26 EVIE
E VIE
The first pieces of footage we shot started with the guys as they goofed around in the dressing room working out any preshow jitters. From empty seats, I filmed sound check. Preshow, I’d perch among the road cases and capture them joining in a sort of pregame huddle.
Fred would often orient them to their location before the show with signs like R EMEMBER , YOU ARE IN CHICAGO TONIGHT .
One by one, they would each run up the ramp to the stage, while Carter hung back for a few moments longer.
Bouncing from one foot to the other, he’d wink at me and flash an excited grin before disappearing through the stage door.
I’d hear the crowd roar and I’d smile, catching gold on film.
At night, we’d file out, the six of us with Fred in the lead, into hotel lobbies or onto the bus, traveling throughout the night.
Cities began to blur from one to the next, and I was in a state of mind so foreign to me that I could barely remember a previous life.
We captured the press, asking the same questions over and over again, repeated in each city, to show the banality of the promotional machine—the way it stole just a little bit of the soul while at the same time bringing the music to the world.
(We didn’t realize that Radiohead was doing something similar at that time with Meeting People Is Easy , so maybe it wasn’t that original, after all.
That’s a great documentary, but I could barely watch when it came out; it cut so close to the quick.) This was the vision we created for the film—these four boys becoming something greater than their individual parts while trying to hold on to the core of who they’d always been.
I learned about Jacob one night in those early days. Carter rarely spoke of his brother and always seemed to be running away from a past that felt like a dark shadow.
Alex and I had snagged a couple of beers, and the two of us were lounging on a picnic table at the edge of a backstage lot. Somehow the conversation turned to Jacob.