"‘IT’S FUNNY HOW PEOPLE ARE INTIMIDATED BY HIM’: DARYL HANNAH ON HER NEW NEIL YOUNG DOC AND MORE" | Rolling Stone

Daryl Hannah and Neil Young
SXSW Film Festival - Paramount Theatre, Austin, TX
March 15, 2018(see REVIEW: 'Paradox' Premiere @ SXSW - Film Directed Daryl Hannah)  

In an interview in Rolling Stone, Daryl Hannah speaks extensively about her new film "Coastal", a documentary on Neil Young's solo tour along the US West Coast in the summer of 2023.

Hannah decided to make a film from the solo tour footage because she wanted to shed light on certain aspects of Neil Young's daily touring life. She noticed that many people had misconceptions about touring life. Therefore, she wanted to show how normal and often lonely this everyday life can be.

From "‘IT’S FUNNY HOW PEOPLE ARE INTIMIDATED BY HIM’: DARYL HANNAH ON HER NEW NEIL YOUNG DOC AND MORE" | Rolling Stone by DAVID BROWNE:

Rolling Stone: When you said you “miraculously” got what you needed for this film, what did you mean?
DARYL HANNAH: 

We placed the cameras [at the concerts] in front of the instruments we thought he might play and some nights he would never use them. [Laughs.] Neil never has a set list. He just plays what he feels in the moment. Well, there’s no way to accommodate that, so some nights we’d set the cameras for one of the three pianos on stage, or for a certain guitar and the organ maybe. And he wouldn’t play any of them! So there were great versions of certain songs I would have liked to have used, but we didn’t even capture them because he didn’t even go to those instruments the whole night. We would have literally nothing for an entire night sometimes, you know, because of him choosing to do different songs.

Were you allowed to get mad at him over that?

Well, that’s his forte, you know. That’s just who he is. I’m not going to start saying, “You have to play …!” [Laughs.] That would be horrible, right? He only listens to his muse. That’s kind of what he’s known for in some ways, because it has to be authentic for him, or he won’t do it. So I’m not going to mess with that.

I was absolutely determined to have “I’m the Ocean” at the beginning and “When I Hold You in My Arms” at the end. Those are really the heart of it to me. “I’m the Ocean,” even though it was written a long time ago, for that record with Pearl Jam, resonates with all of the shit we’re facing today and all of these crises. And even in the ways we have to stay positive and remember that we don’t need to focus on all the negativity all the time too.

With “When I Hold You in My Arms,” once again, it’s one of those songs that resonates with what’s going on in the world today: “New buildings going up/Old buildings coming down.” And how important it is to lean on someone you love or someone you care about to have that refuge. The fact that he plays both the electric guitar and the piano in that song, I’ve never seen him do that. And I’ve been around for a while. [Laughs.]

Given you’re both the filmmaker and the spouse here, what are the challenges of making a movie like this in terms of what you do and don’t include?  You even slipped in a few scenes of Neil addressing you behind your iPhone and saying he’d missed you.

That was a little bit hard, because I really wanted to make a cinema verité film; that’s my favorite style of documentary. And when I was in the editing room, I really was fighting those kind of moments because I didn’t want to have myself or the camera acknowledged in order for it to be true cinema verité. You’re supposed to be a fly on the wall.

But all of those moments, when he’s looking in the camera, even when he’s talking to Ben, I find them really moving. So, even though I fought it and fought it for months during editing, I finally decided to put them in because there was an aspect that you would never catch otherwise. When Neil looks in the camera, there’s such a beautiful openness and vulnerability and charm. You really see so much more into his soul.

At one point, we see Neil talking to Jerry, his bus driver, about how the fans want to hear the hits because those are often the only songs they know. That’s an unusual comment to hear in a movie like this. 

But it’s pretty true. People go to a show and want to hear the song they’re familiar with, their favorite song played at their wedding or whatever. So I think that’s kind of true for everybody, but Neil specifically decided on this tour that he was going to do songs he’d never really played before, “hidden by hits,” as he calls it. It was like people were hearing them for the first time, and in many cases, they really listened. I mean, you could hear a pin drop in all of those theaters.

 Full interview @ "‘IT’S FUNNY HOW PEOPLE ARE INTIMIDATED BY HIM’: DARYL HANNAH ON HER NEW NEIL YOUNG DOC AND MORE" | Rolling Stone by DAVID BROWNE.

More on Daryl Hannah and Neil Young @ REVIEW: 'Paradox' Premiere @ SXSW - Film Directed Daryl Hannah.  

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