The rise of concert films and music documentaries, from Pavarotti to Shakira, and the A-list directors, such as Ron Howard, drawn to the format
- Metallica, Shakira, Bruce Springsteen, Depeche Mode, Roger Waters – all have turned to concert movies this year to reach out to fans
- Meanwhile, documentary producers play to the nostalgia of older fans, and to younger music lovers who missed seeing stars in their prime
If music be the food of love, play on, wrote William Shakespeare – but in Hollywood music is a source of money. Concert movies and music documentaries are in full swing, playing to nostalgic fans or those who missed out on concert tickets. As trade paper Variety recently put it: “Music docs are proliferating like mushrooms these days.”
This year has been a remarkable one for lovers of music, be it classical, contemporary, rock or pop. Top of the bill among music films is Pavarotti, Ron Howard’s non-fiction film about the most famous opera singer of them all. The film covers his early years, his rise to global fame, performing as part of The Three Tenors on the eve of the 1990 World Cup, and his personal traumas.
For Howard, one of the goals of the movie was to find an emotional through line using the famous arias sung by the Italian tenor.
“I said to Paul Crowder, our editor, ‘I feel like we can almost make an opera about Pavarotti using these arias.’ If we could find performances that can convey what he’s going through in his life or what he’s feeling, it could be a way to deepen audience connections to the music, because they begin to understand that these arias really are about narratives.”
