INTERVIEW: New documentary sits down with Bill Wyman, the ‘quiet’ Rolling Stone
Photo: The Quiet One tells the story of Bill Wyman, former bassist for the Rolling Stones. Photo courtesy of Bent Rej / Courtesy of Sundance Selects / Provided by Susan Norget Film Production with permission.
Summer 2019 is shaping up to be an important time for Rolling Stones fans. The band will be touring North America in the coming months, after the group rescheduled dates following lead singer Mick Jagger’s recent health scare. And there’s also a new documentary that delivers a personal portrait of Bill Wyman, former bassist for the Stones.
The Quiet One, which opened in theaters June 21, is the brainchild of director Oliver Murray. The first-time filmmaker was granted access to Wyman and his personal music archives, which are extensive and chart the history of rock and blues over the last 50+ years. Wyman, in turn, dispelled rumors of simply being the “quiet one” in the band and opened up to Murray like he’s never opened up to a project before.
The result is a touching, informative documentary about a musician, a band and the music that influenced them. It’s a rare behind-the-scenes tale of arguably the greatest rock ‘n’ roll band of all time. This is quite a rabbit-hole trip into the 82-year-old’s musical vault.
“I was working primarily in London and in Europe as a music video director, and I was making commercials and short films and making a living as a writer as well,” Murray said in a recent phone interview. “I got asked by the producers of the film, who I had got to know through the music industry through the video-making, and they said would I be interested in meeting Bill Wyman. I thought, well, if I’m honest, I don’t really know a huge amount about Bill.”
Up until this point, Murray had directed music videos for bands such as The Horrors, The Vaccines and Midlake. However, he has been pining to get into the documentary world, mostly because of his desire to make films about extraordinary times and extraordinary people.
“And Bill’s life is certainly nothing less than extraordinary, and that band is a legendary band that means so much to so many people,” he said. “So I kind of dived in with both feet because I selfishly thought this was a great way to learn, but then also I knew the huge amount of people that would be interested in hearing from someone who has always been so quiet. I was interested in what it might be like at the back of the stage. Bill, to me, he was the silent, stationary guy with the rumbling bass lines. Him and [drummer] Charlie [Watts] were that dependable rock that meant the other guys could go crazy around the stage and provide the theater and write those fantastic songs.”
This was Murray’s plan at the beginning of the project, before he knew much about Wyman. But what if the musician stuck to his supposedly quiet ways and didn’t open for a feature-length documentary?
Luckily that was not the case.
“What I wasn’t expecting was that … every now and then you see the glimpse of the Bill of old, the sort of rockstar, but really he is now a dedicated music historian, archivist,” Murray said. “He’s dedicated to preserving the memory and getting all that history down of what he did, what his bandmates did and sort of contextualizing his journey and his friends’ [journey]. His mission, if you like, is to get all that stuff down before there’s no one else left to remember it.”
Murray found Wyman’s archive truly mind-blowing in its scope and detail. In order to understand the compiled stories and the musician himself, the director felt it was necessary to literally immerse himself in Wyman’s life. The bassist was open to such a close inspection.
“Really the only way for me to immerse myself in it was to go and live with the guy, so that’s what I did, which was as amazing an experience as you might think to sit with a Rolling Stone and listen to all those stories firsthand and pore over every photo and get the Super 8 projector out and screen some of the footage,” Murray said. “Amazingly some of it he hadn’t actually seen since he shot it or since a fan or a roadie had donated it to his collection. There’s just such a huge volume of stuff.”
Most of the production for the documentary took place in the south of France, where Wyman has had a house for a number of years. At the musician’s home, Murray found Wyman emotionally available to the interviewing process.
“I knew we had something that I was immediately very, very excited about,” he said. “I think he’s the most relaxed out in France because he’s lived there for so long, and then I just thought we had this fantastic combination of access to brilliant material. This narrator was so emotionally available and so able to talk about himself in those terms, which is kind of the opposite of that rockstar bravado, which at times made it feel like I was working with a guy called Bill Wyman who is just an expert on Bill Wyman, the Rolling Stone, if that makes sense.
He added: “One of the things the film taught me was that, especially if people lead lives like a Rolling Stone might, he’s led multiple lives. He’s worn different hats and been a different personality for different portions of his life, and that was the thrust of what I was setting out to do.”
When IFC came into the picture, Murray started getting serious about securing the rights to the music and archival footage in the film. With a band like the Rolling Stones, which has a storied and complex history, this securing of rights can be a chore.
“We got together and decided to go ahead and take a pretty risk and make the movie,” Murray said about his partnership with IFC. “I say it was a risk because of all the rights involved in the music, and the legacy of that band is so important to so many people that I felt this weight of responsibility making this film. And we all felt like that and wanting to do right by Bill and by Bill’s family. Thankfully everybody was pointing in the same direction, which often can be the worst part of documentaries. Obviously it’s real life, and real life is complicated. And people don’t always see eye to eye, but I had a fantastic experience with all the record labels and the rest of the Stones and the wider family of all the people that surround that band and the other important individuals of that era.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Quiet One, directed by Oliver Murray and featuring Bill Wyman, is now playing in select theaters. Click here for more information.
