It’s Monday again, so random!
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Today we have rock legend and now also leading man Dave Grohl telling us all about the new Foo Fighters’ feature-length film Studio 666. He also fills us in on co-writing the recent Liam Gallagher single, the Foos touring plans and why he calls Lionel Ritchie the Muffin Man.
Enjoy, see you Wednesday,
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… Dave Grohl
Foo Fighters have long been one of the world’s biggest rock bands but with the release of Studio 666, which came out in cinemas on Friday, they have a go at cracking Hollywood too. Based on a story by Dave Grohl, the film is a horror comedy that sees the frontman become possessed as the Foos record in a haunted mansion, savagely disposing of some of his bandmates on the way. It’s great fun, a homage to the band feature films of the sixties plus added gore with an amusing turn from Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Jeff Garlin as the group’s manager and a cameo from Lionel Ritchie. Niall was supposed to meet Dave in London to talk about it, but Storm Eunice put paid to that idea so they caught up a few days later on the phone instead.
Hey Dave, how are you? I was looking forward to seeing you but the storm ruined it.
Oh my god, I mean, listen, I grew up on the East Coast in America. We’re used to hurricanes, but there’s a fucking season when they happen so we’re usually prepared. I don’t know about your random storms! God, you guys got walloped, it’s fucking crazy.
Yeah, I’m a few fence panels down.
It’s crazy. We packed our bags and sat by the phone waiting to hear if the flight was gonna happen and it was delayed and delayed and delayed and then finally we went down to the airport, got on the plane, and sat there and took our shoes off and had a glass of wine, ready to go and the fucking pilot comes over the PA and says “sorry, the parking brake doesn’t work.”
Argh, no way!
So we had to go fucking home and I had another night of sleep, woke up, sat by the suitcase and waited and then eventually we just had to call it.
You should’ve been at the film’s fancy premiere. What did you do instead?
What did I do? Well, more fucking interviews. I mean, the past three years, you don’t need an aeroplane to do an interview anymore so I kept in the game, wrote a little bit of music. I’m working on a release for the band in the movie, Dream Widow. I’m making their ‘lost’ record at the moment. I have about three more days to finish it. It’s good, it’s fun.
Is it freeing when you’re writing under fictional licence?
Oh, absolutely. Plus I get to release my inner thrash metal child. I grew up listening to punk rock and thrash metal in the early 80s, mid 80s, and I have a real soft spot in my heart for old school bands like Venom and Slayer and Testament, Exodus, all those bands. I was really into that shit when I was a kid but I’ve never been in a band that plays that type of music so when I go into the studio by myself and I record these things, it’s almost therapy, I’m finally getting it out of my system.
Is there some parallel universe where you ended up in the thrash metal band?
Well, I’m glad I didn’t, as much I love it. I think I love my Foo Fighters a little bit more.
Congratulations on the film, it’s a lot of fun. How did you feel when you got to the end of it?
Well, it was a long process. We started filming the movie without realising the magnitude of the project, before the pandemic hit, so this goes back three years that we started working on it. It’s incredible that we kept it a secret for so long. We filmed for about five weeks and had a few days left when we had to shut down and then took about six months off, came back to production with the new guidelines and the new regulations, finished the film, and then just moved on to the album and touring and the What Drives Us documentary and my mother’s documentary and things like that. So I almost forgot we made a fucking movie, there was so many other things going on. Someone would say, ‘oh, there’s a new edit of the film’ and I’m like, ‘Oh, we made a fucking horror film, I forgot’. I saw it on the big screen for the first time last week and it just blows my mind. Beyond anything, it just amazes me that we accomplished something so huge and so ridiculous. I’m proud, I have to be honest.
You really get to utilise your expressive eyebrow flexing in close-up, they’re the star of the show.
But they’re usually very happy eyebrows – if the one goes up, then you know there’s a problem.
Was there anything that surprised you about the whole process of making a film that you didn’t realise before?
The patience, to be honest. I consider myself a patient person but I do run life at an exceedingly high rate at all times so sitting around and waiting for something to happen is not my style. I appreciate and understand why this needs to be when making a movie, but I’m a bit too restless for that, let’s just say that. But first of all, I was so grateful for all of the people that came to work on a movie with us, these are legitimate professionals that were asked to come work on this project basically out of generosity, you know, we didn’t have $100 million budget like some of the films that these people work on all the time. But they came to do it because they knew it would be fun. And it fucking was. Having made music videos for the last 26 years, I know what it’s like to assemble a production team and make something in a short period of time, maybe two or three days. But for a six-week full length feature film production, it’s an entirely different beast which I have a whole new respect for. It’s a fucking process, man. I mean, it took three years.
Whilst you were doing it, could you see the bigger picture?
Yeah, knowing the script and the direction of the film, you could almost envision the movie long before it was cut and coloured and finished. While we were making the film, I knew which lines were going to work well, I knew which scenes were going to shine. I mean, I’ve had to edit fucking documentaries for years and you just feel those moments when they happen, so I had a pretty good idea of what we were accomplishing. I just didn’t imagine the magnitude of it. I mean, when I saw the final cut with the CGI and the thunderous fucking surround sound and the big screen, that really blew me away. I did not expect it to be the full-length feature film that it became, I thought we were gonna make some low budget, really quick, run and gun slasher flick. I did not imagine it was going to be an actual movie.
And it does feel like a film, rather than an an extended music video.
Absolutely. Making music videos is so much fun because it’s almost like making a silent film, there’s usually no dialogue so any acting is very much physical, almost slapstick comedy, exaggerated gestures, just to trying to convey something without words. It’s really fun to make those, obviously we’ve had fun making them for a long time, most of them are ridiculous. But it pales in comparison to making a movie like this, and once we started seeing the dailies, once we started seeing the rough edits come in, we were all looking at each other like, ‘oh my god, we made a fucking movie’. I think it took everybody by surprise, for sure.
Did any bandmates have to be convinced more than the others?
At this point, any ridiculous idea that comes out of my mouth, they just get behind me and march into battle. I have a very specific way of saying no, it’s very passive, it’s not the most direct or best line of communication, if someone has an idea and I say, ‘Yeah, that could be cool’, that means no. And they know that at this point, I can’t even use that fucking trick anymore. They know that that means no. When an idea comes out of my mouth, and I seem my usual, overly enthusiastic, eager self, they start to strap on their boots because they know they’re going to have to march with me, it just happens that way unfortunately. I don’t think anyone disliked the process, maybe a few people felt a little less comfortable in front of the camera but everyone pulled it off. Like, listen, we’ve all had menial sucking bullshit jobs that we dreaded going to every day. This was not one of them, being able to come to a movie set where everyone’s drinking fucking cappuccinos and making each other laugh until the sun goes down. That’s not work. That’s a fucking luxury.
What is the closest you’ve ever come to actually murdering your bandmates?
Murdering my bandmates? I would never! To be perfectly honest, we’ve had a few moments over the last 26 years where we’ve hit a rough patch, but I swear only a few. I mean, I can really only think of two in the past 26 years and they’re fucking decades apart. We genuinely appreciate and enjoy being in this band and we do love each other as people. We communicate like we’re brothers and when we collaborate, we have our own method of doing that. In the film, I get writer’s block and I become possessed. That’s never happened. And one of the reasons why that’s never happened is we don’t waltz into a studio with nothing. I don’t suffer from writer’s block because I don’t have to write. I only write when I’m inspired or feel like it’s time to do so. We’re a relatively drama free band, we really are. I know a lot of people in bands and I know a lot of bands and I know how hard it can be unless you have the right combination of people. And somehow we’ve cracked that code, we found the combination.
Tell me about working with honorary Foo Fighter Lionel Richie.
Haha, Lionel Ritchie. Well, I met Lionel ages ago. Once at a restaurant, where he told me that he was a fan of the Foo Fighters and I wasn’t sure whether I should believe him or not. But then when I broke my leg, I had surgery in London and I had to stay in a hotel for two weeks in a wheelchair afterwards. People were sending get well cards and flowers and things like that and fucking Lionel Richie sent me a muffin basket, because he was supposed to play the Glastonbury we had to cancel with us and we were looking forward to seeing each other. And ever since I call him the Muffin Man. He was written into the script by the screenwriters without them knowing that we’re friends, so when I read the script, I’m like, ‘oh, fuck, this is hilarious, I know that guy’. I texted him and said, ‘Hey, do you want to be in a horror film?’ And he said, ‘Absolutely, brother’. That was it.
Which films scared the shit out of you when you were a kid?
The Exorcist. Still to this day, it’s hard for me to watch. Not only because I think it’s one of the greatest films of all time, not just horror films, I think The Exorcist is one of the greatest films ever made, but also because I grew up outside of Washington, DC, and I would hang out around that house and on those steps every weekend with all the punk rock kids, so there’s something about it that almost seems real to me. And then The Amityville Horror when I was a kid, in 1979. The book came out before the movie and I read the book and it terrified me and then I saw the movie and it terrified me. Those classic horror films by today’s standards seem pretty tame but to me they still carry some sort of emotional trauma of being fucking terrified watching them as a kid. But then there’s others, more recent films like The Grudge or The Ring. I do love a good sort of psychological thriller horror movie, like The Witch or Midsommer, things like that. I’m not a horror fanatic. I don’t fucking hunt those movies down but I enjoy them if they’re good.
What other genres do you think a Foo Fighters movie would work in?
Well, of course as we were filming the movie, we were already talking about sequel ideas and so we tried to imagine where we would go from here then we thought, ‘well, we could just pass it on to another band, what if it’s another band and it works within the template or the framework of the film’. And then we started thinking, ‘Well, no, wait, what if it’s Foo Fighters as an ensemble, but just hopping from genre to genre?’ Like, maybe we do a fucking rom-com, or we do fucking World War 2 movie or something like that.
Or a bawdy 70s British sex comedy?
Listen, I have a really fucking good idea that could actually work that I’ve already talked to people about and it’s even stupider than this movie, just the concept itself will make you fucking double over laughing. It’s so funny. That being said, I don’t want to fucking make movies for the rest of my life, I want to make records and play fucking rock shows, because that’s what we do. Throughout the last 26 years, we’ve kind of wandered into some experimental territory but at the end of the day, the foundation of this band are the songs that we write and the shows that we play, and that’s the bottom fucking line. I want to make songs that everyone will sing along to, and I want to be the best fucking band at every festival. That’s it. Everything else is just fucking candy.
What’s coming next?
Tour! We’re gonna fucking tour all year, we’re rolling around the world again. I remember when everything shut down in 2020 I thought, ‘Okay, well when it opens back up again, I’m gonna hit it twice as hard’. And then I filled all of our time with a thousand other projects so it almost feels like we’ve been on tour for a fucking year and a half and we’re just about to begin. Man, I’m telling you, the most rewarding thing being in this band is walking on stage and staring your audience in the face and saying, ‘Okay, ready?’ and, for the next three hours, celebrating it together. That’s the best part. If there’s 60, 70, 80 shows this year, whatever it is, I’m going to get that feeling every fucking night and I can’t wait.
You co-wrote the recent Liam Gallagher single Everything’s Electric, how did that come about?
You know, it was a really funny experience because I’m friends with Greg Kurstin, the producer, we made our last couple albums with him. We made friends by chance at a restaurant years ago. I didn’t even realise he was a producer, he was in one of my favourite bands called The Bird & The Bee and I recognised him from across the restaurant and I went up and said, ‘Oh my God, you’re from The Bird & The Bee, I love your band’. We became friends and then I realized, ‘Oh shit, this guy’s one of the biggest producers in the world’. And so I’ve watched him over the years work on hit after hit after hit after hit and he called and said, “Hey, Liam’s looking for a rock’n’roll song with a fucking Beastie Boys Sabotage beat.” And I was like, ‘okay, I can do that.’ Greg cut up the drums to make them be that powerful track and it was funny because the whole experience was satellite. Liam was in the UK, Greg and I were here in Los Angeles and it all came together and it’s a fucking banger, man, I love that song, not to mention it’s an honour to be on a song with Liam, it really is. I’ve recorded with a lot of people and I’ve jammed with a lot of my heroes and now I’ve got fucking Liam on that list as well. And I’m very proud to say that.
ND