![]() Presumably writing that in the script is the easy part, and actually realising that soundscape is a whole other challenge? We had Bob Yeoman, the DP, shooting on two Super 16 cameras, but we purposely kept him out of the rehearsals so he never really knew what was coming – he just had to get it.Įarly on, there’s a key image in this giant close-up of an ear, because to understand Brian’s creative make-up we need to hear what he hears. So we hired real studio musicians, gave them real lead sheets, and Paul had utterly ingested the Pet Sounds Sessions box set to the point where Brian’s studio banter was just inside of him and he was channelling it. But it also came from the documentary work I’d done in the 90s, that feeling that something’s actually happening and you’re trying to capture it in a dynamic way. No VH-1 in those days, so it was, like, really sweet when you got a look in on the inside. Did you go back and look at stuff like Let It Be or Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil, where the camera’s battling to capture that moment of creation?Ībsolutely. Here’s someone with mental health issues, who’s open to being hurt and taken advantage of, yet it was precisely that emotional openness which made him such a great artist in the first place.Īnd yet the 60s material is where the film somehow establishes its credibility, especially in the studio scenes. That seemed a good way of getting into it, and since you can’t do Brian Wilson without exploring Pet Sounds, those were the two eras Oren Moverman, the screenwriter, and I gravitated towards.Īs the whole process gathered pace, I was really intrigued by the whole ‘creative genius’ aspect – where he got his musical ideas from, how he developed them – but however cool that was to explore, the heart of it was in the 80s. ![]() Here was this odd, quirky guy she found really appealing, but only later does she discover it’s Brian Wilson only later does she discover all the stuff that’s going on with him. I guess it was meeting Brian and Melinda, who’re still together, and hearing how they met. Was there a key moment when you began to see your way through it? If you just end up with a parade of celebrity scenes, that’s so much harder it becomes too much of a different world. ![]() And I was never really interested in the celebrity side of it I wanted to get intimate with the guy, feel it as he feels it so that the audience could relate to him in their own way. With Brian, there was so much trauma in his life, so many different periods, it felt that if we tried to do everything we’d end up in a mess. I don’t mean to do biopics down, but sometimes audiences expect you to hit every beat in that person’s life. Were you able to crack it precisely because you opted not to take the conventional narrative route? The notion of a Brian Wilson biopic is something that’s been doing the Hollywood rounds for a while. I sat down with Pohlad, a softly-spoken and gentlemanly Midwesterner, on his recent visit to the Edinburgh Film Festival.īill Pohlad (left) on the set of Love & Mercy (2015) Here John Cusack gives a bravura performance as a sweet-natured but evidently damaged pop recluse who’s eventually rescued from the clutches of his enabling yet somewhat sinister psychologist ( Paul Giamatti in Mephistophelean form as the late Dr Eugene Landy) by Elizabeth Banks’s car dealer Melinda, the latter captivated by the unusual behaviour of a walk-in customer not knowing who he is – or what baggage he’s carrying.Īdeptly flitting back and forth across the years, switching from documentary-style in-studio footage to rather more measured coverage of Brian’s 80s travails, and even switching perspectives from Banks’s sympathetic outsider perspective to a more interior take on Brian’s eventual self-realisation, the result is a film which cannily finds its own distinctive form as it goes along, confidently dispensing with much biopic cliché en route. However, he is clearly however tuned to a station which isn’t on anyone else’s dial, and the legacy of his subsequent psychological flame-out can be seen in the film’s interwoven later material. In the earlier scenes, Paul Dano incarnates the youthful Brian, who eschews the pop formulae of The Beach Boys’ harmonised paeans to cars, girls and the California surf to follow his own unique inner voice by crafting the ornate arrangements and achingly exposed emotional maturation of the classic Pet Sounds LP.
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