Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band, the new documentary feature starring the iconic musician and his famous bandmates, gives audiences an up-close, inside look at just how the sausage gets made as they rehearse and prepare for their first live shows together in six years. The film features intimate moments and interviews with Springsteen, as well as with longtime musical collaborators - guitarist Steven Van Zandt, drummer Max Weinberg, manager Jon Landau, and wife and musician Patti Scialfa.
It was directed and edited by Thom Zimny, the Emmy and Grammy award-winning filmmaker who has collaborated with Springsteen for 24 years. He won an Emmy for directing Springsteen on Broadway, and a Grammy for “Wings for Wheels: The Making of Born to Run,” directed Letter To You documenting Springsteen and the E Street Band recording their album “Letter To You,” and co-directed Western Stars alongside Springsteen. His other credits include The Beach Boys, Willie Nelson & Family, Elvis Presley: The Searcher, The Gift: The Journey of Johnny Cash, music videos for Bob Dylan and John Mellencamp, and HBO’s The Wire.
Here, in an exclusive interview with Post, Zimny (pictured, left) talks about collaborating with The Boss, making the film, which premièred at the Toronto International Film Festival and debuts on Hulu and Disney+ on Oct. 25, and his love of post and editing.
How did this project come about and what was the goal for you in doing this?
“It came about in a very traditional Bruce way, where I get a phone call, and there's no expectations or declarations that this is going to be a movie. The phone call is literally, ‘Drop by! The band and I are gonna get together and rehearse for the tour. Bring the camera.’ And it's the simple start of a giant adventure. And there's no set POV of what this film will be. Road Diary was one of those documentaries where I wanted to explore the 24 years that I’ve had with him with the different types of filmic tools that I could use, whether it be vérité footage, archival footage, concert footage, voiceover, interviews. All these things I wanted to play with, but it wasn't a conscious choice in the very beginning. I just went there and let the film talk to me, and captured it, and came back to the edit room and started to deal with what the dailies were sharing.”
What were the challenges of maybe making this one different from the other Springsteen projects you’ve done?
“It's a great question. When I look back at the film history I've had with Bruce, with Western Stars, and Letter To You, and all the others, the difference is, as a director, and also in terms of cutting these films, that the filmic language I was playing with was very different. With Western Stars, I was dealing with saturated color and the intensity of the desert. And then you get to the space of Letter To You, and I'm dealing with the interior studio and this feeling of an outside world with overhead POVs of snow.
“All these kind of filmic languages come from tapping into the music, the lyrics, and what story he's telling. So, with both Western Stars and Letter To You, and now also with the current film, Road Diary, I'm using Bruce and his music as a guiding force for a lot of the visual language. Road Diary became an example of using a lot of different tools, like the vérité footage having one look, but then also, and this comes from being an editor, I know the power and beauty of archival footage to evoke memory and details. And then also knowing the power of voices, as the band itself has a whole array of great musical voices. The band telling a story and cross-cutting them creates a tempo and a layer of storytelling that I didn't want to mix with Bruce, because Bruce's voice has a whole other different musicality to it.
“Bruce's voice was a written voiceover and narration. So as a filmmaker, I’m switching hats – I'm wearing the hat of a fan, but I'm also wearing the hat of a director. And then the editor pops in and the editor sees that something will change emotionally when I start to mix Bruce's voiceover with these interviews. So I keep Bruce isolated, almost as a conversational voice, a narration that really started from the early films like Western Stars, but also Broadway. I can trace language and choices and stylistic filming decisions through all these films from the start of Broadway. Because Bruce has had a conversation with his fans, and I'm trying to make films that are an extension of that. And at the same time, not doing anything filmically that gets in the way of the storytelling. Road Diary was a great example of how I was able to look at the show itself that Bruce created – the live event – and try to mimic some of the total structure, some of the emotional highs and lows. Like the concerts that have these great moments of rock and roll, these great moments of humor, and at the same time, these great quiet moments of reflection. So I wanted the movie to have that too, and I really examined what I was witnessing in the live event and tried to totally capture it in the edit room.”
How hands-on was Bruce? Did he just give you free rein? Or was he super involved in everything?
“Bruce and Jon and the conversation I've been having with them for 24 years is a combination of trust and space to create. But also the beauty of it is, by this point we have a shorthand where we can talk about the power of an edit, the power of a montage, or just some of the storytelling that we see unfold. So, he's involved in all the details, and, much like Jon, they drop into the edit room, and we sit, and we screen, and we talk. But it's not a frame-by-frame overseeing. And there was never a limitation put on what I could explore. So, with Road Diary, I was able to explore some of the changes within the band structure, like calling Steve a musical director for the first time officially, and what that meant, or some of the losses within the band with Clarence Clemens and Danny Federici, and exploring that history. The beauty of this collaboration with Jon and Bruce has been those two precious things, which is time – time to edit, time to shoot, time to take in, no forced POVs, no agendas, no written themes that have to be hit, no questions altered, no review. And trust. It's a trust that is very rare to find in film, and it's a responsibility I take very seriously.
“At the same time, with each one of these films, I'm trying to push the language of the storytelling in a way that we're not repeating. That's why Western Stars ended up with a very saturated look and stylistically was shot very differently than Road Diary. We also wanted to fight the clichés of the rock and roll film on this - the clichés of ticket stubs being ripped and talking about the amount of lights and about the production and things like that. What we ended up with, based on the experience of Toronto and sharing it with an audience, is a highly emotional film. And that's rare for a rock film that's a documentary with concert footage, but that comes from Bruce and the story and the power of the band. And also some recent songs that are being played for the first time. I tried to stay in the space and the tonal qualities of that and reflect it in the film.”
Unlike a lot of music films most of it didn’t look like a huge multi-camera shoot.
“You’re right. I like to stay clear of any of the filmic language of reality TV – so I'm not stepping into a space with multiple cameras, as then people psychologically feel that they're performing for a camera. If anything, I walked around with a single cameraman, Justin Kane, who would capture Bruce in the moment with the band rehearsing – meaning vérité. So we used a pretty small camera package of an Arri Alexa Mini and Sony FX6, but then we also go to the magical place of the concerts, which was a different visual approach, where you're working with stage lighting and natural lighting sometimes in Europe. And you're able to find that magical combination of light. And then if you linger on a face that's having a transformation because of the music in this moment, you read in their eyes and you shoot it, and you get closer to the power of what a Bruce concert feels like because you see in the person's eyes that connection. You see that reflection of where they are and their self-examination.
“That was something that cinematically I was chasing, and with the cameras and the cameramen that I used throughout Europe. I would show them examples of the kind of shooting I wanted and things I wanted to keep away from. And I had no interest in some of the clichés, like a Dutch angle. There's no staging here to try to keep up with. There’re no lights that are explosive, there's no fireworks, there's no smoke, there's no costume changes. You're left with a band that the camera itself is tapping into the pure emotional quality of. One of the earliest directions I got from Jon Landau, which was always something that I passed on to my cameraman, is that the drama will come into the space by getting Bruce's eyes – his connection to the audience, the conversation that's unfolding in the music, the conversation that's there, if you're present. So I work with a very small team. Adrienne Gerard is a producer on this one with me. Sam Shapiro is my co-editor, and Justin was a cinematographer on it. And we all worked together as this team, trying to get that really unexplainable thing, which is the magic of E Street Live, and also a sense of storytelling by shooting the interviews stylistically in a way that they felt they were sitting with you and you were conversing at a pub.”
As an editor, you must love post?
“Yeah, I absolutely love post, especially with the work I do with Bruce. I love the quiet of the edit room. I love when a film talks to you. I love to discover the magic of archive, where you piece together a voice from an interview and a moment in time that's black & white, three-quarter video, and this unexplainable magic happens. When I first started as a filmmaker, I took two VCRs and hooked them up together and made my first videos to ‘Born in the USA.’ So, I've been chasing this dream of working with Bruce's music since the age of 16. I am constantly amazed at the power of editing and storytelling, that whole process. It's a dream space. I admire so many editors and study so many films just for the power of editing. Scorsese and Walter Murch are always my go-to emotional pick-me-ups, where there's choices to be made, where there's challenges. Also, the power of sound design is another really important element.
“With Road Diary, I worked with a team of people - Gary Rizzo, Jonathan Greber, John Cooper, Rob Lebret - who come out of Skywalker, and also Bob Clearmountain, who's been with Bruce for, I believe, 40 years. Bob Clearmountain and Gary and John and myself sat at Skywalker and mixed this doc to create a sonic space that brings you to the power of E Street live. So, it's not this linear experience in sound. You're hearing the band in the pit and in this raw element of pure rock and roll. But as a film editor and a lover of that side of post, it's also about the sound design with sound effects, and the power and the EQ of tweaking archive or sound transitions. Editing and its power and its magic. I have to edit. I miss editing. If I don't edit, I will sketch all the time. I will edit all the time, even when I'm not with a project.”
Where did you do all the editing?
“I did a bunch of my editing at PostWorks in New York, and I also did a little bit of cutting in Santa Monica, in LA in an office space. The reality of it is that with editing now, everywhere I go, I bring my Avid. So, if I'm on a plane and I want to watch footage, I will be corresponding with my assistants through email and getting files sent back and forth, sketching out ideas. I watch all the dailies. I came from a school and a background where the first edits I made were with 16mm film. So, I have the tempo of the Steenbeck and love of editing from film itself, the early days. I think it's a big part of my day-to-day reality, and as a director, I use that process all the time. The two worlds spill over all the time. If I want to shoot something with a certain tonal quality, I will sketch it out on the Avid first. I don't even bother with storyboards that are, to me, stagnant. I will rough out these ideas and present them to the DP. I did that with a lot of the stuff with Road Diary. Sometimes I will work with tonal qualities of sound designed to mimic, for example, this raging bull echo. I want this sound that just gives the isolation of the stadium perfectly. So I will sketch in my Avid and pull up a history of films that I've connected to.”
What were the main editing challenges?
“The main editing challenge was how to use as many tools as possible in an invisible way - meaning voiceover, vérité, concert, interviews and so on – as these are all different cinematic languages. I wanted those tools not to seem jarring as you transitioned in and out of those different types of filmmaking. And the biggest challenge always is, ‘How can we make something that takes you outside of the clichés of rock and roll, and make it an emotional piece?’ So that's really what I was leaning towards and found through the work of Bruce and the band.”
Where did you do the grade, and who was the colorist?
“Shane Reid is the colorist on this, and Shane worked with me on Western Stars and on a bunch of the Springsteen projects with me. We did the grade at Mom&Pop in Culver City, LA. Shane has a complete understanding of how we really are never repeating ourselves. So, when you look at this and how we went through it in every detail, you can see the difference from our films of the past – such as Western Stars, and the look and the deep saturation for that, to Letter To You with the black & white and the grays and the grain that we used there. He's very connected to the Bruce world, because like Bruce himself, he's very highly-visually attuned to the power of the image and how it affects music. Also, grain and saturation, and the grading process itself is not anything that we take lightly. It's as powerful of a tool to the final mix as to all aspects of storytelling. Shane really did an amazing thing with Road Diary because he was handling a lot of different sources and a lot of different textures.”
In terms of all the projects you’ve done, where does this rate in creative satisfaction?
“I'm really honored to be a part of this film because, in some ways, it's the culmination of working with these guys for 24 years - Jon Landau and Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band! It's a film that I can only make now because it reflects where the band is at this moment. It reflects Bruce the artist, and all the questions that he has. I couldn’t have made this film five years into my journey of working with them. I needed the time to actually gain the trust, and also be around them to the degree that they would forget about me so that I could reveal this side of the process. So, I find it to be a highly emotional, engaging story that really comes from Bruce and the band.”