
1971 November 27
Zappa's Latest Box Of
Tricks
Steve Peacock,
1 p
I was starting to ask about the way he's approached making the movie. He's
explained at length before what the film was about how it showed that touring
makes you crazy, but presumably he'd seen other pop films and he had ideas about
how to do it himself. He immediately picked up on the phrase "pop films".
"I'm not an avid fan of pop films, but you get dumped into that category by
virtue of the fact that the film revolves around a group of people who happen to
be musicians. I think I would use the same people whether they were musicians or
not. I happen to be interested in making a musical film, but a lot of the music
in it is not pop. In a way that's unfortunate because it's not like one of those
regular rock and roll movies."
"But as far as the ideas for the technical things went, I had seen many examples
of
the special effects you can get, and I had some idea of the capabilities of
video technique. 99% of the effects in the movie happen live while you're
working, which means you can see how they're going to turn out at the time, and
you don't have to send them away to a lab and get them to do it for you. If you
don't like it you just erase it and do it again. It was extremely appropriate
for this film." (read more)
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