EXCLUSIVE: When Power Ballad opened the Sands Film Festival in St. Andrews Scotland recently, the audience reaction was rapturous. Same with showings at SXSW, Dublin and in a limited release last week. Sending festival audiences into a lather has been a regular occurrence for writer/director John Carney since he premiered Once at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, before the $150,000 budget film won an Oscar for Best Original Song, grossed $23 million and spawned a stage musical. He got the same reaction when he brought Sing Street to Sundance in 2016.
Directors like Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese are masterful at creating indelible movie moments plugging established tunes into key scenes. But when it comes to being fluent in the language of the creation of music enough to use it as the propulsion for honest and audience-friendly storytelling moments that are best enjoyed in a communal moviegoing experience, there is no one like the musician-turned-filmmaker Carney. Except maybe Cameron Crowe, whose music bona-fides came from absorbing wisdom from top ‘70s rock bands as a teen journalist for Rolling Stone.
Each time I see a Carney-directed film, I wonder, will this be his Almost Famous, or his Jerry Maguire? I had the same feeling at the Power Ballad premiere, about a drunken night between an Ireland-based wedding singer (Paul Rudd) and a former boyband singer (Nick Jonas), each desperate to not feel like their best days are in the rearview. A stolen song and an ensuing U.S. road trip propels a comedy grounded by genuine musical moments and an understanding of the struggle to create an original hit song. He’s like a master mechanic with grease under the fingernails, making a movie about fast cars.
What the film doesn’t have is the kind of things that rule box office right now. No YouTube phenom-generated genre, or an iconic musical subject like Michael Jackson, whose controversy-free biopic is on course to top Bohemian Rhapsody en route to $1 billion in grosses. Lionsgate released and marketed that film also.
Power Ballad goes from limited to wide release today as Lionsgate opens it on 1200 screens and hopes stellar reviews and strong word of mouth hold those screens as counterprogramming. In the heat of summer movie season, is there room for Power Ballad to slowly build word of mouth and a respectable audience in the heat of summer?
I would have thought Carney’s breakthrough would have come after the 2013 Toronto premiere of Can A Song Save Your Life. The film had a strong cast, and powerful musical moments like when a songwriter (Keira Knightley) listens to a song by her singer boyfriend (Adam Levine) and can tell he’s been unfaithful on the road, and when a down and out and freshly fired record exec (Mark Ruffalo) stews drunkenly at a bar until he hears the songwriter pour out her pain onstage, armed only with a guitar. Suddenly in his head he is adding an entire arrangement to her song – we see the song come to life — and it gives both a second chance.
Buyers left the screening to huddle with their teams and run the numbers on the value of a film everybody wanted. Harvey Weinstein went right to the afterparty and charmed Carney into a deal. Weinstein promptly took a perfect title and changed it to the perfectly benign Begin Again, and whether it was because of the cash crunch The Weinstein Company was going through or because he didn’t see a hit, the movie didn’t soar. At an $8 million budget, the film did respectable business but it could have positioned Carney for better had it not underperformed stateside.
“I agree, I think the film should have done a little bit more business than it did, but I’m not bitter or sore,” Carney said. “It is what it is. I’m in film for the long term and I’m happy if the film does well, even it is after I’m dead when people acknowledge it. I’m not sure Lionsgate will love hearing this, but I’m not interested in like how the first weekend is. Tons of great movies that we love bombed when they came out, and then 10 or 20 years later, they became classics. But that said, I don’t think Begin Again is a classic movie, but I think that it should have done what, $40 million stateside or something like that. And it should be a movie that more people know. I don’t have much to say about Harvey Weinstein, and Jesus Christ, I’m the least of the people that he’s worried. But he didn’t get the movie, I think. Didn’t understand it. There were different offers at the time and we didn’t really know what we had with that film. It is a hard movie to sell because it’s like, what is it, a romcom? A musical? And a lot of the stars in it weren’t as big stars as they are now. Ruffalo is a household name. Myself and Ruffalo were cycling around on bikes while shooting that movie. A couple times people were like, “I think that’s the guy from The Hulk.” He had just done that first movie. I think we were like, “I don’t really know what to do with this film.”
This time, Carney’s got another Marvel hero in Paul Rudd, who has played Ant-Man in multiple movies including the Avengers blockbusters. His character is a wannabe rock star who fell in love with an Irish gal, swallowed his rock star dreams, content raising a daughter and fronting the wedding band Bride & Groove. Carney also has Nick Jonas in the role of the washed-up boyband singer eager for a comeback and not above appropriating someone’s work and turning it into a hit song to fuel those ambitions.
Nick Jonas as Danny and Paul Rudd as Rick in Power Ballad. Photo Credit: David Cleary
Lionsgate
In his acting career, Jonas has assiduously avoided borrowing from the fan base from the Jonas Brothers, which disbanded but is now performing again. He instead has taken roles like in the Sundance fraternity hazing film Goat, or playing a closeted MMA fighter in the gritty series Kingdom, and costarring in the Jumanji remake franchise. Jonas made an exception here right after reading the script Carney wrote with Peter McDonald. Writing and performing songs from an early age, Jonas recognized a kindred spirit in Carney.
“John is a musician, he started as a musician and music is so a part of him,” Jonas said. “It’s in the marrow of his bones so much so that there’ll be guitars sitting by the video village and he’ll sometimes just have to pick it up and play for a while. There’s a piano on set. He’ll sit down and play during lunch. He lives it, he breathes it and he directs like a musician. If by some divine inspiration, a chord progression were to enter his head, he’ll follow it and he’ll pursue it, whether it’s music or the direction of a scene. And he really treasures it. His relationship with music is not a superficial or light relationship. I think he feels compelled to serve the music in a way. And because he knows it so well and knows the world, the characters that he creates know it and he uses it in the way that [music is] intended, which is to make our lives better. I’d been a fan of his forever and when I heard about this script and they shared a log line, it was a pretty simple decision. When I read the whole script, I felt really connected to this character, not only for some of the similarities to my own journey, the bigger idea that my character is just trying to find himself after having success in a group vehicle and then breaking out on his own. I’ve lived some of those experiences and felt deeply connected to it. And then I heard the music and fell in love with that. When I heard that Paul was doing the movie, I was thrilled. I’ve always been a fan and dreamed of working with him. That first day on set was the scene where we’re in the suite together writing, jamming and drinking. And it was the perfect way to set the stage for the experience.”
The singing was second nature to Jonas. With Rudd, a lot was taken on faith after the production team eyed a video of him singing Wichita Lineman. They hoped for the best. For his part, Rudd jumped in without thinking much about the pressure to perform.
“I’m such a John Carney fan, love his movies, and I signed on and it wasn’t until just before I started, that I had a different feeling that I’d ever had before. Which was, oh my God, should I have done this? So you just close your eyes, jump in the deep end, hope for the best. And I found the entire experience to be a real joyful one, but nerve-wracking in very specific moments.”
When Tom Hanks made That Thing You Do, he labored long and hard to find just the right song that wouldn’t wear out its welcome being heard throughout the film. Surprisingly, the construction of the signature song in Power Ballad happened late in the process, with Carney providing Gary Clark the beginnings of a tune with lyrics that fit the narrative and Clark rounded it into a solid tune that has ear worm qualities but not in an unpleasant way.
The tune How To Write A Song Without You is heard throughout the film, and it came together so late that Carney hadn’t given much thought to whether Rudd could really sing, or the intrigue of Jonas tapping into his boy band past. Carney actually wasn’t familiar with The Jonas Brothers and he too jumped into the deep end with Rudd.
“When Paul came on board the film, we didn’t have that conversation,” Carney said. ”It was almost like say you’re in the movie and let’s cross that bridge when we come to it. We were down in the studio recording the soundtrack for the movie and the film was happening and nobody had really heard Paul sing. I staged this phone call with him because all of the musicians were around and with [composer] Gary Clark, and I said, ‘Is there a way I could kind of get Paul to sing on the phone and if I could then get the thumbs up from our crew, it would be fine. Paul was on the phone and we were talking about the selections of the songs for the wedding band and I was like, “I wonder, what key do you think you’re happy singing in? He said, ‘I don’t know.’ Okay, everybody is looking at me and I said, sing and we will sort it. He started singing, Wichita Lineman I think it was. I don’t think I’ve ever told Paul that I was doing this but he sang this country song beautifully. And everybody breathed a sign of relief, like ‘whew.’ I would say he passed the audition but he did not know that he was effectively auditioning at that moment.”
As for Jonas, Carney said it was only other people that were like, ‘Nick Jonas, is he not too close?’ “I didn’t know who that Nick Jonas was. I met him on Zoom and I had seen him in that movie about hazing, and from that, this was to me it was a no-brainer. I just knew that between that acting and my Zoom with the guy that he can pull this off. It was only the people who knew how big Nick was in terms of like American culture or pop culture who were a bit worried about Disney. But me and Nick weren’t remotely worried.”
Carney expects his next film will revolve around music once again. Surprisingly, he has no North Star musical movie, because his fascination with the role of music in storytelling began in a most unusual way.
“ I grew up watching movies that my parents were watching and listening to the musical score,” Carney said. “I genuinely thought, well, that is so affecting that it could only be the writer, the director, the author of the story putting those strings on because it’s working so well. And only later started to realize that actually the director very rarely, if ever, has much to say about that process.
“I was five, or six or eight, hearing these great old movies playing in our house and being moved by them because of the music. I sure as hell didn’t understand what Elizabeth Taylor was saying to Richard Burton in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf. But I did understand the music playing at certain points. When they’re both looking out the window and this tremendous score comes up, I could understand and I knew something was wrong with this couple. In so many of those great earlier Hollywood movies, the composers were so good. So many of them were Jewish exiles who had been run out, all over Europe. They would have been incredible composers in their home countries, but some of them ended up in Hollywood, writing these scores that were so much better often than the movies that they were appearing in. The brilliant classical music in 30s and 40s Hollywood movies was the thing that was giving me the goosebumps. And what melded together for me was that idea of the images and that stunning music.
“On the Waterfront, when they’re in the back of the car and all of that dialogue that I realize now, I actually didn’t understand what any of it meant when I was 12 or 13,” he said. “I didn’t know that Marlon Brando secretly had been harboring those feelings that the brother had kept him down. ‘I could have been someone, I could have been a contender,’ I didn’t really know what that meant. I didn’t even know he was a boxer in that movie, but I knew what the music was doing and it was breaking my heart. If you listen to the music in that movie, it’s just extraordinary. I have 50 examples of things that only when I became an adult and I started to realize what life really was about that I actually understood the scenes, but I understood the intention behind them from these amazing European composers that were making the music. And when I got into film, the two things just went hand in hand.”
Carney’s emergence was a happy accident. He played bass alongside Glen Hansard, who was part of The Commitments ensemble cast and would become Carney’s leading man in Once. Like that character, Carney made extra money entertaining passersby on the Dublin streets.
Peter McDonald as Sandy and Paul Rudd as Rick in Power Ballad. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Lionsgate
Lionsgate
“I busked when I was young, but in a very different way than Glen did or the guy in that movie did,” Carney recalled. “I did robotic dancing on Grafton Street to try and make money when I was a kid. And I made some money actually. It was quite a good act. I hustled in tons of different weird kind of experimental attempts to try and put movies together. I was broke when I made Once and I had had a little bit of success in television beforehand, but it had dried up and I didn’t know what my next move was. And my girlfriend was in London and I was on my own in Ireland. Fo the first time in my life, I didn’t know what was next and that was quite discombobulating. I put my money behind On The Edge, this one story that I had written that starred Cillian Murphy. It was really a good film in many ways for me because it wasn’t that far from my existence and I wasn’t faking. There’s a sense about once that it’s really cheap and cheerful and that’s how I was. We couldn’t afford to buy dinner for the crew, but we paid them whatever the minimum was and we kept it under 20 days. I look at pictures of myself and Glen [Hansard], we were skinny and gaunt and pale. It sounds ridiculous, but it’s because we were hungry and broke. So there’s very little faking it in that movie.
“I left that to make short comedy sketches and slasher movies with my friends. And I think honestly, it probably coincided with the Irish film board starting again in Ireland. It had been around in the 80s as a tax subsidy for film people and it had been broken up and it had gone away when I was young. It came back together around ’92, and so there was a little bit of money. If you wanted to become a filmmaker, you could dip into this and maybe get some money to complete a movie or edit a movie or get a camera or whatever. I would say if it wasn’t for that, I wouldn’t have managed to become a filmmaker. It gave you just enough of a taste of actually making a movie, and there weren’t a lot of them in Ireland back then.
“Because we’re not like America where there’s huge cinemas everywhere and the film industry sort of takes care of itself and has a commercial interest,” he said. “Ireland is a small country and we need subsidy. We need support and help to make movies, which are expensive. The second you turn a camera on, it’s just burning money. I think that helped terrifically in myself and other filmmakers lives. And also, you’re young, you’re 20 and there’s a fearlessness about when you’re that age. There’s like, “Yeah, I’m a filmmaker now.” And everybody’s like, “What?” And there’s some weird self-belief that you have when you’re that age and life seems like it’ll go on forever.”
I mention that Carney’s connection to the music in his movie plotlines seems genuine. We’ve all heard of the screenwriter who writes a car movie and doesn’t drive, or the computer hackers who tap a few keys and crack the CIA database.
“I’ve been watching Breaking Bad again, and you ask yourself, why is this show so bloody good? And I think there’s lots of answers to that, but the big answer for me is it’s relentless in its exploration of seeing these two guys try, fail, try, fail to become drug lords. They never just do the Hollywood thing where it’s one scene and then they’re bad guys. It never does that. It does for the drugs trade, it really goes into the failing and the comedy of failing of trying to become somebody else.”
For Carney, it’s all about the depiction of the struggle.
“I love lifting up the hood and going, “Oh, I see how this works.” This is almost as good as driving the car, seeing how it works. And I think people love that actually. I think audiences now really respond to the idea of, “I don’t need to see the finished thing because we’ve been looking at that for how many decades since the 20s? We wanted to remove the camera away and pretend it’s not there and never show a boom. If a boom might came in, it was a disaster nowadays people kind of like knowing all of that stuff.
“It seems like the struggle, whether it’s to write a song, or the struggle to become an accomplished meth dealer, it’s so much more interesting than the outcome.”
I mention that the resonance of music in his films reminded me of Ryan Coogler’s staging of the blues number I Lied to You in Sinners, which actually showed the connective tribal tissue between the roots of the blues, and subsequent musical forms like hip hop that were influenced by the music.
“I loved that scene,” Carney said. “I thought it was terrific in how it developed that idea and went further with it than anything I could have done. I love seeing how anything works. I’m not necessarily that crazy about the finished product, you know what I mean?”
