I think the fact that he's lived his life in the public eye, essentially, for 50 years, gave us an incredible palette to work from.
03:35And yeah, it was difficult to choose, you know, what are we going to focus on and which of the music?
03:40I mean, it was challenging.
03:42But I think in the end, what we wanted to do was use music and pieces of his life lyrically.
03:48We wanted to use things that illuminated the life and illuminated the artist so that you could really understand who he was at his core as an artist, which is an artist that has been tremendously influenced by so many different genres of music.
04:04And that is very much expressed in his catalog.
04:07There's this dream state I get into, almost like a trance.
04:12There's a flow to it, like a river.
04:14Oh, another thing I thought of.
04:17When we do the stops.
04:21How do you pick up?
04:25The song, The River of Dreams, came to me in a dream.
04:29I woke up hearing the rhythm, hearing the call and response, the gospel aspect of it.
04:44I'm not a gospel artist, but that was so different to me.
04:48But that's also, thank you very much, Jessica.
04:50It's also about that existential reflection, not necessarily dread, although there is some dread, you know, in how he progresses.
04:58But once he gets to, like, where he is now, I mean, listening and play Uptown Girl in the style of classical, listening to, because I, you could always hear, and, you know, even like modern day musicians like Muse, who's a classical pianist, Matt Bellamy.
05:12He does the same thing, but the thing is, if you listen to everything, you totally see it.
05:17But it's only at this point, it's sort of interesting seeing him look back.
05:21Like, him on the boat is so, because I remember listening to Downeaster Alexa, and I knew it was about Alexa Ray.
05:28But now, good not my angel, like all these things feel so much more rich and deep.
05:36Maybe it's because of age with all of us that we're able to see this.
05:40Could you talk about that?
05:42Because you can't capture time, and yet you guys were actually able to capture time with him.
05:49How do you have to approach that?
05:51Is it just, you know, did certain, like, questions, for example, were certain questions more important than others to make sure to get to?
06:01Could you talk about that process?
06:03Because the research before, and probably just going to talk to him initially, was probably very specific, I would think.
06:11Well, I started with the areas that I thought where we could connect in terms of a shared history.
06:19And one of those was classical music.
06:21There's a whole review about classical.
06:22The first interview was actually very largely about the Holocaust story, because we had that shared history, which got into his childhood.
06:35And the second interview was almost exclusively about classical music, and a very intense interview where he talked about composition and harmony and all these things.
06:44And we had a lot of fun, and that kind of opened the doors to begin to really go deep into his life.
06:51Were there questions that were more important than other questions?
06:54Not really.
06:54I mean, we wanted to understand every song and the origins of them as connected to his life and what he was going through.
07:03So it wasn't just a drive-by situation.
07:07We kind of had to connect where he was at any given point in his life when he was writing these songs.
07:14So it takes a lot of time to do that.
07:17And we wanted to get into the messy life.
07:20I mean, you can't avoid the messy life, because he also documented the messy life.
07:26He talks about his alcohol.
07:29He talks about, you know, he said, I did my own research on Big Shot, you know.
07:34I mean, and Lullaby, as you pointed out, came out of his deep sadness after the divorce, that when he had to say goodbye to his daughter and spent a little bit of time with her.
07:47And then she was gone, and he was back in that empty house, that quiet house.
07:52So it really was in a way kind of prescribed, if you're going song by song, which we did because it connected entirely to his life, until he stops writing songs.
08:05And then he turns to classical music, and he goes through some very dark periods.
08:12Some of it was hard to talk about, and I waited until kind of the last couple of interviews to really talk about those dark periods.
08:22And I said, I'm not going to write this.
08:25No, no, no.
08:25I rejected it immediately.
08:27In the middle of the high, I kept walking in the high, I said, bada, bada, call and response, which they do in church.
08:33And I went in, took a shower, and I'm soaping myself, and I'm singing, in the middle of the high, and it would not go away.
08:41It became part of my being.
08:44It wouldn't leave me, and it was like, you're going to have to write this whether you want to or not.
08:48But when something is that powerful and that evocative, you should usually go with it.
08:54It needs to be written.
08:56I mean, my last question, I'll let you go, thank you, is because the thing is, is that the way he interacts with this band,
09:00just sort of the psychological, almost sociology of it, because you're a rock star, you want to act like a rock star, but, you know, we're all human.
09:09And there's one song, which I know you guys didn't use, but I always think of that one, you're only human, second wind.
09:15And it's just about that.
09:17It's about, you know, I see, you know, because we're always bound to repeat our mistakes sometimes.
09:24But as long as we own up to them, it's so interesting.
09:27And like with all the band members, this is so true.
09:29Can you talk about looking at the societal, the pressure, again, pressure, you know, the pressure that this kind of person was under.
09:36I don't think any of us can sort of, you know, understand the kind of pressure maybe these people are under as artists.
09:44Can you just talk about that?
09:48I mean, listen, it's very obvious the kind of pressure he was facing.
09:53I mean, every time he, first of all, the first couple of albums didn't do well.
09:57And then he had the fear that they might actually drop him, that Columbia might actually drop him.
10:02And, you know, this miraculous connection with Phil Ramone after many, many misfires.
10:10And then he goes on to do the biggest selling album in the history of Columbia Records, The Stranger, which is a phenomenal story in and of itself.
10:18I mean, Billy's climb to rise to stardom was a very, very slow burn.
10:24It took a long, it was a long, slow ride up to success.
10:29Then you have the success and then you got to do it again.
10:31And then you got to do it again.
10:33And then you got to do it again.
10:34And I think he really felt that pressure.
10:36I think it's one of the reasons he stopped writing pop songs.
10:39He couldn't bear the pressure of having to, and lyrics were always hard for him, always hard.
10:44That's why he wrote the music first and the lyrics afterwards.
10:47And he just got, he just wore out on it and he wore out on that pressure.
10:52And there are many, many other times in his life when he just said, I'm done.
10:56You know, when the press was all over him, every single thing he did was in the press.
11:01It was constantly scrutinized.
11:05He writes a letter to the band saying, I'm done.
11:08I'm not completely dropping out.
11:09And he did for a couple of years, literally dropped out.
11:13And I think only 12-12-12, the Hurricane Sandy concert, which he only participated in because it was very local to him.
11:21It was very personal to him.
11:22Long Island was, you know, parts of it were destroyed.
11:27And it was like his home territory.
11:28And then he goes and he does this concert and he blows everybody out of the water and says, okay, well, maybe I'm not done yet.
11:36It's a real role.
11:37His story is Shakespearean.
11:38And it's a Shakespearean tale of love and loss and betrayal and resilience and rising from the ashes.
11:48I mean, it's a drama is built in.
11:55There are certain traumas that one never gets over.
11:58There's an underlying rage that wiped out my family.
12:02Still trying to put the pieces together.
12:03I didn't know my father at all from eight years old until I was in my 20s.
12:09I've had a lot of hard lessons in my life.
12:12I should have been worth this.
12:13And I was worth this.
12:16And I hit the baby.
12:17Kaboom.
12:19I was amazed that I was still alive.
12:22I learned life is a fight.
12:25It helps to be a fan.
12:26But who has not been touched by Billy's music?
12:30Who has not?
12:31I can't think of anyone.
12:32So really important for us to say that we didn't we we don't ever make films like, oh, my God, you've got this guy such a genius.
12:40You've got to know this.
12:41I mean, we it's it's an objective viewpoint made for people who love Billy and made for people who were like, why Billy?
12:49I mean, there were people who said, why are you making a film about Billy Joel?
12:52You know, there are people out there who don't like Billy Joel.
12:55I'd like to leave it up to the to the viewer to make their own decision about that.
12:59And the thing that's been pleasing to us is how many people are saying, I had no idea how interesting Billy Joel is, how complex he is, how complex his music is.
13:09And they have a whole and they've come to appreciate him.
13:13People who didn't appreciate him now appreciate him.
13:15But what's our goal, necessarily, our goal is to reveal the artist and let people come to their own conclusion about the importance of their work or not.
13:23But there is a body of work there that's going to last forever.
13:26And that's that's the bottom line.
13:32If there was a skeleton key to unlocking what's behind the songs.
13:39It's my relationships with others.
13:42He cares about the human experience.
13:46He wrote songs that matter.
13:56He wrote songs that have been released.
14:01I don't want this world yet.
14:06ni
14:16songs that have been released.
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