There are many different approaches to making a tour film that captures the life of musicians on the road. Perhaps you focus on the highs of performance or the boredom of traveling, the anonymous backstage rooms and endless planes, buses and hotel rooms. But what if you made all of that seem really fun?
Directed by Tamra Davis, “The Best Summer,” which debuts at Sundance tonight in the Midnight section, is rooted in a box of videotapes that the filmmaker found early last year while evacuating from the fires near her longtime family home in Malibu. Though they are now separated, Davis still shares the compound with Michael Diamond, better known as Mike D of the group Beastie Boys. On those tapes was footage Davis shot in late 1995 and early 1996 as the band toured through Australia and Asia, sharing bills with the likes of Sonic Youth, Foo Fighters, Pavement, Beck, Rancid, the Amps and Bikini Kill.
“I just always had a camera in my hands,” Davis, 64, said in an interview conducted earlier this week. “I identify as a filmmaker. This is normal for me to have a camera in my hand. People don’t think twice about it. It’s so unobtrusive.”
A few days before Davis would drive to Park City, Utah, with her friend, neighbor and co-producer Shelby Meade, the two were sitting on the backyard patio of Davis’ Malibu home (it survived the fires just fine) as a couple of dogs ran around the yard. When she spots a hawk flying overhead, Davis calls for one of her two sons to be sure to round up the few chickens roaming around.
“The Best Summer” brings a blast of ’90s nostalgia to the festival. Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna and Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon are both expected to attend the screening as well.
A throughline for the movie is Davis and Hanna interviewing members of the bands, asking them a standard series of questions including their favorite color, what they’re reading and what their personal motto is before Hanna gets into trickier concepts about performance and persona, seemingly figuring those things out for herself in real time.
“With Mike, I filmed so much — every time I went out on the road with them,” says Davis. “So I had tons of Beastie Boys stuff. I didn’t know I had all of that other stuff. I filmed Foo Fighters and Beck and Pavement, I didn’t know I filmed any of that. I looked at it and I see, oh my gosh, I’m so diligent: Oh, I better get Pavement. Check.”
At the time of the tour, Davis had recently finished directing “Billy Madison,” which launched the movie career of Adam Sandler. Having made music videos for countless bands, including many on the tour, Davis had also directed Drew Barrymore in the 1992 noir remake “Guncrazy” and Chris Rock in the rap mockumentary “CB4.” She would go on to direct Dave Chappelle in “Half Baked” and Britney Spears in “Crossroads,” as well as work extensively on documentaries, including “Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child,” which played Sundance in 2010.
At the time of the Australian tour in “The Best Summer,” Davis and Diamond were newly married and there is a honeymoon vibe of sunny sweetness to the proceedings. The bands play for sprawling crowds in between lots of playful hangout time.
It was though manager John Silva, who works with a number of the bands in the movie, that Davis was able to start the process of getting permissions and untangling the tricky issues of music rights. She had to show each individual band the movie in order to get their approval.
“The only people I wanted notes from was the bands,” Davis says. “I work all the time with Netflix, Paramount, whatever, like all those things. I can’t get that note and then translate it to the band. But if Adam [Horovitz of the Beastie Boys] had a note or if Kim [Gordon of Sonic Youth] had a note, I would do those notes. And I felt so proud to do their note and be like, ‘Done, you’ve got that.’ That’s why I wanted to make sure it was self-funded because I could control it like that. It could just be between me and the artist. It’s just me doing the end credits.”
Working with editor Jessica Hernandez, Davis wanted to keep the loose feel of the original footage, including how she often would shoot entire songs in a single take, her camera moving from one musician to the next as one might naturally look at them from the audience. The raw sound comes from the built-in microphone on her camera. Some additional post-production work had to be done on the interview footage, but the audio of the concert footage is, for the most part, she says, unaltered.
“It’s like watching a memory,” said Davis. “And for me especially, to watch it again was like a ‘Black Mirror’ episode of going back and somebody being like: This is what it looked like from your point of view at this time. That was your experience.”
It’s something Davis has heard from other band members after showing them the film. “Adam said it felt like I reached into his brain and pulled out that memory,” she says. “He didn’t realize there was somebody filming it. So to him he was like: How did you know that memory existed in my head?”
Davis had previously put Hanna in the Sonic Youth video for their 1994 song “Bull in the Heather” as well as in a short film called “No Alternative Girls,” so the two already knew each other. But they latched onto each other during the tour, taking on the informal project of the interviews and collecting candid and revealing moments with Gordon, Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus and others.
“It became like that friendship that you have at summer camp,” says Davis. “[Hanna] goes, I was so glad that you and I had that same energy where we were just these girls going into people’s dressing rooms, ‘OK, we’re here to interview you.’ We were just bored. We were trying to get something to do.”
It was Diamond who suggested to Davis that the end credits should say “Starring Kathleen Hanna” for the outsized role she has in the film. Another highlight of “The Best Summer” is when Hanna interviews Horovitz. The two would marry in 2006, and their moments together in the film have the energy of a rom-com meet-cute.
“She’s so bossy and she’s really forward,” said Davis. “And I’m pretty bossy too, but she’s just like, ‘Look, this is how it’s gonna go.’ And just her questions are so good. When I started to really put it together, I loved all of that. I think before I showed it to her, I texted her a couple times and I was like, ‘Kathleen, I’m making this movie and you’re all over it.’ And she was like, ‘Am I going to be embarrassed?’ And I’m like, ‘No, you’re going to love this.’”
One thing that jumps out watching the concert footage is the lack of cell phones, how the ubiquitous screens that one sees nowadays in the audience at shows did not yet exist.
“I think there’s an authenticity about it,” Davis says. “When I look at my female performers and the artists in this film, I love how they present themselves and how equal they seem with the men. I just feel that open acceptance of everybody. I know that my kids really like that world. When you see a whole video and they’re not cutting, there’s authenticity in that. Now we never have that experience of what that’s like, to have that connection with the band — and they’re connected to you as well.”
With a few possible feature film projects percolating, Davis has been at work on a memoir, currently scheduled to come out next year, that includes anecdotes of when she went to Italy as a teenager and found herself watching Federico Fellini shoot “City of Women” or hustled her way into shadowing Francis Ford Coppola as he made 1981’s “One From the Heart.”
As a woman working as a director in Hollywood in the 1990s, there were not a lot of choices presented to Davis and she often felt she had to make the most of whatever was available.
“Sometimes people are like, oh my God, it’s amazing you got to direct ‘Billy Madison,’ you got to direct Chris Rock in ‘CB4’ or ‘Half-Baked’ with Dave Chappelle. That’s what I was offered,” she recalls. “These were unknown comedians. They’d never done a feature film. As a girl, that’s what you get what’s offered. But then how do you turn that into something special? I thought those guys were the funniest people I’ve ever met in my life. So I direct like a fan.”
It’s a statement of purpose that’s guided Davis even as she’s ping-ponged between a huge amount of TV work, from “P-Valley” to the TV version of “High School Musical.”
“I become the best viewer for that show,” she says. “And so it’s not me imposing my style on them. It’s me appreciating how much I love that, what I’m seeing in front of me. And trying to get that best version across.”
Revisiting the ’90s while making “The Best Summer” has been a positive experience for Davis, one she hopes will resonate with others as well, not simply as a fun tour doc revisiting a very specific time, but also as a reminder the things can be small, personal and handmade.
“I’m think it’s exciting for young filmmakers to see that there’s a film in the festival that’s shot by one person,” she says. “It makes you feel like you don’t need to have a gigantic everything to make a movie. One person can make a film. I feel like that’s inspiring.
“And then I’m also excited as a woman of age that you can get a film into Sundance, that your career is not over,” she adds. “I always felt like, ‘Oh, you’re too young.’ Then it’s, ‘You’re too old.’ It was never the right time for me. But I felt like it was my time, so you just had to keep doing it.”
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