In spite of the two-man band’s stripped-down sound, nothing has ever been as simple as it looks for the Black Keys, making it apropos that “This is a Film About the Black Keys,” a documentary detailing the first two decades of Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney’s rock act is at once direct and not necessarily easy to slip off the tongue. Still, director Jeff Dupre finds that even though Auerbach and Carney’s steady ascent from garage band to arena fillers is relatively straightforward, it has been incredibly complicated when its two members find it easier to communicate with one another through their instruments than with traditional conversation, rarely speaking outside the studio but making beautiful music inside of it.
Although Auerbach and Carney share a hometown in Akron, Ohio, “This is a Film About the Black Keys” suggests they might as well have come from different worlds when they didn’t cross paths in high school when Auerbach played football while Carney was more inclined to join the AV club. Even when they did come together, Carney only picked up the drums when it was clear that Auerbach was more gifted at the guitar and after a third member flaked on them, their decision to believe in themselves has paid off enormously when they had a common affection for blues music that could add a distinguishing flavor to their hard-driving brand of rock-and-roll, but has made it so there’s no tiebreaker in an argument and they’ve reached a number of forks in the road as they’ve reached incredible heights of success, moving between different labels and being on different timelines creatively and personally.
“This is a Film About the Black Keys” sees Auerbach and Carney’s different personalities as crucial to how they’ve become a dynamic duo on stage, but off of it as well when Carney has always been more interested in the business side than Auerbach and Auerbach’s prolific side career as a producer for other musicians has been constantly bringing new energy into his collaborations with Carney. Dropping in on the pair as they start to work on their twelfth studio album “Ohio Players,” produced in part by Beck, who it’s revealed in the film gave the band their big break after they handed him a CD at a Saturday Night Live afterparty, eventually making them an opener on his “Sea Change” tour, Dupre catches Auerbach and Carney at a full circle moment, putting all the ups and downs of the past behind them to find their groove laying down tracks.
Still, as mellow a place as “This is a Film About the Black Keys” finds its subjects now, the band was bound to blow the roof off the Paramount Theatre in Austin when those opening guitar licks of “Lonely Boy” started to play and we were fortunate to catch up with Dupre, who previously profiled artists such as Kehinde Wiley in “An Economy of Grace,” which picked up a Grand Jury Prize at SXSW 2014, and Marina Abramovic for the 2012 doc “The Artist is Present” (co-directed with Matthew Akers), the morning after the main event to talk about the blessing of having musicians whose work could speak so boldly about themselves, the archival material that changed the direction of the film and how destiny led to a premiere in the live music capitol of the world.
How did this come about?
It was all thanks to Carter Little, the film’s producer. He’s an old friend of mine and he is good friends with Patrick Carney, the drummer of the Black Keys. Carter had been talking to Patrick for a while, like, “Oh, you guys need to make a doc,” and during the pandemic, it was like, “What else are we going to do?” IThey’re not going on tour, so we were all sitting around on our hands and we’re like, “Let’s make a movie.”
One of the most interesting things in this movie is the idea that they communicate best through the music, so was it interesting to engage with them when they may not even talk to each other about what they do much, let alone a camera crew?
Usually, the sign of a compelling story for me is when you get that push-pull where you’re drawn to it, but also afraid of it or challenged by it. Whenever I have that feeling in my stomach, I know it’s like, “Okay, I need to make this movie.” And with regards to communication, while they may fail to communicate about certain things, the fact that they make this music together, that is a form of communication that is just on another level, so Pat on drums and Dan on the guitar and singing, I think that’s incredible and can make up for talking about their feelings with each other. And that is what makes their story so fascinating. It’s just a level of intensity that’s really remarkable. If you look at a married couple, it’s like, what is it that keeps them together? Is it the children? Is it the money? And it’s the same thing with this band. Their child is the music they create and there’s all kinds of forces always pushing them together and then tearing them apart. They have to ride that and figure out how to make it work.
This isn’t the first time you’ve profiled artists. Is there something that you can key in on to unlock what they see?
The fascinating thing about music documentaries is that we’re always circling the heart of the matter, which is “How are they walking into the studio and having these songs just like bubble up in their mind?” That to me is the glorious mystery that we can never capture on film. We try really hard in this movie. You see them during the process, but it’s like we’ll never understand how that happens, you know. But the big thing that unlocked things for me was was their songs. My job as a director is to reveal who those guys are as characters, but there’s nothing more revealing to me than the music they were creating and every step of the way. Those songs capture who they were, what they were thinking, what they were feeling like better than anything they could ever tell you in an interview, and a big part of the job is removing the talk and just letting it be an experience for the viewer and to let the music really carry the story a lot.
Also, the songs are awesome, and we ended up with a chronological structure because it actually works in this case, because you see them evolving as men, growing up and then you’re hearing that music get deeper and more interesting, just as they are as people. Watching art emerge from life is always inherently fascinating, as it was on the other films, like the Kehinde Wiley [movie “An Economy of Grace”], so that is the thing about this film that is so fun to watch.
There are some particularly electrifying marriages of music and montage. Was there any that was especially exciting to craft?
There’s so many great performance sequences. The “Gold on the Ceiling” performance is great. The moment “Fever,” — and really, the whole album “Turn Blue” I love so much — but that song is up there because it has this great energy as a pop song, but also this feeling of wistfulness or sadness about it, and it comes in a moment in the film where the wheels are about to fall off for them. There’s this moment where Dan’s like trying to record the song in the studio and has to do another take, and you just get this sense of the human frailty of them. The song really captures that and then it segues into like a big performance sequence. I just love that song so much, and I love the whole album.
Was there anything that took this in a direction you didn’t expect or added a dimension that was interesting?
The main thing is that we kept discovering or uncovering wave after wave of new archival material that had bubbled to the surface. Pretty late in the game, we got all this footage of them working with Danger Mouse and that was a game changer, and we got sent the footage of them recording “Brothers,” which is the absolute pivotal moment in their whole career. That was just astonishing and fantastic, and the excitement of making a documentary is that you have this idea in your mind about what it’s going to be, and then it’s every step of the way it’s blown up and it’s like, “Oh, no, now it’s not that, it’s this.” So you have to you have to embrace that.
It seemed like the families actually kept pretty incredible archives. What was it like going back to Akron?
Yeah, the families did keep a lot of stuff. Then Patrick’s brother is a talented photographer and graphic designer, and was with them in the very early days taking pictures of them. Thank the Lord he was a good photographer, and I don’t think they were thinking at the time “Oh, we need to make sure that we have footage of ourselves,” but they have it.
Did you actually go into this knowing that there was going to be a new album?
We went to Nashville and Beck was flying in to like come and noodle around in the studio with them, and that was one of the first tracks they started working on for the new album, so the gestation period of the film paralleled the gestation period of their album and we got to capture some moments of them in the studio. That was about a year ago, and [I asked], “Oh, you think the record’s going to come out next spring?” And then I thought, South by Southwest, have the film come out, and then it all worked out, which it almost never does.
It seemed like you almost were calling your shot when you see the band’s SXSW showcases at Emo’s and Antone’s in the film.
We would have used that material itself by regardless of whether we premiered here, but they have a long history here. I have a long history here, so it just was the perfect venue to do it.
What was the premiere like for you?
It was a bit of an out-of-body experience. You’ve been sitting in a small dark room with,one or two other people for two years, trying to solve this puzzle, then suddenly you have a thousand people watching it and a film is never done until the audience completes the work in a way. So it was a thrill. And I was so happy to see that people were laughing at all the funny moments, even things that had ceased to register as funny to me because I just watched them five thousand times, so the response was great.
“This is a Film About the Black Keys” will next play at the Cleveland Film Festival on April 5th at the KeyBank State Theatre at 7:35 pm and the Sarasota Film Festival on April 12th at 6 pm at the Regal Hollywood.
