There’s “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb,” and then there’s “How to Sufficiently Interview Someone Whose Work You’ve Spent Countless Meaningful Hours with While Over Zoom to Promote a Film About Themselves, All Inside of Eight Minutes.” Who knows what number among the hundreds of thousands (millions?) that have attended U2 concerts in the last 45 years would sell an arm and leg for limited time of any kind with Bono, whose odd mixture of talent, sincerity, and absurdity have left an imprint on fans that goes well past the standard rockstar glitz and glamour.
My own opportunity arose via “Bono: Stories of Surrender,” Andrew Dominik’s cinematic rendition of a one-man stage show that itself condensed Bono’s compelling, self-effacing memoir “Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story.” Those who read that book will recognize many stories captured herein, though they’ve been jumbled around, reanimated by Bono’s buoyant presence, and punctuated with stripped-down renditions of classic U2 tracks.
For whatever that could suggest of an ego trip, it’s a proper experience: Shot in black-and-white by David Fincher’s regular DP Erik Messerschmidt, “Stories of Surrender” looked and sounded nice at home — and could really be something on an Apple Vision Pro, where it begins streaming in 180-degree “Apple Immersive Video” on May 30 — though those at Cannes will have the rare opportunity to see and hear it on a grander scale. While I can’t wager what “Stories of Surrender” might mean to a U2 agnostic, this acolyte found it effortless (but not-insubstantial) viewing.
Zooming from New York into Cannes, I found the legendary musician — sunglasses obviously on — offering a straight-out-the-gate greeting.
The following interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Bono: [Points at camera] Chin, chin, motherfucker.
IndieWire: Hi, Mr. Bono. How are you?
Mr. Bono to you. [Laughs]
We could go with Paul.
No, I like that. I really like Mr. Bono. Herr Bono.
Monsieur Bono. We could just do this for eight minutes — we could just riff.
Would love to.
That’s the dilemma of super-fast encounters with people you admire.
Speed-dating, Nick.
These are the challenges that we face, but it’s a good challenge.
It’s an artform, I’m told, to a person who doesn’t do full stops or commas or even paragraphs [Laughs] that well. This might be tricky for you, and I apologize upfront; it’s certainly going to be tricky for me. But I have a number of friends who are great journalists, and the art of compression is one I’m in awe of.
I come to you as something of a co-star, because I was in the crowd for the filming of this movie.
Oh, wow.
I spent hours watching you do different takes, waiting between set-ups, singing along when the time came. It was also interesting watching it as a complete, edited piece — it’s seamless. I can’t remember what was cut out, except when you broke into an Elvis impersonation and did “Heartbreak Hotel.” Do you remember that?
I don’t, but I remember there was some tequila involved — oh, no, it was whiskey. I remember doing a Ramones thing. Yeah, no: It’s all a bit of a blur because it might have been the same day that I say goodbye to my father five times. [Laughs] Derangement of the senses, as it were.
It felt deranged being in there. I wonder what it was like being a performer with an audience that’s, let’s say, “in on the joke” — being directed to react on the third take of a song or fourth take of a joke as if it were all fresh. Does it affect you much as a singer or actor?
It’s tricky to undo surprise. For someone like me, it’s more than tricky — it’s unsettling. But once the interweb — or whatever they’re calling it these days — happened, suddenly, to surprise your audience became almost impossible. So artists started to become human jukeboxes and just change their sets every night to create that sense of surprise. But I learned through this process the power of a script, and that actually the exact same words, the exact same tempo — actually the exact same key — can mean something completely different from one night to another. I had this confirmed before I went into “Stories of Surrender” with two copies I have of Frank Sinatra singing “My Way” — one from his late 50s and one from his late 70s. Same arrangement, same key, same text, and one is an apology and one is a boast. It left me in awe of interpretive singing.
I guess Frank knew what every great actor knows: that you can, somehow, suffuse the same line but with where you are at and where your emotion is at. The hardest bits for me were actually when there was no audience at all and I was just left on my own; Andrew wanted it that way. So I don’t know how many days we did just on our own, and he was reminding me: “You think the audience are close in this theater, but they’ll never be as close as this lens. And that lens will know if you’re not telling the truth more than any of these people who are either a) fans of yours; b) curious; c) just tourists coming to see the sight.” That was interesting. So I had to get closer to the text. Yeah.
There’s a really rich history of U2’s music in cinema — my own favorites are the Passengers songs in “Beyond the Clouds.” Are there any that make you especially proud when you see them?
Probably my favorite U2 song is from Wim Wenders’ film, called “Faraway So Close” — a song called “Stay.” And on the Passengers album there’s “Miss Sarajevo,” which features in “Stories of Surrender,” but “Your Blue Room” is… yeah. It’s very special. We just revisited that album in conversation with Brian Eno, who was our guide on those. We went in and spent some time in the studio over a period, and we’re straight back there.
U2 is this odd combination of… it’s this dialectical thing between experimentation, innovation, trying to get to feelings — more than stances, feelings — that haven’t been felt, and sort of connecting. It’s this almost contradictory impulse. David Bowie had it, too. It’s like: He wanted to be Picasso [Laughs] and he wanted to be Elizabeth Taylor. And when he was completely, equally driven, you got all this incredible music. That’s my drug of choice, really: music. I always want artists to be somewhere at the center of that contradiction. The Beatles’ best work is: They’re still trying to communicate with the best people, but they’re also trying to push the artform to its elastic limit.
For me, “Stories of Surrender,” the elastic limit might just be to make people laugh, and to be able to take off my armor — this sort of machismo that Irish people go around with — and just talk about my life as a little opera. And that felt somewhat daring and somewhat, actually, experimental. Sometimes we can hide in the experimental. This was more exposure for its mundanity, actually: The kitchen table, the four chairs — Edge, Adam, Larry, Ali — the operating theater, the hospital bed where I say goodbye to my father, “Krapp’s Last Tape,” black-and-white. I managed to be both really pretentious in the first five minutes, which I’m really proud of, then pantomime. Stuff from avant-garde to fucking panto.
I think Apple is going to set off a device in my Mac that kills me if I don’t end this conversation right now, but —
Publicist: Thank you, Nick.
No, no — hold on a second.
Well, I just want to say thanks. Having spent so much of my life listening to your music, these minutes were valued.
I feel a little more useful now. Thanks, Nick.
Whatever I can do to improve Bono’s day.
Thanks, Nick. You’re a beautiful man.
