BBC Radio Ulster Arts Extra

A live, on-air interview with the BBC Radio Ulster program ‘Arts Extra’. Host Marie-Louise Muir spoke with Lawrence Peryer and Carolynn Cecilia about the making of UNBOUND: A ★InstaMiniSeries.

TRANSCRIPT:

Marie-Louise Muir: The passing of David Bowie last month—tributes are still being paid by artists, and the music icon is still blazing a trail. The music from his last record, Black Star, was given over to a group of pioneering filmmakers in advance of its release with complete creative control. Unbound, a Black Star Instagram miniseries, is released this Thursday on the social media platform Instagram. Lawrence Peryer is producer, and Carolynn Cecilia is one of the writers on Unbound. Good evening. Carolynn, first, tell me about these films in general terms. Are they linear? Is there a theme?

Carolynn Cecilia: Hi, hello. No, they are not linear. It’s not a traditional narrative. What we’ve done is I’ve treated these stories as if they were a short story collection. So it’s a collection of stories, and each story will live within the world of the track that it has been attached to. While they won’t tell a traditional linear narrative, they will tell you a story about the music. They will tell you a story about the images that the musicality has inspired, and they will give you, by the end of it, a look inside what we were trying to accomplish with this concept.

Marie-Louise Muir: The genesis of this must have been well before David passed away.

Carolynn Cecilia: It was fall of two thousand fifteen, and actually the original discussion happened in the summer. That’s when the whole thing germinated, but it wasn’t until the fall that I was brought into the room as the executive producer of this miniseries just to get a very general idea and listen to the music for the first time.

Marie-Louise Muir: And you must have been asked—the trust must have been there for you to keep this a secret.

Carolynn Cecilia: Oh, absolutely. From the very beginning, it wasn’t just me signing forms that say you promise you won’t tell anything about anything. You just have to keep sticking to your word and showing them how you know how to keep a secret.

Marie-Louise Muir: Lawrence—

Carolynn Cecilia: Because in the beginning, yeah—

Marie-Louise Muir: It’s an incredible secret. It’s a gift of a secret as well. Lawrence, you’re producer on the project. Did you ever think that David would gift you complete creative control to this extent?

Lawrence Peryer: Oh, I don’t know how I could ever have imagined something like that. I’ve worked with David in various capacities over the last decade and a half, including running a company that he was a co-founder of, and so I’ve been involved with a lot of his digital projects and digital initiatives over the years. But it was certainly rare for me to have such a large creative role in one of these projects.

Marie-Louise Muir: How collaborative was the process with David?

Lawrence Peryer: It wasn’t a collaboration. What happened was David was very interested in new mediums and platforms, and Instagram was something that he was interested in trying to leverage for promotion around the new album. Last summer, as Carolynn alluded to, we put together an idea and a concept for him to use Instagram. He was involved in that he received the story pitch, he approved the treatment, he obviously gave us access to the music. But it was not an artistic collaboration. It was more that he made the material available and said, “Run with it and have fun.”

Marie-Louise Muir: Isn’t that an incredible thing for an artist to do?

Lawrence Peryer: It was amazingly selfless. And it was a tremendous sense of responsibility that we felt to both him and the fans.

Marie-Louise Muir: Why, in terms of platforms, why Instagram? How does that work better for this project, Lawrence?

Lawrence Peryer: I think from his vantage point, this was just the most recent in a long line of technology and media platforms that either fascinated him or that he just has that keen awareness of how these new media work. And he’s always been at the forefront of utilizing those both for marketing and for creative expression. So Instagram was just—it had been a couple of years between his last album, and Instagram emerged as an important platform. And he wanted to try to push the limits with it, I think, as he usually does. So it really did start off initially as a marketing discussion, but once we put a concept together, it morphed more into a creative outlet.

Marie-Louise Muir: So these are sixteen films in total, Carolynn?

Carolynn Cecilia: Yes, they’re sixteen films. You will have two films for each track on the album except for “Black Star.”

Marie-Louise Muir: Why is that?

Carolynn Cecilia: We felt that “Black Star,” at that time—even when we went into the first meeting—the video for “Blackstar” had already been completed. And because it’s so long, we felt that at that time people would already have heard the track, and they would have already created a story and imagery within their own mind and within the world that was created in the video by Johan Renck. And so we decided to use “Black Star” in a very different way. So you will see it in the first two, which we consider our opening, and you’ll see it in the last two, which we call our closing.

Marie-Louise Muir: We’re looking for a sense of what the films are about, Carolynn, as well. Are they taking literally the lyrics of the song? Is it a mood that the music gives you? What are we seeing?

Carolynn Cecilia: It was very important to me to not speak to the lyrics, to not have a literal interpretation of the music. So when I heard—I only heard the album once before I wrote the script or before I made the treatment because it was all that was available to us because it was so secret. What I did is I went into that meeting with a scaffolding structure and just hoping against hope that whatever I learned listening to that album, it would fit within that scaffolding. And thank God that it did. And from there, just on one listening, I sat in the room with Nikki, and we just went with what the music inspired via images. If the music rose, then we wanted our characters to rise. If the music was slow and mellow, that’s the energy that we wanted within that particular film. So we went with that far more than we went with a literal lyrical interpretation.

Marie-Louise Muir: Finally, Lawrence, I mean, they sound incredible, but it must have taken on a real poignancy when you learned of David Bowie’s death.

Lawrence Peryer: Yes, for all of us—for everybody involved, whether it was the crew that worked so hard to pull it together in such a short timeframe or the talented artists that we had on camera—that was a very difficult morning here in the States to wake up to that news. And actually, the project was slated to launch within a few days of Black Star having come out. But we decided that it was not appropriate, and there was so much outpouring, as everybody knows, online of love and grief and discussion and memories that we didn’t feel it was right to drop something into the middle of that. So we held back for a little while, and I think that was the right decision based on the reaction we’ve seen. It feels like the world and the fans and everybody was ready to get back to the art and talking about the art. And it seems like there’s been a really positive embrace of this and a lot of anticipation for people to see exactly what it is we cooked up.

Marie-Louise Muir: Thank you both. It was difficult, but it’s been also nice to have this to focus on as well.

Marie-Louise Muir: Thank you so much, both of you, for joining us live from the States. Thank you, Carolynn and Lawrence. It’s being launched—Unbound, a Black Star Instagram miniseries—released this Thursday on Instagram.