Gee's experience making Meeting People Is Easy bears out this assessment. The director was initially brought on board simply to document the week-long press junket for the 1997 release of OK Computer "They were going to have all these cameras pointed at them, and they were quite keen to have a camera on their side of the divide, pointing back," says Gee. (EMI was also "smarting," as Gee puts it, from having just released a major Beatles' anthology, al which point it realized that it didn't actually own much archival Beatles footage.) "For the future, any band that looked like it was going to be happening, the record company wanted to own as much documentary footage as possible," recalls Gee. "It was like, ‘We don't know what this shit's for, just go out, cover the week in Barcelona, shoot stuff, and then it'll go into our archive should this band ever really become big."
By week's end, Gee knew that no matter how big Radiohead eventually became, the material itself was already huge: here was an immensely talented band, led by a personality who existed at an inhuman "pitch of self-conscious intensity... of hope and despair and frustration" staring straight in the face of a fame of almost inconceivable magnitude. The footage Gee shot over the next year and edited into Meeting People Is Easy makes the Beatles' Hard Days' Night look like a Keystone Kops episode.
What was most remarkable, then, was that Meeting People Is Easy was never commissioned as a documentary; Gee simply kept submitting proposal after proposal in order to keep the cameras rolling. In retrospect, it's hard to imagine why the band would want to bring a filmmaker on board - just one more distraction in an already very messy existence. But if Radiohead ever grew tired with Gee's probing cameras, "they were polite enough never to say it," he says.
By week's end, Gee knew that no matter how big Radiohead eventually became, the material itself was already huge: here was an immensely talented band, led by a personality who existed at an inhuman "pitch of self-conscious intensity... of hope and despair and frustration" staring straight in the face of a fame of almost inconceivable magnitude. The footage Gee shot over the next year and edited into Meeting People Is Easy makes the Beatles' Hard Days' Night look like a Keystone Kops episode.
What was most remarkable, then, was that Meeting People Is Easy was never commissioned as a documentary; Gee simply kept submitting proposal after proposal in order to keep the cameras rolling. In retrospect, it's hard to imagine why the band would want to bring a filmmaker on board - just one more distraction in an already very messy existence. But if Radiohead ever grew tired with Gee's probing cameras, "they were polite enough never to say it," he says.
Grant on some of the drones featured in the movie:
"He [Jerry Chater] generated a lot of kind of different atmospheres and again taking the film being in analog to the music somehow, he plugged in audio pedals into the editor suite.. [...] So we've got Hi8 tapes of something or other and he's stamping on audio pedals, recording the output, feeding that back. Stuff like that."