Director Thom Zimny is due for a big September: Come Sept. 22, he’ll find out whether he’s winning an Emmy Award for directing “Springsteen on Broadway” for Netflix. Ten days before tha…
“Although it’s a great honor to have the body of work, working with him, I never think about it like I’m his filmographer or this [next] job is there,” Zimny says. “Starting from ground zero is really important for me, because then you’re not riding on anything. And I’m picking up all that from Bruce, because he once said” ‘There is no “Born to Run 2.” He elaborates: “‘Born to Run’ was a layered album, and then he went to ‘Darkness’ and it was a stripped-down record where he went the other way.
“I used the same cinematographer as ‘Springsteen on Broadway,’ ” he says, referring to DP Joe DeSalvo, “but we really went a different way with the language of it. It’s not a straight concert film; it has moments of him reflecting and talking about the new music” — without the small live audience that came for the intimate barn concert — “and we go in and out of those moments to a live performance of the new album.
It feels daring, to generally eliminate the audience as anything other than a presence felt in the surround speakers. But there was precedent. “I think of ‘The Last Waltz’ as being a great reference to the lack of audience shots. I think it keeps it very timeless as a film, as a piece, because you’re able to step into it as an audience member at any point.
There was a spark of both in the bold choice for an opening shot, which has Zimny starting right in with a tight closeup of Springsteen’s face. “We didn’t want to do a preamble backstage or have him walking up the stairs,” the director says. Springsteen himself has talked about one spark for that choice being Elvis Presley’s 1968 comeback special, and how it begins with an already zoomed-in opening shot.
Far from milking showy camera moves to make you forget you’re watching one guy for 2½ hours, Zimny’s approach was to not be afraid of a lot of fairly static close-ups early on to create a Springsteenian trance, then moving the camera around more once you’re too hypnotized to be consciously watching out for those moves.
Zimny didn’t storyboard all of “Springsteen on Broadway,” but he did with select songs. “If you look at ‘The Ghost of Tom Joad,’ that’s one where I knew I didn’t want a single cut for those three verses. And when it comes to the line where Tom Joad speaks to his mom before he goes and says ‘You’ll see me in all the eyes of the people,’ I knew at that moment I had to be very close on Bruce delivering that — and I knew I had to earn that moment by slowly bringing camera in.
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