INTERVIEW: New documentary tracks John Waite’s ‘Hard Way’ to the top
Photo: John Waite is the subject of the new documentary John Waite — The Hard Way. Photo courtesy of the artist / Provided by Gravitas Ventures with permission.
Filmmaker Mike J. Nichols knows what he’s doing behind the camera. The successful documentarian has contributed to many different projects that have profiled important subjects in the music industry, from Frank Zappa to the music scene that emerged from Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles.
Nichols’ latest is John Waite — The Hard Way, which follows the ’80s rock icon and his five decades in a sometimes unforgiving profession. The film, which is now available on streaming services, is an intimate portrayal of an unconventional artist who has never followed anyone’s prefabricated model of a rockstar. He takes to the stage, night after night, and brings his art alongside him, like a traveling salesman unfurling his wares in front of a hopeful crowd. The film transcends the conventions of a music biopic and touches upon more universal themes that hit right at the heart of being an artist, being someone who struggles and triumphs, of being an invested member of the world community.
The Hard Way is an appropriate title for the film. Nichols said the name speaks to Waite’s five decades of doing it the “hard way” and finding success with such hit songs as “Missing You” and “Restless Heart.” But that title also defines Nichols’ struggles in bringing this film to life during a global pandemic that prevented the customary scenes one can find in a documentary. There was no filming of Waite walking down the sidewalk because communities were quarantined. Instead, he had to rely on unique, socially-distanced methods to document his subject, and supplement those images with stellar, but exceedingly rare, archival footage that shows Waite in his prime.
“I always keep saying I think it’s impossible that it exists,” Nichols said about his new documentary. “There’s never been a screening that I’ve been to with people. It’s all been electronic. … Not being in the room with people during most of this stuff has kind of been the way it was. It’s very unnatural. For me and Alex [Winter], we worked on this movie about Frank Zappa, and it went across over five years. The premiere was at South by Southwest on March 13, 2020, and we got our tickets to fly there. And then it all got shut down that day, so we never did any of that stuff. And so I never really got to ever see that movie presented for an audience. Isn’t that strange?”
When Nichols joined this Waite project, he had some obstacles in his way that he need to solve, and a lot fell on his shoulders because he is credited not only as director, but also writer and co-producer with Scott Wright.
“We’re not going to be able to follow [Waite] around in an vérité type of way,” he said. “We can’t follow him on tour because there’s not going to be any tours. All of that stuff is all gone. I guess if you’ve ever seen anything I’ve worked on, I always have an arthouse quality. I’m not a marketing film kind of person. There’s always some sort of narrative aspect to things I do. … So because of not being able to do what is standard, there’s an arthouse feel to it because we’re missing a lot of the things that maybe somebody else in a different, non-COVID kind of thing might have gotten, especially the vérité, the following people around. Not knowing how you could make a movie out of this became part of the movie itself. The movie being called The Hard Way, to me, is not only about the timeline of how someone got five decades through a music business, but also the making of it, too. All of that is all represented by that title, to me.”
There also wasn’t much archival footage of Waite, who often was in the habit of simply playing his songs on stage and not recording the audio or video of the performance. This was in stark contrast to Nichols’ last project, which was Zappa.
“Zappa was a person that began shooting his life behind a camera in the ‘50s and the ‘60s as a young kid making movies, and he kept all this stuff,” Nichols said. “And then he became a musician, and he had recordings, and he had Super 8, 16mm, then videotape. He documented things, not necessarily his career, but just life around him, and he had this whole repository in the basement of his house that is like the Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
Waite, on the other hand, came from modest means. Both of his parents worked in order to pay the bills, and as a child, the singer was something of a latch-key kid. They didn’t take many pictures or video recordings because there wasn’t a camera in the house.
“They didn’t just run around and take pictures, and throughout his career, through the ‘70s and the ‘80s, all those things, he’s not recording concerts,” he said. “He’s not recording it audio-wise or having a documentarian shoot it like a lot of people do now. The art, for him, is going out and playing the concert. And you play the show, ‘Thanks a lot,’ you go home, and that’s it. You don’t think about it anymore. That’s the performance. So when you go to make a documentary about somebody like that, they don’t have a huge repository of their past because they did not do it that way. So that’s another challenge to do something like this is having a person who doesn’t have an archive of their life because they were sharing it on stage live.”
One particular example of Waite not recording his concerts is especially interesting. Eddie Van Halen, the legendary guitarist who died two years ago, actually joined Waite on stage at a theater in Hollywood during the height of Van Halen and Waite’s solo career.
“He gets on stage with John at a time when John was really huge, and he does a couple songs,” Nichols said. “And you think, that’s great. Do you have any footage of that? No, it doesn’t exist. There’s audio, but it’s like people just sat and watched this thing and had their mouths open, but people didn’t have cameras or video equipment. It just seems so strange that there’s no visual footage of that whole thing, but there isn’t. I couldn’t find it.”
Thanks to Nichols’ new film, some of the memories from Waite’s career have now been painstakingly stitched together.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
John Waite — The Hard Way, directed, written and co-produced by Mike J. Nichols, is now available on streaming platforms from Gravitas Ventures. Click here for more information.
