The hottest ticket at TIFF this year was for a 40-year-old concert film of a band that broke up in 1991.
Toronto audiences Monday night were treated to the world premiere of the new, IMAX, 4K restored version of Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense, originally released in 1984.
The band members: Frontman David Byrne, bassist Tina Weymouth, drummer Chris Frantz and keyboarder/guitarist Jerry Harrison all attended the screening at Toronto’s Scotiabank Theatre and took part in a Q&A afterward with Spike Lee, who directed the concert film David Byrne’s American Utopia — which premiered in Toronto three years ago.
“I want to go on the record: This is the greatest concert film ever!” said Lee of Demme’s movie, which was shot over the course of three nights at Hollywood’s Pantages Theater in December 1983, as The Talking Heads were touring to promote their Speaking in Tongues album.
“This was more or less our tour,” said Bryne of Stop Making Sense. “It seemed like [the show] had a kind of progression to it, a story, and it occurred to us this could maybe work as a film [because it had] a beginning and a middle and an end.”
The Toronto crowd went wild for the film’s rerelease, whooping and clapping after every Talking Heads number and twice — during “Burning Down the House” and “Once in a Lifetime” — jumping up en masse to dance.
Harrison noted that the music for the original film was recorded digitally — “this was way back in ‘84, we were pioneers in doing that” — but that the newly restored version is not the same as it was. It takes the sound quality beyond what is possible to hear in the original or in the first rerelease of the film in 1999.
“One of the wonderful things is there is new technology, which meant we almost have a burden to adapt and to bring [the film] up to what people can hear now in theaters,” said Harrison, who pointed to the multi-channel audio on the 4K version allowing audiences to pick out the sounds of the individual performers, including that of late keyboardist Bernie Worrell.
“Talking Heads was such a good band,” said Frantz, “and when we had that expanded lineup [for the Speaking in Tongues tour] with Steve Scales and Bernie Worrell and Lynn Mabry and Ednah Holt and Alex Weir, they just took us into a whole nother dimension. I’m very grateful to be here tonight and to be able to watch this and to enjoy it so much.”
The rest of the world will get a chance to re-enjoy Stop Making Sense later this month. A24 is bowing the film first as an exclusive IMAX exhibition on Sept. 22 before rolling it out in conventional theaters on Sept. 29.
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