Some subjects are so big, and span so many decades, that it seems a fool’s mission to tackle them in anything less than the mini-series format. With “Rejoice and Shout”, however, director Don McGlynn deftly traces the 200-year history of gospel music, and its evolution from spirituals and early hymns to four-part, harmony-based quartets, along the way both soaking up and giving off influence to blues, swing, soul and even the hip-hop of today. Part documentary, part concert film, it’s a mind-bogglingly complex undertaking. We had a chance to talk to McGlynn one-on-one recently, about knowing and staying true to his film’s audience, the discovery of some amazing musical clips, and the extraordinary amount of time he spent editing his movie. The conversation is excerpted below:
ShockYa: The film is so informative, but hardly dry and just full of talking heads. I was quite surprised at the degree to which it was and is also a de facto concert film, really.
Don McGlynn: Well Brent, I’ve made about 30 music films. The very first film I made was about Art Pepper, a great jazz artist who I really loved. I was going to film school at USC, and at that point in time I didn’t think there was any film on him. And later on I found out there had been a couple of tiny things here and there, but I felt like he really needed to be documented… and I felt like I’ve always had that drive. Half the time, I look for someone who has been under-filmed and I film them because I love their music. I found all this great Howlin’ Wolf footage, and I happen to love Howlin’ Wolf, so I said let’s show people all this great footage and bring this person to life. This is partly a personal thing only, making movies that I wished someone else would make. So that’s [dictated] the films that I’ve made in the past. This film was a little different in that it wasn’t just one subject where you shed the light on an entire career. But that’s important thing: you have to show the music because these people are musicians and the expressions on their faces tell you what this music is about. And what’s so bad about watching a three- or four-minute number? It’s not going to kill you. If you’re interested enough to see a movie about a particular person, you want to see more than 20 seconds. So one of the things I discovered early on was that the music is so powerful that I really wanted this to be experiential. If we set up Mahalia Jackson, let’s let her sing, you know? What I was happiest about when we finally got the film in one piece is that when we did the sound mixing we wanted to take it another step, we wanted to make it more like a concert, and make it so that if you’re sitting in the theater you feel like you’re in the TV studio with her when she was doing The Ed Sullivan Show. We spent a lot of time examining the data on the track, which was mono, and trying to figure out a way to make it fit into the conventional 5.1 mix without degrading the original sound. If anything, we were dragging elements out of the soundtrack so that it would come across clean and we could hear more things. In the past I had been a little bit wary of doing that with older film clips, but with this one I was stunned with how much more clarity we could get. Things that I had been listening to for four years I had not heard before. And all of a sudden I could hear the musical accompaniment much more clearly, and [hear what] Mahalia Jackson was doing with her voice in response to the keyboard or what have you.
ShockYa: It is true that the film unfolds in largely chronological fashion, but how much care and attention was paid to how you sequenced the music?
DM: When you make a music documentary, you look at the music paradigm that exists in opera. You have someone singing for a while, and then they burst into an aria because they want to be more expressive. If you have a Broadway play you have some discussion and then they sing a song that extends the story while also illuminating an emotional point. And when I make a documentary I want to do that same thing. If I’m telling a person’s life story, I do the same thing. In this case, I was trying to tell a story with the songs that were songs. The songs that you hear from the 1930s and ’40s are all about being so downtrodden; The Golden Gate Quartet sing about that. And toward the end of the film there’s more uplift because things are going on that are a lot nicer. So I was trying to kind of turn the film into an opera or a Broadway musical, in terms of the music articulating the soul of the subject. And in this case it’s not just one person, it’s a whole group — the African-American Christians that have been in the United States for 200 years.
ShockYa: I’m consistently struck by what sometimes seems like an emotional gap between the formats or mediums, rather, of music and film. In music, a really trite expression can still pack an emotional punch when sung with feeling, and yet movies oftentimes have difficulty putting into deeper emotion into words. Given your professional and personal interest in both music and film growing up… did that difference strike you early on, growing up?
DM: It [did], and I absolutely try to bridge that gap. And the key for me on this picture was that I didn’t want to run away from the fact that these people are intensely religious. I’ve seen other movies about gospel music that don’t get into what a church service was like, or what God meant. And I felt it those were really important, to contextualize things. Early on, when I was showing the film to some people, I was getting all this [positive feedback] but one person said, ‘I really liked it, but don’t you want to have an opposing point-of-view?’ And I looked at her like, ‘No, I don’t.’ I really want it to be about the joy and the personal commitment that these people [have rather] than have some atheist calling them a bunch of dumbbells because they believe in something that’s illusory or something. I didn’t need to have that argument in the film. I realize that the core audience for this film is going to be African-American Christians, and if anyone else wants to visit that’s fine, they’re welcome. They might understand it. I think a lot of people that are interested in music will make that leap, I hope they do, because there’s a lot of great music for them to enjoy, and they don’t have to be a Christian or even religious.
ShockYa: The film boasts such an exhaustive roster of interview subjects. Were there any that made you especially nervous?
DM: You know Brent, when I was at USC I was the exact opposite of a shrinking violet. If some filmmaker was in town doing a Q&A — like I remember King Vidor was in town once for a showing of Duel in the Sun — I just went right up and talked to them, figuring it might be my only chance. I don’t have that fear, usually — on occasion, but not often. That served me well, because we brought in Martin Scorsese and Roger Corman and John Cassavetes and Orson Welles, Don Siegel, all these heroes of mine, and I got to talk to them. That part of my personality has adapted well to making these films. For instance, when I interviewed Smokey Robinson — I think he’s fabulous, I love him — I just sort of regarded it as a chance to talk to him, to have a conversation. And I was startled, because he had almost the same entire world-view I have, which is not the most normal world-view. Almost everything he said completely synched up with what I felt. And for me he’s sort of the pivotal voice in the film, while clarifying all the points in the movie and also saying all these things that I believe, too. The only time I’ve had some trepidation is when the subject is not very forthcoming, and you have to drag stuff out of them, but that’s happened to me so rarely.
ShockYa: Was the editing process on this more difficult or daunting than your other works, just because of the sheer volume of material, or had you formed enough of a narrative spine in your mind with some of the musical performances?
DM: Well, because I’ve made so many music biographies before this I’ve gotten to the point where even before I start shooting I have a pretty good idea of where I want to go with it, and I can map it out. Frequently the movies come together quite well, and quickly. On this project it was the exact opposite, because it was too huge — there was no way you could comfortably say, ‘Oh, I’m going to do this, this and then this.’ I was editing on and off for two years on this, because it was so tricky. The biggest problems [were] distilling things, making it clearer and bit shorter each time. But I didn’t want it to seem rushed. I’d made a lot of films that were a bit more flamboyant in the way they were shot or edited, because I felt it suited the film, but with this one I wanted it to feel nice and easy. But the irony of it is that this film has over 3,000 edits in it, and many of my other films have 300 or 400 edits. So it’s strange that this film that I deliberately wanted to feel leisurely and comfortable is probably the most edit-heavy thing I’ve ever done.
