When We Were Beautiful...

An interesting view of the new documentary, this woman reviewed several movies at the TriBeCa Film Festival, here's what she had to say about When We Were Beautiful as well as her conversation with the filmmaker...

Visual flair lies at the heart of Bon Jovi documentary When We Were Beautiful. Shot by photographer-by-trade Phil Griffin, shown at Tribeca as a work in progress. His black and white photography recalls that of Anton Corbijn - and we all know how well his move from still photography to the moving image worked out. This isn't a slavish biopic tracking the band from their beginnings through the height of their success, but rather a snapshot of where they are now, both physically - tracking them through their Lost Highway tour - and emotionally, as they speak about the psychology that has kept them together down the years. Insightful and great to look at, this is sure to please fans who want to know more about what makes Jon Bon Jovi, Richie Sambora, Tico Torres and David Bryan tick but there's plenty here for the casual observer to admire as well. The only thing that I can think that may still need to be done to the film is some colour correction, since oddly the tone of the black and white seemed to shift slightly through the course of the movie.

After the screening, I asked him why he'd chosen to shoot in monochrome. He said: "I'm a photographer as well as a filmmaker and When this film was originally conceived I had taken a series of photographs of Jon in Minnesota when he was performing. And he saw one particular shot, which was a black and white shot, which he loved, and asked me to go on tour with the band so I could do more photography.

So, I joined the Lost Highway tour just after Minnesota and did a month with them on the road doing stills, all of which were black and white - they always look good like that. And then he said: 'I really like this one picture, it's me - it's a grumpy old guy who sits in the corner moaning about things. I'd like you to make a film like this photograph.' And I said: 'Well, okay, this is your 25th anniversary and as long as you allow me to expose the band like those black and white photographs, I will do it.'

So the working title of the film was 25 Years In Black And White and black and white not because of the colour but because black and white is the truth."

He went on to say he shot around nine months of footage. When asked about the 'work in progress' moniker attached to it here, he said: "In many ways it is complete but I wanted to see what people thought of it, because if they left me I would work on it for another... There's so much footage and so many scenes we could add and so much honesty in what the guys said to me that I wanted to see it on a screen and in a cinema before I said, it's done."

When asked how Jon reacted to the film, he says it was "mixed". He adds: "There were a lot of conversations about what would be included and what wouldn't be included. He felt quite exposed by some of the things that I managed to get him to say, as did Richie, and we had many conversations about that. He's a very good collaborator because he knows what he's good and and he knows what he's not good at, but he has a very big opinion about what he's not good at at the same, but if you talk long enough and hard at him he will give in, because he just gets bored.

"My final comment with some of the lines that he wanted removed from the film was that if Richie's prepared to sit on a boat with me and talk about his addictions, then you should be willing to talk about how great but tiring your life is."

He adds that he was "absolutely not" a fan of the band before he began to work with them. He says: "I think there are many pluses to the fact that I knew nothing about their history - and I didn't read anything about them either. I did a little bit of Googling about who each character was and got their Wikipedia stuff up but I wanted to go into those conversations with them not knowing much, so I could learn something."

He also says it was a conscious decision both to focus on the band themselves, not their families, and to keep their current position at the forefront, without going over the ashes of the past. He adds: "We wanted to refer to the past but I wanted this to be a contemporary look at a band that have lasted a long time and I didn't want it to be a Behind The Music because then I didn't think it would be a film, it would just be a retrospective, I wanted to hear what they had to say now."

I absolutely cannot wait for this and the book to come out and I'm jealous of all of you that got to go to the screening at the Film Festival. October can't get here quick enough for me.