Interview

The beloved All Tomorrow's Parties festivals have earned a reputation as the premier gathering for obsessive indie music fans. Now ATP has the concert documentary its fans deserve, simply called All Tomorrow's Parties. Jonathan Caouette, with a crew of 200 festival-goers-turned-camera operators, captures the frolicy vibe of the ATP getaway, mingling performance footage with off-stage antics, elliptical banter, and poignant moments of sincerity. Caouette, who made Tarnation, the surreal 2003 documentary about his childhood, draws from Cassavetes and Quadrophenia and uses the festival and its culture to tell a story about youth, nostalgia, and millenial expressions of tribal recreation. The end result isn't so much a collection of performances by some of the bands that have played ATP, but an ode to their moment, fleeting as it may be. Below, he explains some of his choices.


ALEX SHERMAN: This movie took hundreds of people to make? Sounds epic.

JONATHAN CAOUETTE: The amount of footage that we got was unbelievable. Like 800 hours. I never want to make another movie like that again, where you have too much content and too many choices. We really had no premeditated notion of what we were going to go for. Most of the people who did this were not professional DP's or videographers. They were just holding cameras.

SHERMAN: A lot of it reminds me of the audience scenes from the Woodstock documentary.

CAOUETTE: Woodstock has always been one of my favorite docs ever. Any film that has to do with a particular subculture is hopefully going to be pretty strong and honest in terms of seeing them as a reactionary component to the current state of times. People from this particular world or subculture are just that. They seem very hopeful to me.

SHERMAN: Like a tribal gathering.

CAOUETTE: Yeah, it feels like you have stumbled upon a big three-day event for a cult where music is the god.

SHERMAN: The scene with Grizzly Bear performing by the sea is really evocative of that experience. How did that come together?

CAOUETTE: I saw them outside one of the bars at ATP and said, "Hey, would you like to play this song on the beach." I had the Who movie Quadrophenia in my mind, the scene where all the mods are screaming on the beach.

SHERMAN: It's wonderful.

CAOUETTE: It wasn't really our intent. You never know what's going to happen. [But] it's almost like, "Here we are, a group of misfits on the beach making our own world." I think that's what ATP is–a bunch of wonderful misfits getting together to celebrate the music they love.

All Tomorrow's Parties will screen November 13 and 14 at IFC Center in New York and in Chicago on Novemeber 20. It will be available on DVD and for download November 24 from www.warpfilmstore.com.