INTERVIEW: Jon Bon Jovi’s 40-year rock career comes into focus
Photo: Jon Bon Jovi and the band Bon Jovi are the subjects of a new documentary series on Hulu, directed by Gotham Chopra. Here Bon Jovi is pictured at the Bryce Jordan Center in State College, Pennsylvania, in 2013. Photo courtesy of David Bergman / www.BonJovi.com/prints / Provided by Hulu press site with permission.
Jon Bon Jovi, the voice and creative force behind the influential rock band Bon Jovi, recently made himself available to an all-access documentary project that tracks the band’s evolution over the last 40 years. The result is called Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story, a four-part series now airing on Hulu and directed by Gotham Chopra.
The documentary project offers stories of the many highs involving Bon Jovi as a band, including the group’s 1986 mega-album Slippery When Wet, which produced hit songs like “Livin’ on a Prayer,” “You Give Love a Bad Name” and “Wanted Dead or Alive.” There are also frank discussions about the many lows, including members leaving the band and Bon Jovi’s recent vocal issues.
Chopra’s TV project is one that goes beyond the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll in order to find the heart of a singer and the soul of a band. Recently Hollywood Soapbox spoke with the director, whose other credits include Kobe Bryant’s Muse and Man in the Arena. Here’s what he had to say …
On why he was interested in telling this story …
“I’m a certain age. I’m almost 50. I’m 49 years old, so I grew up in the ‘80s when Bon Jovi, the band, arrived on the scene. Slippery When Wet, New Jersey — I remember those days as a kid. I was familiar with it. I have a lot of family, [and] my family in India, for a lot of them Bon Jovi was America back then. I used to travel and spend a lot of time in India, so I was familiar with it. I didn’t know Jon’s origins in New Jersey and all of that, and so I think I was just fascinated by it. Jon actually approached me. He had seen something else I had done. It was about Tom Brady and Tom Brady’s 20 years of success in football. Jon is a huge sports fan. He said, ‘Yeah, Tom’s pretty good. He’s got 20 years, but I’ve got almost 40. We’ve never told our story. I’m interested. Do you want to explore this with me?’ It was a pretty easy yes for me.”
On finding the universal message of Bon Jovi’s story …
“That’s the intent. The rock star stuff, the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, which there is a lot of in those early days, that’s not particularly relatable, but Jon is the archetypal story. That first hit song, ‘Runaway,’ that he recorded back in 1981 or something like that, everybody said, ‘No, no, not good enough.’ He had the door slammed in his face a dozen times, and yet he kept on going. That’s one of his great qualities, I think, is resilience. That’s relatable. OK, how do you pick yourself up off the floor? That, I think, was his gift, the unwillingness to accept no and that ability to keep grinding and going for it. Admirable, but also that’s applicable. We can all do that. Those were the things we were in search of to try to ground the story more.”
On how to divide the project into four parts …
“We knew 40 years. At one point, we’re like maybe we’ll arrange this by decades. That’s probably where the four parts came from, 40 years, but then as you start to really go into it, it doesn’t move exactly [that way]. … Then the organizing principle came through the storytelling. I think I always knew, oh, this is going to be more than a feature doc. There’s so much here. There’s so much archive. Not only had Jon and the band collected all this stuff over 40 years, but really in the ‘80s when Slippery When Wet and New Jersey exploded was the rise of MTV. So it had been documented by others, and then VH1 into the ‘90s, and so there was this perfect storm of archive to navigate and tap into.”
On filming the warts and all …
“I think Jon’s a really smart guy, so early on after, ‘Yes, yes, yes, I want to do this,’ it was like, OK, but we’re going to have to deal with a lot of this stuff, the ebbs and flows of relationships. Originally this was going to be a retrospective, looking back 40 years, but then by the time we were near 39 … ‘Wait, what’s going on with your voice? Like something’s happening here.’ He was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, I’m struggling with it.’ He’s like, ‘But that’s not for the film.’ I was like, ‘No, no, no, that’s for the film.’
“I think Jon is a really smart guy, and he understood very early on that in order for this work, in order for this to really celebrate the band, and I think we’re all unified around that, it has to be honest. It has to be authentic. It has to be warts and all. Yes, I’ve got to talk to Richie [Sambora]. That’s really important. He’s like, ‘You have to talk to Richie. That’s really important.’ We just decided, and he was very open. It takes time. It’s a relationship, gaining that trust. … There’s tons of archive, lots of band members, lot of time. I’m going to have to talk to a lot of people and figure this out, and we weren’t really under the burden. There was a 40-year anniversary coming up on the horizon, but it wasn’t like we had to hit this deadline. There was space, and he really granted that.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story, directed by Gotham Chopra, is currently streaming on Hulu. Click here for more information.
