The Chemical Brothers: The Movie [Directors Q&A]

The Chemical Brothers have been part of dance music since forever, touring around the world with their psychedelic onslaught of a live show rattling people’s eyeballs and eardrums, leaving dazed and confused punters in their wake. And now this audiovisual blowout of a show has been put on film in Don’t Think so future generations can look back and see what it was like way back when.

The movie was directed by Adam Smith, who’s worked with Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons for 18 years, and produced by Marcus Lyall, who’s done special effects for them for the last five years has been co-directing the live show with Smith. What they’ve managed to do in the film is capture the madness and transcendence of being lost in the colors and sounds of a Chemical Brothers gig.

This sense of being dazzled and pummeled by the set is one that the Chemical Brothers long-time visual collaborator Smith was aiming for. “We wanted to transport the cinema viewer to a place where they could experience the visceral sensations that the show induces. And most importantly we wanted people to emotionally connect with the music and the show.”

The way they achieved this is by doing POV shots from the audience of Ed and Tom behind their equipment, while also setting up cameras that faced the crowds, which resulted in some hilarious and touching shots of the crowd, eyes like saucers, entranced and ecstatic. It was shot at the Fuji Rock Festival in Japan, a favorite place for the Chemical Brothers to perform.

The decision to make the audience become the cast was a calculated one. “It would have been very hard to hold a cinema audience on spectacle alone,” says Smith, “so we decided that making the audience the cast of the film would help this.” They also admitted that YouTube footage of the concerts shot on mobile phones was a big influence on the shaky, immersive style. “The thing that you got is the sense that these people were in the middle of it.” says Lyall.

But the guys did more than just look at UGC concert footage from the web, another influence was The Grateful Dead, a concert film from 1974 that featured lots of shots of the audience. It’s this sense, that the audience are as much the stars as the two guys on stage, that sets Don’t Think apart from other concert films.

“There's a relationship between the camera and the audience,” says Lyall, “that's the biggest structural difference between this and a normal concert film. Generally the mandate for a concert film is point the camera at the artist at all times, keep the camera above the audience's heads, cut back to occasional audience shots. Basically, what you're filming is the godlike performance of the star. So the camera always looks down on the audience. And so it's just the fact that Tom and Ed don't perform like that, their whole thing is that they stay in the background essentially. It's about what the audience is feeling.”

Another thing the movie succeeds in is capturing the experience of dance music—but not in a cheesy, hands-in-the-air Ibiza foam party way. The quality they manage to achieve is more transcendent and visually emotional. Images of clowns, horses, and toy robots wash over the viewer and audience, all collectively lost in a 100-odd BPM reverie. This trance-like state can be attributed to the alchemical mix of thumping beats, drugs, and the disorientating visuals, which bathe the adoring Japanese festival goers. “The visuals are what you're watching but it's the lighting that you're feeling,” says Lyall.

Structuring the visuals also plays an important part in bewitching the audience, along with establishing some kind of narrative. “I think the main thing is that there's a structure,” Lyall continues. “As soon as we get the set list we try and turn it into some sort of narrative. And it isn't necessarily important that anyone understands what the narrative is but it is important that there is some pacing in the show… We come up with a key word for each song, that's certainly how the film worked, and we make everything go toward that. The thing about the film is that a lot of the visuals are a library that goes back for years. Some of them were made for that tour, some of them are ten years old, with new things getting added to the pot.”

But what the film’s really trying to convey is an idea as old as rave culture itself. It’s about coming together and throwing yourself around and having a blast, as Lyall states when he reminisces, “It's about trying to promote people getting together—at the risk of sounding like an old raver—about trying to recreate that classic rave moment and that transcendental thing where the big track comes on and everyone looks at each other, hairs on the back of the neck and everyone wants to have a group hug at the end. I guess it's the memory of that experience that is quite central to what we're doing.”