-Hi Mike, welcome to Smashing Time, i think that we must start from the beginning could you talk a bit about the genesis of the project, when you have decided to film the Love's story?
We decided to try and make the film in 2002, not long after Arthur Lee had come out of prison. He'd been released and he was touring a lot, and was playing some great gigs, and I just thought someone should try and tell his and Love's story. They were a great band, but also, they were a really interesting band, and for a number of reasons they had a sense of mystery about them that other band's didn't have, as they'd always been a little bit under-documented. We'd never tried to do anything like it before, but we got in touch with Arthur's management, then spoke to Arthur about, and eventually after about 2 years of trying managed to persuade him to do it.
-What's your relationship with Arthur Lee before the film, you were a long time fans or a sort of newcomer ?
Love had been one of my favourite bands since I first heard them when I was about 16, so I'd been into for them for years before we thought about making the film, but we would have never tried to make
the film if I didn't love the band in the first place.
-Talking about Love’s sense of mistery, in your opinion which sides of the band’s history are more intriguing and why ?
I suppose the music the most intriguing thing about Love, its really unusual and doesn't sound like anyone else. Also there's something quite sinister and dark and disturbing about it, its not always specified directly in the lyrics, but it still gives off the impression that all is not well in the world, which at the time when it was written (Summer of Love/Flower Power etc), probably set them apart from a lot of other bands. On top of that, as a band they were quite mysterious, they didn't seem to do loads of press interviews or TV appearances or anything like that, so not a lot was known about them as people, we only really had the records.
-What’s about the making of the film? It was a difficult task to organize all the material, I mean the interview, band’s footage and stuff you have worked on a sort of storyboard or script ?
Organizing the interviews was OK, we filmed about 30 hours worth of interviews, so it took a long time to bring it down to the right length. Basically what I did was put everything into sections - probably about 10 sections, so for example, any interview footage talking about "Forever Changes" would be grouped together, then I'd work through it and gradually reduce it and put it in some kind of order where I felt it told the story of what happened, then would try and piece together the individual sections so that the film as whole flowed properly. Certain bits we're easy enough, some took a long time before I was happy with them. Also, you realise you can't neccessarily cover every single bit of the band's story. There were lots of really good bits of interview footage that (though interesting) just didn't fit in with the film, so you end up having to leave out bits you really like.
Footage of the band was difficult, just because there wasn't very much footage of the original band, there's no live footage of them and they only ever made 2 TV appearances where the footage has survived, so archive material was really thin on the ground. Fortunately I think the interviews of the band members are interesting enough to hold the attention, but it would have been nice to have had a bit more choice!
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