Documentary Team Behind ‘Pete Townshend: Behind Blue Eyes' Talks in Telluride About Capturing the Amazing, Sometimes Frustrating Journey of the Who's Brilliant Architect

No one would say Pete Townshend has led an unexamined life up to this point, be it on film or in memoirs or anyone else. Yet he remains an endless enough source of fascination that fans of the Who leaped to attention when word got out that a preeminent music-documentary filmmaking team was at work on the movie that is finally arriving in festivals now as 'Pete Townshend: Behind Blue Eyes.' While it's a fairly comprehensive introduction to Townshend and his band for those who may not be total Who-heads, the film will be welcomed by the hardcore, not just for providing some heretofore unseen footage, but for interviews with the rock genius and past associates that may provide further answers to a core question the faithful continue to have for Townshend: Well, who the fuck are you? The film was well-received in its world premiere over the weekend at the Telluride Film Festival, where fest friend and part-time Telluride resident Frank Marshall has first brought many of his music docs over the years. Marshall co-directed this one with Nigel Sinclair, whom Who fans will remember for his 2007 Who dod, 'Amazing Journey.' They were complementary forces on this one, with Sinclair having first been approached to do a doc centering on Townshend's legendarily unfinished 'Lifehouse' project, before he brought in Marshall, who was not a Who lifer but made up for lost time on this project. Serving as a producer, writer and interviewer was Cassidy Hartmann. The three of them had previously worked together on docs about the Bee Gees, Beach Boys and Fleetwood Mac (and in various combinations on many other projects), so they provided one another some pure-and-easy, complementary chemistry, perhaps in the same way that Townshend and fellow interview subject Roger Daltrey always have, if that comparison isn't a stretch too far. Popular on Variety Variety met with Marshall, Sinclair and Hartmann in a house in town over the weekend to discuss the film, which they kept under wraps — even to distributors, whom they began entertaining at the same time as mountain audiences were getting their first glimpse Friday. Documentary filmmakers Frank Marshall, Cassidy Hartmann and Nigel Sinclair at the Telluride Film Festival, after premiere of 'Pete Townshend: Behind Blue Eyes' Chris Willman/Variety Fair warning: The Who is one of my favorite subjects to talk about. Marshall: Well, it became my favorite subject too. But my dad was a guitar player [prominent jazz guitarist and producer Jack Marshall], and so I grew up in a guitar family. And in the '70s, I was not a big fan of Pete's, because he destroyed guitars! But I now understand why. And I was happy to go on this journey with Cassidy and Nigel because, as you see in the movie, fascinating guy. So is it probably fair to say that you, Nigel, are the biggest Who fan here, among the three of you? Sinclair: I suppose I am, because, I mean, in 1967 at Cambridge University, I was buying the 'Quick One' album. We'd heard all the singles; they defined pop culture in the '60s. But the 'Quick One' album, which he did as a mini-opera, I remember listening to that and thinking, 'This is amazing.' So I would say I've doggedly followed the Who all my life, and eventually had the privilege to come to know Roger in 1988. Nigel, in 2007, you did a more straightforward documentary on the group, 'Amazing Journey: The Story of the Who.' So obviously recently you felt there was something to be done more tightly focused on Pete? Sinclair: I mean, these things are often happenstance. Pete wanted to do something about 'Lifehouse.' Marshall: And that's when they came to me and said, 'There's this unfinished sequel to 'Tommy.'' I said, 'Really?' I'd never heard of 'Lifehouse.' And then I started looking at what it was about, and the fact that almost everything Pete was thinking about then has happened today — connections with the audience and audience feedback, and these things he was hoping for. But it really was around 'Lifehouse,' and I think that's the original conversation that you (Sinclair and Townshend) had. Sinclair: Yes. That was the energy for us, and we came to a conclusion that it was a bigger film. … I think he's become ready to take a detached look. And in this interview, which Cassidy conducted, and we did it over seven hours in two days surrounded by his electronic equipment from the 'Who's Next' period, which was completely amazing, he just was completely open. More than anybody else we've ever interviewed, I think. Hartmann: Yeah. I mean, I think I only had to ask about five questions, and that was just seven hours. He knew what he wanted to say. He was open. It was amazing. I think we were all kind of in awe during it. … I think what we realized is, in order to care about 'Lifehouse' and Pete's journey with 'Lifehouse,' we had to care about Pete and understand Pete and why 'Lifehouse' meant so much to him. So a lot of the filmmaking process, I think, became trying to find a balance between those two things, to help the audience understand where Pete was in his journey coming into the 'Lifehouse' project, and then also explaining what 'Lifehouse' was and what he tried to do with it. That was the central challenge. This film does serve as a pretty full-service biography of Pete and his career, or as much as you can get into an hour and 40 minutes. But I was wondering if it started out to be entirely about 'Lifehouse' and the period following 'Tommy'… Marshall: I would say yes. And it's just what Cassidy said: It then led us to to explore what about 'Lifehouse' he couldn't let go of and, and why it's been his obsession right up until the performance he did in London, where he finally sort of got it out. But it was really, what was that all about? Which is what I always like to explore. How did this happen? How did these elements come together? Sinclair: And then we discovered, if you look at the evolution of Pete from art college, where he was not planning to be a musician, and always thought of the Who as a sort of fun project that would just evaporate, to his enormous success, and then you get to the failure of 'Lifehouse,' which is his attempt to resolve that conflict, as we can see from the film. Particularly that he wrote a screenplay and wanted to have a multimedia event that played to all his aspirations to be thought of as an artist, not as a rock star. And then we came to the conclusion that from the failure of 'Lifehouse' to when he left to go to Faber & Faber (as a book editor with his own imprint), you could almost draw a straight line. It was predestined that that would happen, that he'd shut the Who down and go and take a completely different job. Which I think was probably a life-saving thing for him to do, although it's not for me to say that. Then you've got the emancipation in a sense in the third act of our film, where he finds a different kind of peace working with the Who and his relationship with Roger… and comes back to 'Lifehouse' as he has. Even though he remained frustrated that 'Lifehouse' didn't come to fruition, this is a story that had a happy ending at the time. Maybe not to him, because he was so ambitious. But it's different than the story of another famous abandoned album, the Beach Boys' 'Smile,' where a lot of Brian Wilson's best stuff gets shoved away for a lot of years. Here, Pete comes out of it with 'Who's Next,' which a lot of people consider one of the 10 best albums of all time. That's not too bad a consolation prize for not getting exactly what he wanted with the full concept. Sinclair: Yeah, exactly. It's interesting, the creative process. Because each time he wanted to leave the Who, like when he talks much earlier in the film (about thinking the band would have a short shelf life), then he has 'Can't Explain' as a significant hit, which I can remember from my childhood/teenage years. And then 'Who's Next' is so powerful and initiates the use of electronica in pop music. So they're servicing that, but in the back of his head, as he told us, it was eating away at him that he didn't pull that off. While we're all thinking, 'What's the problem?' Hartmann: I think it's what makes Pete such a pure artist, too, is amid all of his commercial success, he's not thinking about any of that. He's just thinking about his intention and what he was trying to do with his art, and I found that very inspiring. Listening to some of that material as it showed up on 'Who's Next,' it's hard to believe that it was originally part of a concept where, as you illustrate in the film, he was thinking about science-fictioin concepts with people hooked up to one another via spacesuits during an ecological disaster. Sinclair: I think his prophetic description of what would be the internet is a rather abstract idea, which we only mention in the film. But it is true that all these people wired up to the central system and receiving controlled input is a version of the internet. Or probably the internet as it exists now in some countries in the world, which I won't be naming, where they actually control everything on the internet. Marshall: The thing I was fascinated to find out about was the Young Vic experience, where he wanted the (direct and tangible) feedback from the audience, which now you can get on the internet. He was totally shocked when the audience came and was just, 'Oh, we just wanna hear the Who.' It was just one of those great doc moments for me, that we had this footage and we had somebody who was there who was talking about it. His realization at the time was that 'Oh, we just have to play the hits. They wanna hear us. They don't wanna tell me what they want to hear.' It was really fascinating. Sinclair: So you have him trying to have an audience that is prepared for the interaction between him and the audience. That, nowadays, would be not a difficult thing to organize. But they didn't advertise the concerts because they were terrified they'd have 10,000 people coming. So the only people that came in were people who either didn't have jobs or teenagers who skipped school to go to it. The room wasn't full. And then he's got these computers on stage, and he's decided he'll hear a melody or an idea and he'll try and on the spot write it and put it through the synthesizer, which is a measure of his ambition and grasp of then-technology — but of course it was impossible. Hartmann: No one had seen that footage before. That was something we found from a collector. Something else no one has ever seen before is some footage you have right at the beginning that was apparently shot for a planned documentary. It's a band meeting, they're trying to figure out what to do after 'Tommy,' and it got contentious, or at least frustrating, between them. Sinclair: Some time in the late '80s, Pete realized that he had all this stuff in his archive and didn't know what to do with it, so they had some expert at the University of Exeter freeze it, which is the way you save film cans from disintegrating. And it's not been unfrozen until for this project. I tried to get it unfrozen for 'The Amazing Journey,' but I couldn't. So there is this film which literally nobody has seen. Even Roger hasn't seen it. Well, he has now. And there's an hour and a half of them talking, and Roger looking more and more — I don't know — incredulous, probably, at Pete. Keith Moon adopted the persona of actually trying to be a bit of a leader, so he keeps trying to protect Pete, saying, 'What would you like to do?' And then Pete says, 'I don't know. This has to be different. But I have no idea.' Nothing is ever unseen in this world, except actually for this, what they call the Holmshurst Manor footage, which is Roger's current house to this day. That footage literally not been seen again by Richard Stanley and the few people that made it. Pete's always seemed like such an interesting character, so full of contradictions. Fans know he came out of art school, and how high-minded he is, and how even in his solo career, he's into concept albums that can seem very esoteric. And then we also think of him as the guy who's just totally slamming through these very elemental performances and smashing the guitar. But then you have him in the film explaining that he thought of the guitar smashing as a deconstructionist art concept, so that bridges some of the gap. Marshall: Yeah, 'auto-destruction.' One of my favorite interviews is, we went and interviewed his professor from art school who really started it all. He lives in Glastonbury, and we went and sat and he told us those wonderful stories about Pete. 'The rest of the kids were just kids, but Pete got it.' Sinclair: And Pete introduced us to Roy Ascott, who's quite a deep thinker, and he's written books about something called 'The Telematic Embrace,' which I could try to explain to you. Pete came in as a man looking for something, and Roy gave it to him, which is: Art is an attitude, it's not a technical skill. I mean, that's the simple version of it. And as you saw, he was pretty out there. He was eased out of the various art colleges he went to because he was too radical. In one of Pete's classes he came in drawing with a pencil and said, 'You think this is a line?' And then he cuts his hand with a razor and takes the blood that runs that down and said, 'No, this is a line.' I don't know what that means, but Pete said he was inspired. With your interviews with Roger in the film, he seems very bemused a lot of the time, and that seems to be kind of his perpetual attitude, at least as they've settled into a certain kind of grace with each other over the years. Their relationship still fascinates people, even though, 60 years on, we ought to be understanding it by now. Was it easy to get Roger to be interviewed for a film about Pete? Sinclair: Well, it was easy to get him to do it, but then Cassidy had to do the interview. Hartmann: It was probably the most combative interview I've ever done, actually. Because he wanted to stick to 'Lifehouse.' Any questions that veered off from that, he was, you know, 'This isn't about 'Lifehouse'! I don't wanna talk about the Who.' But kind of ironically, it became I think one of the best interviews in the film, just because he has so much energy, and he's such an Everyman, and he becomes us in the film, in a way, kind of trying to make sense of Pete's intellectual vision. And he does it with a lot of humor. Sinclair: We did another interview with Roger where he was very gentle. They're very close, those two. They're like siblings. Bill Curbishley (former manager of the Who) says they started an argument when they were 16 — you know, Roger was very glamorous and attracted a lot of female interest; Pete was very thoughtful and clever and basically created all of this — and Bill says, 'And they haven't finished it yet.' Hartmann: I think we realized at some point that that relationship was kind of the heart of the film because Pete's up in his head all the time. There was that realization that Pete eventually had, that actually what Pete was trying to do to connect with the audience, he'd actually done that through Roger. And Roger was the perfect complement to him in a lot of ways. I found that just really moving, that that relationship had evolved to that point. Sinclair: I think going back to where you started about the older perspective, I think that, you know, we don't speak for Pete, but what we have observed is he has tremendous grace about his relationship with Roger. I mean, he's very thoughtful about it. Roger just lives it out, but each of them would give their lives for the other without any question. They're like siblings. At the same time, they get on each other's nerves, and we all have siblings. It came to us, and it was pretty much Cassidy's idea, the epiphany, which is what's really going on here is that once Pete was not with the band anymore and he had time to think… We had that great thing where his daughter asked him, 'Which of these things would you do?' And, having renounced being the guitarist in the Who, he said, 'I play the guitar.' And that was the beginning of the next phase of their lives together. In real life, they had a lot of stop-start in the '90s. They toured as Townshend, Entwistle and Daltrey because Pete didn't want to be the Who for a while. And then they had a series of events, and then suddenly the wheel was back on the barrow, as Roger likes to say. And I think it is true that when once it was just the two of them, they had to either make it or break it, and they made it. It was an honor to make this film for all three of us. We learned so much more about him than we thought we knew at the beginning. Even I, who've been a Who fan since 1966, trying to understand why was I always reading in Rolling Stone, 'Townshend slams the Who,' or 'he slams Daltrey.' Why is he leaving the Who? What could be wrong with that job? And suddenly you realize actually the reason that he writes 'Tommy' when he's 23, all those songs, all those melodies, all those arrangements, structuring the acoustic guitar to sound like an electric guitar, is because of all that torment in his head. I mean, otherwise, like a lot of rock stars, he'd have run out of things to do by the time he was 30 and just endlessly recycle them, you know? The three of you obviously work well together. You've done a few things together, all three of you, like the films on the Bee Gees and the Beach Boys and Fleetwood Mac, and there are some others where it was only two of you together on the same project. So your behind-the-scenes chemistry works. But going back to Frank not having been a Who fan initially, is there something helpfuol about Frank's perspective, not having been that total Who-head? Marshall: I think that's what made it so complete, is that I would say, 'Well, what's that? Why was that?' In the '60s, it was the Beatles and the Beach Boys and folk music — t hat was my thing. As I said, I was really offended because I was a guitar player and I didn't understand this (smashing). I thought it was just a show, to be honest. But now to understand where it came from, that was amazing to me. And I think the fact that I didn't know everything, and I could continue to chime in when Pete would say something and I'd go, 'Wait, explain that more.' And just understanding how the intellectual side of him created the music was much different than what Brian Wilson did or what the Bee Gees did. It was intellectual, as opposed to, 'I'm just writing a song.' Nigel knew these two guys forever, and then Cassidy, you're much younger, and so you're bringing that perspective, and then I'm the old guard from before, and I think that really made a great combination. Sinclair: And I think that curiosity of discovery, if you have somebody on the team — in this case our lead director (Marshall) — who is going through that process, it avoids that you're sort of reciting tropes and repeating things. But there's something else occurred to me, you know, while we have you: As a sort of student of popular music history, in particular having lived through it, I'm fascinated by the way that pop music — which used to be a denigrating term; now it's just a generic term — evolved from 1963 to, say, 1970, where for my generation and Frank's generation, it became our language, our claim. We claimed the Beatles. Initially we claimed the Beatles just because it was great, and then they bought Rolls Royces, and if you're working-class you thought, 'Good for John Lennon. He sprayed it yellow.' And that's why he did it, 'because I'm doing it for you guys.' And then you get to 'Well, it needs to mean something more,' and the Beatles grappled a lot with that in the last few albums. And along comes Lennon, who's a thoughtful person with his solo acts. Dylan, who was onto this in '64, but because he was folk he wasn't yet having that impact. And then Pete comes in with 'Tommy' and creates the idea of an anthemal long form piece of pop music, which is now no longer pop music. I think that probably the four of them — and add Bowie to that — really fashioned as avatars the idea that this music was so much more than just the music: it was a look, it was a point of view. It was associated with mostly left-wing politics. And if you were 22, which I was in 1970, it was who you were. You went to a Stones concert not just to hear the music, but because that was a statement — a little bit like a football team. But these others also provided the narrative, the words, the thoughts, which the Stones didn't so much, but these people did. And I think that that's just a light undertow within our film, but it's apparent that the stuff that Pete's writing was astonishing. But it was presented in a popular idiom, which is why we liked it.