Director Alan G. Parker was in London to promote his film Hello
Quo and I got the chance to have a chat with the filmmaker about his epic rock
documentary.
Alan G. Parker is a friendly and passionate man with as much
to say as the stars of his rock-doc. We
talked about the inevitable Spinal Tap comparisons, the rumours surrounding a
reunion tour for the original Frantic Four members of Status Quo and the
difficulty in cutting 50 years of rock history down into a manageable length
for a feature. Parker also teased about
his next project which looks set to be another definitive look at an even bigger
international rock’n’roll band.
As the barricades were being erected in Leicester Square and
fans started arriving long before the premiere would begin, I started by asking
Mr Parker what it was like to finally be showing his film to a packed audience
this evening.
With the Leicester
Square premiere of Hello Quo about to kick off, I
imagine you’re looking forward to the audience reaction…
AP: What’s been fun
is that so far at the press junkets and showing various pals in the industry
the film, nearly everybody has said the same thing which is ‘did you sit down
to make a comedy?’ Because it’s laugh
out loud stuff. There’s laughs all the
way through it. You start watching it
and within five minutes, everyone in the room’s laughing. Within thirty minutes some people’s sides are
aching, they’ve laughed that much, and yet it’s a very serious story about a
rock’n’roll band. But I understand why
it’s got that thing about it. The
lineage if you like is that everybody who’s spoken about this movie in print,
within ten sentences has mentioned Spinal Tap but not in a bad way.
Comparisons to Spinal Tap are always welcome surely…
AP: Well Quo’s a funny beast. It’s the dark secret isn’t it? It’s Dad’s father’s day present. It’s something that everybody knows a song by
but is anyone wearing the t-shirt to shout about it? And I think that Quo in that respect is a
very, very big reason why we made Hello Quo.
Because Hello Quo at no point ever sets out to change anything that you
know. What it does set out to do is… one
example for years we’ve been told the reason Alan Lancaster left the band is
because of Marguerita Time… now that’s not true. Well then here’s the real reason why he left
the band. OK fine great, that’s more
plausible, I’m glad you did it that way.
That’s the way I see it.
And it’s long but again how do you do a film about Quo in 90
minutes? We tried for three months in
the edit. It didn’t work.
How long was the first cut?
AP: Nearly six hours.
But that was just talking heads.
There was no archive in it, nothing.
Having said that, Who Killed Nancy? Which is my film, not the last one,
the one before, was about four hours in rough cut. And that’s about 100 minutes in cinemas…. The
way I got taught to do it by Don Letts… always go big. Because when you’ve got more, you can keep
more. If you’re fishing about trying to
find something, that means you didn’t get it in the first place. That’s when we have the sort of Eureka moment… well this
is the first movie to contain the whole of the Frantic Four. This is the first movie to have Francis,
Rick, Alan and John on board.
What is it that makes that original line-up such a big
selling point?
AP: So in the same
way that there’s loads of people read The Dirt by Motley Crue who don’t know own
a single Motley Crue album but they read it because it’s a rock’n’roll
story. It’s about sex, drugs and
everything we all think we might do but not of us are gonna. That’s the Frantic Four story. It’s cocaine, it’s being in prison, it’s
platinum albums, it’s the first band to have six straight UK number one albums. It’s spending too much money, it’s being
ripped off cause that’s how it worked back in the seventies and it’s a
juggernaut of a story. So what I did I
went back to the band and their management and I didn’t want to diss the new
band because they’re very successful and they do what they do. And I said listen, we need to weight it
heavily in the favour of the Frantic Four so I would say 85% of the movie is
the Frantic Four story which is why we called it Hello Quo and why we used the
iconography of the very early 1972 album for our poster. Because we’re not feeding anybody a false
myth. Yes it does bring you up to date…
but by the time we hit the new band there’s probably 30 minutes of the film to
go.
And then you have the big reunion as your climax…
AP: Then we always
knew we had the ace card at the end… With this lot they’re probably going to
carry on rolling for a while. So I said
we need something that’s big enough, we need a P.S. but it’s got to be a punch
in the stomach P.S. It’s got to be like ok well if they do make a brilliant
album next year, that’s not unfeasible, they made a brilliant album last year
with Quid Pro Quo, probably the best album they’ve made in ages. So what we’ve
got is what all the fans wanted to see which is Francis, Rick, Alan, John back
together again. And that has been a
talking point online since about last Christmas.
There are all sorts of rumours around what happened at that
reunion, what was it like?
AP: I mean the biggest thing is, like all these things, I
know what it’s like cause I’m a fan of bands too. But let’s be honest, the first rumour I read
online which I thought was hilarious was ‘it was a two hour jam session’. No it wasn’t.
I know that cause I was there. I
filmed the damn thing with 16 cameras.
It was about 50 minutes. Oh yeah ‘there must have been 50 or 60 people
there’. No there weren’t, there were
about 20 odd people there and that included wives, girlfriends, the odd wife,
the odd kid, management, our gang.
That’s it done completely. There
were just too many to me false rumours floating around and then of course came
the big one which none of us can ever have control over. Therefore two and two together make eight,
they’re doing a reunion tour! Who says they’re doing a reunion tour? Where’s it written down that they’re doing a
reunion tour? On Facebook? Well that’s going to be reliable. About as reliable as Wikipedia who for three
weeks to begin with on this film said ‘following the rip-roaring success of The
Commitments, Alan Parker makes Hello Quo.
And we got that pulled down and got my name right. So all this reunion
talk seemed to be a house built on sand, not built on a good foundation. Now that’s not to say that it won’t happen,
that’s not to say that it will happen but it is to say that right now, it’s
about Hello Quo. What happens in the future,
be it near or far, who knows? I’m the
only person in the entire world whoever shot that band together in 28 years so
that being the case, you think I might have some insight on that matter. But got none.
Sorry to disappoint.
This is what fans do I suppose… speculate and jump to
conclusions…
AP: You’re always going to get with any fan base; the people
who post on the band’s forum are the hard core.
They’re the ones that probably have a jacket full of badges, three
tattoos and someone’s changed their first name to Ricky Quo or whatever. You expect that from people like that. If I found out that Kiss were doing their
last ever gig next week and it was on the top of Ben Nevis,
I guarantee I’d be there. I’m gonna be
there and that’s it… But it’s what fans
do. How does the movie end? They get back together. Oh well they must be playing round our way
soon then.
The premiere is tonight in Leicester Square and then it’s released
on DVD and Blu-ray next week. Were there
plans to screen the film around the country?
AP: I’m kind glad we did it this way because at least this
way, we go in, we do our thing for one evening, they’re all about to go away
and do that wild tour thing they do every year where it’s Europe, Europe,
Europe, Australia, then here forever at Christmas and we’re about to have a
very short break and a holiday and then start movie number eleven, So I don’t think either of us are that
bothered about, yeah we’ll promote it and yeah we’ll stand behind it but we
don’t want to keep on talking about it till Christmas dinner. We’ve done it now and it’s great and I’m glad
it’s been well-received apart from The Times and Time Out but fuck’em frankly. The Times didn’t like it, everybody else did…
You’ve done Sex Pistols, The Clash, Monty Python, what’s
next for you?
AP: A fella said to me last week and I love this, I was
doing an interview for some Japanese magazine and the kid said to me ‘well at
least it fits in with your lineage’. I
said ‘my linage?’ What Sid Vicious,
Monty Python, Status Quo? I’d like to
sit here all afternoon and talk about this lineage. Where’s the lineage? All I can tell you cause we’re under wraps is
this: it is a massive, big, worldwide rock’n’roll band. Potentially bigger than this even. And we’ll be running on it pre-production
wise this side of Christmas. It will be
out next year. But it’s probably going
to be late next year. It’s something
I’ve wanted to do for a long, long time.
It’s neither Kiss nor Slade. I
know both those bands very well and I have talked to them about doing something
but it’s neither. It’s a great group and
I’m flattered to be doing it and hopefully via Classic Rock magazine which is
our normal first port-of-call, we’ll have that news story out this side of
Christmas.
You’ve got some great talking heads in the film, was that
difficult?
AP: Brian May didn’t need any persuading at all. Cliff Richard didn’t need no persuading at
all. Scott Gorham from Thin Lizzy just
went ‘where and when?’ He’s a mate of
mine anyway but he was like ‘where and when, I’ll do it!’ To my mind that means we did something, we
pulled it off and I’m massively pleased with that.
You talked about cutting it down to a manageable length, how
difficult was that?
AP: When we got the cut down to about 2.25, K5
(International distributors) had said no longer than 2.20 deliverable. And I’m going ‘show it to them, screen it for
them now’. And God bless Carl Clifton
from K5, he came out of that room and he went ‘actually it works very well at
2.25 doesn’t it?’ I went ‘good’ because… I feel like it’s been through a
butcher’s shop. I don’t know where that
five minutes would have come from. The
only thing we could have done was pull a story.
At the moment I happen to think all the stories in that film are
important enough to still be there.
So what was the worst thing you had to cut?
AP: There’s a few
things we pulled out that we knew were kinda good stories but at the same time
maybe they’d been told a lot in previous Quo books or they’d been told a lot in
previous doc’s that had been done for other TV companies. That’s not to say that when you’re doing a
story as big as this about a band as big as this, you’re bound to go over old
ground. What I tried to do when we were
going over old ground was not to reinvent it but to revisit it. Normally when you see a movie that says next
to the band’s name ‘official’, it’s been stamped all over by management and
lawyers who’ve gone ‘you can’t say that, that’s no good, why’s he slagging him
off?’ We had none of that at all. We were given a completely free hand so
whatever else you can say about this movie, Hello Quo yeah but also Honesty
Quo. Everyone’s been dead straight about
everything. The fact that Alan Lancaster
about 30% into the film is allowed to say ‘but after John left, it all went
shit, we made shit albums after that’.
Normally that would get pulled straight away. But we were given a great deal of breathing
space.
Is this the definitive Status Quo documentary then?
If there’s a point in doing a Quo movie in ten years, then
we didn’t do our job. So let’s say this
is the Quo movie and that’s it done and when Rick Parfitt and Bob Young who’s
our consultant but also their best mate and worked for them and is tied in with
them both come back in 24 hours and go
‘this is the best Quo doco ever’, I go (mimes ticking) tick because who else is
going to tell me? Some bloke with long
hair and denim might tell me tonight but it won’t make me any richer and it
won’t buy me a drink… It’s nice that the
band think it’s a good doco and I think it is very honest. I like that.
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