Dylan South­ern and Will Lovelace: ​‘We picked up enough detec­tive skills that we could work for Bellingcat’

In mid-2017, jour­nal­ist Lizzy Good­man wrote per­haps the ulti­mate tome of the ear­ly-00s indie rock renais­sance, Meet Me in the Bath­room. A rau­cous, ultra-com­pre­hen­sive explo­ration of the bands, clubs, and pro­mot­ers which made up New York at the turn of the century.

Five years on, Will Lovelace & Dylan South­ern, vet­er­ans of doc­u­men­tary films on Blur (No Dis­tance Left to Run) and LCD Soundsys­tem (Shut Up and Play the Hits), have adapt­ed that sto­ry for the big screen. The pair hopped on Skype to dis­cuss con­dens­ing a 600-page book into a 100-minute fea­ture, the chal­lenges in craft­ing an archive-based doc­u­men­tary, and grap­pling with rock’s propen­si­ty for mythology.

What brought you onto Meet Me in the Bathroom?

Dylan South­ern: A friend gave me the gal­ley for the book, and didn’t stop read­ing it for about five hours. I love the for­mat of oral his­to­ry, the Rashomon qual­i­ty where everyone’s talk­ing about the same event from dif­fer­ent angles with the truth some­where in the mid­dle. Yes, it’s a music sto­ry, but it takes place at such a spe­cif­ic time in such a spe­cif­ic place when every­thing was about to change – tech­no­log­i­cal­ly, polit­i­cal­ly, cul­tur­al­ly – and peo­ple didn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly know that.

We’ve made a cou­ple of music docs before that were pure music docs, and I liked the fact that this gave us a chance to make a time cap­sule. We knew we could nev­er go into the foren­sic detail of a 600-page book, but what we could do was give peo­ple the time and feel­ing of that place.

Why a film and not a TV series?

DS: We had pitched it as a four-part TV series, but it might’ve been the wrong time. Before there was prece­dent, peo­ple were going ​“well, it’s quite expen­sive for a four-part TV series on a niche scene.” So, we start­ed think­ing that, if we picked the right parts of the book, we could instead cre­ate a sort of com­pan­ion piece.

What most drove the deci­sion to focus on The Strokes, Inter­pol, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and LCD Soundsystem?

Will Lovelace: For us, the first part of the book, which we cov­er, was the most exciting.

DS: As we exam­ined the sto­ries of each artist, we looked at the ones whose nar­ra­tives chimed with the notion of com­ing-of-age; indi­vid­ual exam­ples which all took place in the same city around the same time. Karen O, a shy girl who moves to a big city and cre­ates this new iden­ti­ty that threat­ens to con­sume her; clas­sic com­ing-of-age. James Mur­phy, though he’s doing it ten-to-fif­teen years late, it’s still his moment com­ing-of-age. We want­ed to find some strong con­trast­ing arcs; Inter­pol and The Strokes have a tor­toise-and-hare sit­u­a­tion with their respec­tive ris­es. These four being the most pop­u­lar bands from that era may be a part of it, but they also allowed us to present the depth of things that were hap­pen­ing in the city.

You went into pro­duc­tion when COVID hit. How did the pan­dem­ic alter your ini­tial plans?

WL: We nev­er want­ed to make a movie with talk­ing heads. The inten­tion was to use most­ly archive aug­ment­ed by shoot­ing footage of con­tem­po­rary New York to show what those areas look like now. COVID stopped that. What it did help, in a weird way, was it had peo­ple like us, peo­ple with box­es of tapes and pho­tographs and inter­views, with more time on their hands to search archive out. It also gave us time. Weeks sat in front of our com­put­ers on the Inter­net, look­ing at old mes­sage boards, try­ing to read every inter­view that had hap­pened with every band fea­tured in the film.

DS: We picked up enough detec­tive skills that we could work for Belling­cat. We’d see a pho­to­graph and, in the cor­ner, there’d be a journalist’s mini­disc play­er. ​“Let’s call up the pho­tog­ra­ph­er, see if they can get the journalist’s name, if they’ve still got their mini­discs and can send them over.”

The archive was com­ing in right until the eleventh hour. We didn’t even know footage of the first ever LCD show exist­ed until about two weeks before we had to lock the pic­ture. You’d get pan­ics that you wouldn’t be able to tell this part of the sto­ry like you planned, but then some­body would find a suit­case full of gold at the last minute. It was a very dif­fer­ent way of mak­ing a film to our pre­vi­ous ones.

Some­thing I just realised when I was putting togeth­er my ques­tions, there were no jour­nal­ists in the nar­ra­tion parts. Was that a delib­er­ate decision?

WL: Def­i­nite­ly. We just want­ed it to be the sto­ry of these artists from these artists. You hear jour­nal­ists ask­ing ques­tions, but it wasn’t peo­ple com­ment­ing on the scene.

DS: One of the things we were real­ly inter­est­ed in was the notion of mythol­o­gy in music. Part of why we open on a Walt Whit­man poem mon­tag­ing these roman­ti­cised icons from New York was that they act as a bea­con call draw­ing artists to the city. Then the meat of the film shows the real­i­ty of that mythol­o­gy, these messy com­plex peo­ple strug­gling through. Book­end­ing with the poem reprise was a tongue-in-cheek way of ask­ing ​“will these bands become the same as the ones we saw in the begin­ning? Or has the world changed so much in the inter­ven­ing years, par­tic­u­lar­ly in how we con­sume music, that it’s the last time a scene may emerge organ­i­cal­ly from a sin­gu­lar place?”

The film’s a time cap­sule of this scene, but it’s also a time cap­sule of New York City’s evo­lu­tion in the ear­ly-00s. How dif­fi­cult was it to bal­ance the sto­ry of, say, ⁹⁄₁₁ with­out trivialising?

DS: It was tough. The aim was to show that these spe­cif­ic events impact­ed per­son­al­ly upon the lives of these musi­cians, oth­er­wise it would be insen­si­tive; it couldn’t just be there because it was there. So, when we got the footage of Paul [Banks] on the streets pick­ing up leaflets and going to give blood, or when we found the Kimya Daw­son per­for­mance short­ly after 9÷11… There’s some­thing so hon­est about them, it became nec­es­sary to include.

This scene was hap­pen­ing in New York at a time where the world’s eyes were locked there for anoth­er rea­son. We’re telling the sto­ry of these bands and we found it real­ly inter­est­ing to see what that his­tor­i­cal event meant to a spe­cif­ic artis­tic com­mu­ni­ty. The sto­ry that runs for three years, but we were at pains to make sure that trau­mat­ic events didn’t just hap­pen and then stop. We go to the anniver­sary of it, that park­ing lot show in Brook­lyn, and the rever­ber­a­tions of ⁹⁄₁₁ are still there.