Culture
20 Feb 08

Three at last

Never ones to be left behind the times, Bono and chums have gone 3D with the release of U2 3D. Director Catherine Owens gives us the inside track on the historic project.

Hold onto your hats. Movies are about to get a whole lot bigger. In the frantic rush to combat internet piracy and other supposed profit-syphoning evils, Hollywood is looking to spectacle.

We have, of course, been here before. In an attempt to reverse dwindling audience figures during the ’50s and ’60s, the studios turned to such technological advances as Cinemascope and Dolby sound. Some of that era’s chicanery survives in to this day. Other developments like 3-D stereoscope, a technique first patented in the 1890s, enjoyed a golden age between 1952 and 1955 before joining such gimmicks like John Waters’ Odorama on the rubbish tip.
Like many novelties it has lurked around, resurfacing periodically in such guises as Jaws 3-D. But suddenly, with the added benefit of polio vaccinations, it’s the fifties all over again. A coterie of esteemed directors including Peter Jackson, Steven Spielberg and James Cameron are currently cranking out 3-D projects. Disney are developing their own digital 3-DT technology and will reissue Toy Story in October, 2009. For the moment, however, Irish filmmaker Catherine Owens and her co-director Mark Pellington have beaten them all to the punch.
U2 3D, her spectacular concert film of the band’s Vertigo tour in South America is the first live action film to be shot, produced and exhibited solely in 3-D. A winning combination of the band at their most spirited and uncanny hyperreality, it comes to Irish screens this month and looks set to be the movie event of the season.
“It really feels the dawn of something,” says Catherine, who alongside her musical collaborators is quite the 3-D evangelist. “I love that strange sensation when you’re really sure if that arm in front of you is somebody at the concert or somebody in the cinema.”
US audiences appear to share her enthusiasm. At the time of writing a second 3-D concert film, Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: The Best Of Both Worlds has broken February box office records by taking $31.1 million over the traditionally lean Super Bowl weekend. The U2 film, however, has been made for “experimentation, not profit.” It will only be screened in 3-D theatres and requires the traditional polarised glasses. Catherine, for her part, is thrilled to have the ‘competition’.
“What’s fantastic about 3-D is that you can watch our movie and watch the Hannah Montana movie and they’re completely different,” she says. “And the next person who makes one will do something completely different too. Every time you see 3-D it’s going to be an incredible journey. Our film is the U2 journey.”
Catherine’s own journey with the band dates back to the heady ’80s Back then, as the bassist for all-girl punk outfit Boy Scoutz she was managed by another U2 confederate, the artist Steve Averill. There were, however, plenty of other connections among the Dandelion Market scenesters.
“I’m sure somewhere in your archives you’ll find the terrible evidence,” laughs the director. “At that time in Dublin everybody had a band. When you went to gigs that was your price of entry. And everybody knew everybody and was milling around No Romance, the punk shop or the Dandelion Market. My brother was managing The Virgin Prunes. Steve Averill was managing us. So around that time I first met Adam. And when I went off to college I’d see U2 whenever they came up. So we just kept our little thing going. I did some painting for their rehearsal room for The Unforgettable Fire. Then I was approached to work on the ZooTV tour and we’ve been working together ever since.”
She has, in that time, amassed a remarkable portfolio. Following graduation from the University of Ulster she left for New York in the days when such noted East Villagers as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol still roamed the earth. (“It was the centre of the art universe,” she notes. “Pizza on 8th Street.”) Her installations have enlivened gallery spaces in that city ever since. You will know her however from her work on such aesthetic extravaganzas as the PopMart tour. For all giddy spectacles she helped create during U2’s high postmodern period – the giant lemons, the Travants hanging from the ceiling – Catherine claims the Vertigo tour was even more of a challenge.
“Even though we trying to make it look simple it was certainly the most difficult,” she says. “We did a very complicated fog projection of the Declaration Of Human Rights. Then the first 3D element we worked on was the image of a face projected on fog. We wanted it to hang in the air like a ghost in the machine. But that was a nightmare to orchestrate. The air conditioning kept blowing the fog.”
Filming the tour in 3-D was something else again. Fortunately, U2 were willing to go to extraordinary lengths to achieve the movie’s almost eerie lifelikeness.
“When you’re looking at the film you’re looking at sometimes four or five different layers. They ended up buying a company in Belgium to get the necessary software. We sometimes have four or five 3-D layers stacked on top each other. It was no small expense I can tell you.”
Such dedication to aesthetic is, Catherine says, typical of the band. If anything, she insists, they grow more receptive to new ideas. They are, however, particularly enthusiastic about this latest venture.
“Just after the tour ended I was talking to Bono,” says Catherine. “And he was genuinely excited. He was saying ‘Can you believe what we’re doing? Can you believe what we’re seeing?’ Let’s promise that this is only the beginning of a whole new phase.”