Brad Beesley's film chronicles Wayne Coyne, Steven Drozd and
Michael Ivins for an incredible three decades, from Coyne's childhood to
the formation of the band and their rise to international success. Beesley has
been shooting the band since about 1992, when he shot their video for "Frogs."
At the time, he was just a film student.
"[Wayne] had $10,000, which at the time seemed like a hell of a lot of money
to do a video," Beesley recalls. "So he paid me and my buddies at the time to
raid and pillage the University Of Oklahoma art school and use all their gear
and make a Flaming Lips video and we would show the video and outtakes as class
work, even though we were getting paid for it. Everybody won."
The Lips continued to use Beesley to shoot them doing pretty much whatever.
Over the years, the footage accumulated and eventually the filmmaker decided to
compile some of it for a short.
He convinced a reluctant Coyne to let his family be interviewed and through
that, he was shown Super-8 family films of young Wayne and his brothers playing
the most violent touch football games imaginable and calling themselves
"fearless freaks." In the end, there was about 400 hours of footage to choose
from.
"That's when it hit me that I shouldn't be making a short, I should be making
a feature," Beesley says. "I realized Wayne, his life, he's been prepped to be
in a rock band or do some weird art thing, because at the age of 12 he was
taking these weird motorcycle trips with no shoes, with his brothers, and they
were playing these football games, making flyers and T-shirts, coming up with
musical scores for the films. He was destined to be a fearless freak for
life.
"So from that I went to meet Steven's family and his brother was also a
musician and his father played music. I started to realize there was this deep
story that really moved me. Going through their chronology and saying, 'Oh, they
were on Beverly Hills 90210,' isn't as interesting as finding out Steven's
brother has been in jail and hasn't seen him in 10 years and now they're going
to jam together. It's more endearing."
It's so endearing, in fact, that a scene featuring former heroin addict Drozd
graphically shooting up is even more heartbreaking when you consider his
addiction's affect on the band's music and the weight of his brother's
imprisonment.
It was a scene that Beesley was initially apprehensive about, but one that
would end up being most pivotal to the film when considering the direction
Drozd's life would take shortly after.
"Steven is such an intelligent guy, so articulate in that interview, the way
he very nonchalantly describes what it's doing to his body and his life, so it
really put me at ease," Beesley says. "At the very beginning I was jittery and
nervous. I'd never seen anyone shoot up. I honestly thought when he was telling
me all that stuff that he wasn't going to change his life. He'd sold his car and
sold all his records, all this stuff.
"But that was literally the second to last time he shot up. He got clean and
I really think it would have been a disservice to Steven and his family to keep
that segment in there if he wasn't clean right now. Now he's clean, he has all
of his teeth, he's married, has a child on the way. It's a happy ending to that
saga. But if Steven would have died or if he was still a junkie, I wouldn't have
had the heart to include it in the film. It's one of the few heroin stories that
has a happy ending."
Another focus of the film is that of Coyne's never ending Christmas On Mars
project. The singer has been shooting the movie for years and it features
appearances by Elijah Wood, Adam Goldberg and all of the band members,
among tons of others.
Despite the fact that it's said in Fearless Freaks that the Christmas film
could have been done as soon as this past June, that isn't the case.
"We probably shot 80 per cent of the film," Beesley says of the project. "I'm
now working on an A&E reality series about Texas roller derby that's sort of
inhibiting my availability. I think in September we're going to start shooting
again. The goal is to be done by the new year."
If that actually happens (and don't hold your breath), paired with their
impending new LP near the beginning of the new year, the Lips could get bigger
and more surreal than ever in 2006.
SOURCE: Chart Attack
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