CBC Radio Q

Live, on-air interview on the CBC Radio morning program ‘q’. Host Shadrach Kabango spoke with Lawrence Peryer and Carolynn Cecilia about the making of UNBOUND: A ★InstaMiniSeries, which is an interpretation of and inspired by David Bowie’s recent album ★ (pronounced ‘Blackstar’).

TRANSCRIPT:

Shadrach Kabango: David Bowie was as much of an enigma in life as he is in death.

Blackstar Music Playing: Something happened on the day he died. Spirit rose and…

Shadrach Kabango: Ever since Bowie released his final album Blackstar two days before his death, fans and critics have been trying to crack the album’s cryptic message. Now the album is being transformed into an Instagram miniseries called Unbound.

For those of you who did not know, David Bowie gave three filmmakers carte blanche to use any of the music from his Blackstar album to interpret as they wished. The first episode debuted last night, and joining me now are two of Unbound’s producers. Carolynn Cecilia is a producer and writer who came up with a treatment for the entire project, and Lawrence Peryer was David Bowie’s digital marketing consultant and the co-producer of Unbound. They’re both in our New York studio.

Welcome to the show. Carolynn, without getting into the story, tell me what somebody will be looking at when they open Instagram to check out this project. Give us a sense of what we’ll be seeing.

Carolynn Cecilia: You are going to be seeing a lot of beautiful and evocative images that were inspired by the musicality of the album.

Shadrach Kabango: And these are short videos?

Carolynn Cecilia: They’re fifteen seconds long. That is all that Instagram allows.

Shadrach Kabango: Okay. And Lawrence, the first episode came out last night, the second one comes out tonight. Can you describe how the first two episodes set up the concept in this particular series?

Lawrence Peryer: That’s a great question, and it’s a difficult one to answer without revealing any spoilers. But I think what you’ll see by the end of this evening’s episode is there’s a group of people who inhabit a universe who may or may not cross paths in that universe, but they do share some common experiences throughout our sixteen-episode story arc.

Shadrach Kabango: And what do you think David Bowie was trying to achieve by exploring Instagram video and that medium?

Lawrence Peryer: The project started off strangely enough as a marketing exercise last summer. When I was first brought in to talk about the possibility of a new album, Instagram was brought up as something that David was interested in exploring, mainly as a way to reach new fans and to take advantage of a platform and a medium that had emerged and come on strong since his last album several years ago.

He’s always been interested in technology and media. Of course, there’s always been a large visual component to his work, and Instagram seemed to fit really neatly into that. I had a previous relationship with Carolynn and Nikki. I was a very big fan of one of Nikki’s earlier Instagram miniseries, and I threw out that idea in the room in that initial meeting and it stuck. Everybody was very excited and thought it really fit aesthetically and creatively with the album and with David as an artist. We got off to the races.

Shadrach Kabango: Carolynn, what do you like about the medium itself of Instagram video and these miniseries?

Carolynn Cecilia: I’m a short story writer primarily, and so for me I really enjoyed the challenge of compression. Fifteen seconds is not a long time at all to tell a story—that’s a serious creative challenge. But I enjoyed it. If you keep things simple and you keep things focused, it can work.

Shadrach Kabango: Let’s dig into how you actually created this work. So you got the chance to listen to the record only one time. Is that right?

Carolynn Cecilia: Yes. We were brought in for the first meeting and all the doors were sealed, and we heard the album one time. I did go in with a structural concept that I hoped would work, but I knew that it would depend on the album itself. I got really lucky that it did. So I had some scaffolding going in, and listening to the album was just taking it track by track and filling in all the holes that I couldn’t have known before. We also did not have access to all of the lyrics, so that is a big reason why a lot of the focus is on the music instead of on the lyrics.

Shadrach Kabango: So where did this idea for a structure come from initially, if not from the music?

Carolynn Cecilia: I studied fiction writing at the Writer’s Studio here in New York City, and we study a lot of other writers. You start to look at structure and you start to look at voice, and what that does is it allows you to put a lot of techniques in your back pocket. Going in, I already had a lot of foundation for the different ways that you could tell a story.

Shadrach Kabango: And Lawrence, what kind of feedback did you get from David Bowie about Carolynn’s ideas and her approach?

Lawrence Peryer: It’s very important for us to let people know that this wasn’t necessarily a creative collaboration with David. This was something where he provided access and said, “Please go create something on your own.” But we did involve him very early on with the treatment, which he gave us some very light-touch feedback on. Throughout production we sent dailies, we sent stills from the set, we let him know any major casting decisions.

While we did not necessarily collaborate, we did keep him involved in terms of information, and we didn’t want to get to the point where at the end of the production we delivered something that completely didn’t speak to him. So he was made aware that way. But I think it was very important to him that these not be viewed as his interpretations of the songs. Everybody put a lot of care into making sure there wasn’t over-communication about it.

Shadrach Kabango: This reminds me of an interview I saw him give to the BBC back in 1999 that speaks to how prescient he was about the internet and how that would affect art. He said something about the idea that a piece of work in the twenty-first century isn’t finished until the audience adds their own interpretation, and that the piece of art is about the space in between what the artist has created and then how others interact with it. Do you think he was playing with that idea with this project in terms of being hands-off?

Lawrence Peryer: I think undoubtedly he’s used digital media for a long time, going back to CD-ROMs and early video games. I think he’s always—it’s called interactive for a reason. That’s a big component of his interest in digital media. Whether it’s through the technology itself, through his online community, there’s always been a strong component that the audience is part of the art.

Shadrach Kabango: Carolynn, what did you think about Bowie giving you free rein to interpret his work?

Carolynn Cecilia: It was definitely a huge honor, and it was very important to me that we not repeat the things that he had done in the past, that we not allow the focus to be on the personas that people know him most by, and that instead we stay on brand while giving him something new for the canon. I took it very seriously and I did a lot of research, and I think that we did a very good job. I’m just hopeful that the fans feel we were respectful.

Shadrach Kabango: Lawrence, you said he gave very little feedback, but he did give some feedback. What exactly did he say?

Lawrence Peryer: There was one specific piece of feedback in particular that he gave that’s really stuck with me. Not knowing that we weren’t going to have the opportunity to have the discussion, I didn’t really seek any feedback at the time. But when Carolynn developed a treatment, each episode had very specific recommendations in terms of particular cast members or maybe actors we might want to use.

There’s a scene that has a drummer featured very prominently in it. In the original treatment there were some recommendations as to specific celebrity drummers that people might recognize because they have a strong visual persona or are celebrities. The comment that came back was, “No, this needs to be a young boy between the age of eleven and thirteen.” That was just so specific and interesting.

Shadrach Kabango: What do you think that says about the kind of artist that he was, that he would have such specific feedback on that particular point?

Lawrence Peryer: I don’t believe much of it is unplanned.

Shadrach Kabango: Lawrence, you finished production for Unbound in December. It was originally supposed to launch January fifteenth, and of course, David Bowie died on January tenth. What was your reaction when you heard that news?

Lawrence Peryer: It was brutal. It was really brutal. We ended that weekend so excited for David and for his team and for his record label. They just did a great job setting up the record. Obviously David and Tony Visconti and the band provided such a wonderful piece of art for everybody to bring to the world. There was so much excitement in the air. It’s such a great record. The fan interest was amazing. The press interest was amazing, and we went to bed that Sunday night with our work done. We were just going to take the week and do the setup for the launch, and we just felt so relieved and good and positive.

To wake up that Monday morning on the East Coast—I picked up my cell phone and I had thirty-some-odd text messages and I thought, “Oh my gosh, what’s happened?” That’s how I got the news. It was devastating. On a personal level there was the selfishness of being so excited about delivering this for him and having this now be part of the story. But just as fans and as people that have worked around him, it was just such a complete and total devastation.

Shadrach Kabango: Carolynn, how about you?

Carolynn Cecilia: It was definitely heartbreaking. We had spent so much time in his world, not just of this album, but of all the previous albums, and we also couldn’t talk about it to anybody. The only people that we could really talk to are the people who are part of the project. So you feel like you have this secret hidden inside of you, and then you experience a loss. You still can’t really explain to people why it feels so hard because we kept the secret. We kept the secret a month longer than we ever intended to.

Shadrach Kabango: What do you hope viewers take away from watching this series?

Carolynn Cecilia: I hope that they are inspired to find their own meaning within his music or any music, any art at all. I want to make sure that they come to it not looking for all of their questions to be answered, but that they bring their own history and their own way of thinking to it, and that they find something—some kind of solace or some type of motivation or inspiration and a new way to look at art.

Lawrence Peryer: It is very similar. I think that because it’s not a literal narrative where everything’s explained, I’m very excited and I’ve been very encouraged over the last twelve hours or so to see what people are bringing to it. The comments on the Instagram thread, on the message boards, on David’s official site—the fan interpretation and the appreciation for it—it’s very exciting because now the audience really is part of the artwork and they’re jumping in with a lot of enthusiasm and support. That’s great, and I hope that continues.

Shadrach Kabango: Congratulations to both of you. Thank you so much.

Shadrach Kabango: Carolynn Cecilia is the producer and writer of Unbound, the Instagram miniseries based on David Bowie’s final album Blackstar, and Lawrence Peryer is the co-producer and was David Bowie’s digital marketing consultant. They were both in our New York City studio.