CHAPTER 75

Author: You were filming half the time and Gary Streiner was filming half the time?

Christian: Yeah. This is really … This to me is the essence of why this film … There’s a bunch of reasons I think it works. I had his trust. And I’m not sure he would like me saying this, but I think he used Gary and I as a crutch. Because he was quietly terrified about going into clubs by himself. And we were a little bit of a buffer for him. Because it allowed him to just have his buddies with him and kind of defend himself from a little bit of the need to directly engage with the community. But the most important thing about this film and its success to me is I had the most famous man in America and I had to present him in a way that people would accept him as a regular guy. Meanwhile he’s flying around in private jets, he’s worth, you know, $400 million and he’s got houses all over the place and the biggest collection of Porsches on the planet and it’s not an easy task. And so we made the decision that we would shoot with these prosumer cameras and look like a couple of bozos, and never really kind of present ourselves as a flashy professional operation. So Gary and I made that decision very early on. So we shot it ourselves. At one point I clipped a wireless mic to Jerry, early on in the process, and he said, ‘This is not a film, this is my life.’ And he actually got quite frustrated that night with the fact that he was wired.

Author: Where was that?

Christian: I think that was … Oh goodness I want to say it was the Cellar. And you’ve been there, you know, this is not a place of polish. This is like … This is like, you know, it’s the most organic thing a building can be.

Author: So you think in the Cellar or in the Olive Tree above it you were clipping a mic to him and he objected to it, he said, ‘This is my life.’ And did you take it off him?

Christian: He wore it once and he never wore it again. Yeah, he went up on stage with it and he just wasn’t happy. He wasn’t happy. So that was …

Author: I was just going to say, you named a kind of camera?

Christian: Prosumer. As in it’s a professional consumer camera. It was the Sony TRV 900. It was shot on mini-digital video tape and the footage was … We were very, very lucky. We had this genius who made the film look like 16mm. We tested multiple conversions and this guy’s version of it was like fifteen times better than anyone else and it kind of saved us.

Author: And some of the critics were unhappy with how the film looked.

Christian: Fuck them.

Author: I wondered if Jerry ever said anything about that. Did he ever see any of the footage and say, ‘Why aren’t you using …’

Christian: Oh yeah, he was very much involved, and I think that’s the point of it. They kind of missed the point of it. Sound was tricky. We actually ended up with Frank Morrone, who is like this multi-award-winning mixer, to mix it because we had to dig, dig, dig to get the sound to be … But the point of it is that it looks that way very deliberately because you see Jerry as a real human being. You’re seeing all these guys as real human beings.