| If you’re gonna invite Kanye West, Erykah Badu and a reunited Fugees to play your fandango, you’d better ask the right person to get it all on camera. In the case of Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, a raucous new documentary about a concert hosted by the comic in Brooklyn in September of 2004, that guy had to be Michel Gondry.
When not prepping surrealist-minded features like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the recent Sundance premiere The Science of Sleep, the French filmmaker continues to conjure up innovative mergers of music and pictures. Understandably, he leapt at the chance to film the event.
As Gondry explained in an interview last September at the Toronto International Film Festival, where Dave Chappelle’s Block Party made its debut, he first met Chappelle six months before the concert, when he was contacted about possibly shooting it.
"I liked his show but didn’t look at it very precisely until after we met," says Gondry. "When I did, I thought it was absolute freedom on TV. He told me he wanted to pay tribute to all the people he’s been listening to and been friends with for years. These are all artists who use their music to say something – they have opinions on social issues and they use their music to express them. Even in hip hop there are not so many people who do that."
In the film Chappelle jokes that, like many comics, he really thinks of himself as a musician, but is "mediocre" at both. To the director, the link between the two performing arts is quite clear.
"If you look at him onstage or in sketches, he plays very much with silence," says Gondry. "He doesn’t have to fill up every space. His timing is very musical. It’s like he will go very, very slow and then go big – just explode. And he doesn’t have to constantly put on an act. I know a lot of comedians have this fear of not being funny and you have this fear of upsetting them if they say something and you’re not laughing. Dave doesn’t try to be funny – he’s just himself all the time."
As captured by Gondry’s camera, the comic displays the same easygoing combination of charm, wit and generosity whether he’s with a marching band, a rapping busboy or Mos Def. His magnanimous spirit comes to mark the whole event. Along with giving due credit to the host, Gondry cites the choice of location – Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy neighbourhood – as a big reason why it all turned out so well.
"Some of his people suggested going to Central Park, but I said, ‘Well, if you do it there, it’ll be huge.’ We had an opportunity to bring light on a place that didn’t get light very often. We talked about Chicago, then Brooklyn, because he grew up here for awhile and a lot of the musicians grew up there. The concert started to mean something."
Another key decision was using The Roots as the house band – as a result, the show feels more like an informal jam session than a succession of superstars. "When we first started to talk to all of the performers, it was very difficult," says Gondry. "Everybody wanted to come up with their own musicians and DJs. I pushed really hard to have one house band to play during the whole evening. With an exception of one or two who really wanted to have their own musicians, most of them used the band. It’s the spirit of the concerts of Motown, where the same musicians do the whole evening, or like Booker T and the MGs with Stax. I thought they should lose a little bit of control and be more themselves. It’s not about the music being perfect –– the music should be genuine. If you just try to reproduce your album, it’s not interesting. If you have those musicians playing your song, you’re gonna surprise yourself. Everybody who agreed had a great time doing this."
That air of informality extended to Gondry’s filmmaking approach. Whereas concert films often feel rigidly choreographed, Dave Chappelle’s Block Party is looser in feel. Gondry insisted on shooting on film, not video, in order to create a greater sense of immediacy. He also made sure his camera operators stayed on their toes.
"When you look at the footage," says Gondry, "you can tell we didn’t need a huge amount of technology to capture it. The cameras were there to report the event. I tried not to have too many cameras facing the same direction – each camera had to behave as if it was only one, as if it was making its own documentary. I wanted the film to have this quality that things were exploding with energy and we’re just trying to capture it." |
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