LIVE FOREVER - Movie Q&A with John Dower and John Battsek
LIVE FOREVER Q&A with John Dower and John Battsek
Q: I gather that if you hadn't got "the big three" as it were, you wouldn't even have gone ahead with the documentary - for you that was integral to doing it. If so tell us about getting them all to appear in the film.
JD: When we'd only got one of them I was very much willing to press on and do the film but that was when I was working back in car boot sales and John Battsek said no we've got to get all three. We got them basically by stalking them really, it took a long time. We made a pact at the beginning that we had to get what we identified as the big three; Pulp, Oasis and Blur. We got Noel first and were still waiting on the other two and because it had taken us a while, I had gone back to working in car boot sales. John (Battsek) was a restraining influence, he said we needed all three so we did.
JB: It did feel to me in order to be able to make a film on this scale that we did need the key three. I also new that the process of trying to get all of these people to cooperate and be in the film was going to take a long time, so it was just a question of being as patient as we could bear to be. However, as John Dower says, when you're making a film like this it's hard to be patient because, of course it's how we make a living and the sooner you get making it the sooner you can draw some sort of salary which, means you don't have to do car boot sales.
The process of getting people like this for a documentary is a skill I'm not remotely proud of. You have to be able to crawl unbelievably, grovel spectacularly and generally throw yourself at people's feet begging, because guys like these have no real incentive to be in a film like this - when people like Damon, Noel and Liam put themselves in front of a camera they set themselves up most of the time because the majority of people are there to take a pop. So I had to convince their managers that was not what we were about, and then convince them, which takes a hell of a long time.
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