- THE POLICE: 'Better Than Therapy' -

 

jordan copeland interview - 2/3

- interview by Gert-Peter BRUCH -

 

How long did it take to watch everything?

Throughout the tour, we were logging and backing up our rushes and editing webisodes for the fanclub, so it's also hard to estimate how long it took to "watch" everything. There are some areas of the rushes that I've seen hundreds of times, and some parts I've only ever skimmed through. There are interviews with all kinds of people, a lot of scenic GVs from around the world - crowds and cityscapes and stadiums and a lot of hotel-window timelapse footage, as well as all the footage with the band in it.

What were the most interesting moments to film?

Obviously, what I was really looking for was 3-shots - that holy grail in which all three band members are in the same frame at the same time, and that even rarer delicacy - talking to each other. On your average tour day, these times would generally be sound-check and the walk to stage for the show, so I have a lot of footage of those two rituals. Otherwise, there would be little moments of interaction throughout the day.

Did you have to shut down your camera sometimes during the tour? I'm asking this question because we never see The Police really arguing and I know they did sometimes.

I'd always have to be very careful not to pop the bubble by firing up my camera. Sting is very camera-conscious and refuses to argue with anyone or discuss important business when the camera is rolling, which is understandable. I spent a lot of time on the tour hiding radio-mics in various places, so that I could keep my distance with my camera and still pick up dialogue. I would tell them that the room or stage was "bugged", but it would be easier for them to forget about me and get on with their jobs if I wasn't in their face with the camera.

I was occasionally asked to switch off my camera when things got really heated. Not because they were trying to be secretive, just because it's very difficult to argue with someone when there's a camera in your face.

Did you have to plan your interviews with the members of the group, or did you improvise them?

Of course interviews were a different process - I'd try to stop by their dressing rooms as casually as possible, quickly set up some lights and fire off a few questions at convenient moments in the day, ideally whilst they were doing something else. This is why Sting is interviewed with his lute in a couple of scenes - he happened to be practicing at the time (he spends a lot of time playing that lute). I found this to be a better approach than trying to set up formal interviews with lots of questions - everyone tends to go into Interview Mode in those situations. They adopt their rockstar personas, and you get different kinds of answers.

That's not to say I wasn't careful with my questions - as my opportunities to interview the band were very limited, I had to be very organized about exactly what I wanted to get, and exactly how to phrase the question. They are each very different people to interview, and it took some time to figure out how to get the best out of each of them. Sting tends to answer preliminary questions as briefly as possible, and you have to prod him with more questions before he'll give you anything juicy. Stewart, on the other hand, you just tell him roughly what you want him to talk about and hope you have enough tape in the camera. Andy I often had to ask about one thing to get him to talk about something else - his mind tends to work laterally and his enthusiasm for questioning varies enormously from one hour to the next, so timing is critical.

Do you now understand better the complicated relationship that binds the members of The Police together?

As for their relationships with each other - it's obviously a deep and complicated riddle that I wouldn't necessarily want to explain even if I were able to. The way they interact on-stage is very different to the way they interact in rehearsal, which is completely separate from the way they interact over dinner, which is different to the way they interact on the jet. And over the course of the tour, the dynamic was constantly shifting - there were periods of a few days at a time when they seemed almost like young lovers, hanging out and laughing and enjoying each other's company, and then there'd be weeks when they'd hardly talk at all, only really seeing each other on stage. I knew that for many reasons, I'd never be able to express their relationship completely with my film. But I hope I was able to preserve an overall sense of truth in the way they're presented, even if a lot of details are missing.