Longtime rock band photographer and music video director Anton Corbijn waited until relatively late in his career to try his hand at feature filmmaking. His first effort was the austere Ian Curtis biopic “Control,” which he followed up last year with the masterful assassin tale “The American.” However, it seems like big screen movies aren’t quite a comfortable fit for the helmer. Last fall he admitted he may only have one more film left in him, and that may be an adaptation of John le Carré‘s political thriller “A Most Wanted Man,” which he signed for back in June. Not much has been heard on that front since, but Corbijn is still plenty busy. Before he gets to that film, Arts Beat report he’ll team with Coldplay and helm their upcoming concert webcast for the American Express Unstaged series.
Corbijn is no stranger to the Brit rock band, having directed a spot for “Talk” and an alternate version of “Viva La Vida.” His latest collaboration with the group will take him to the Plaza de Toros de Las Ventas in Madrid. The hire continues the Unstaged template of pairing auteurs with high profile bands with Terry Gilliam, David Lynch and Todd Haynes working with Arcade Fire, Depeche Mode and My Morning Jacket, respectively, in the past. No word yet if Corbijn is planning anything special in his approach to the concert, but with 20,000 screaming fans, it will certainly be the loudest project he’s ever done.
Of course, Coldplay will be promoting Mylo Xyloto, and it should be interesting to note that this new album actually started as a soundtrack for a movie they were writing. For real. “It was going to be a kind of soundtrack album to a film we were writing which had a story through it and we got quite far down the line with designing characters, and then we abandoned that idea and moved into a different direction, retaining elements of the acoustic album and the soundtrack album, so what we’ve ended up with is an album that we arrived at in quite an unusual sort of way. So it’s kind of a hotchpotch of all those different phases,” bassist Guy Berryman told Music Week.
Anyway, you can tune in your interwebs at 4 p.m. EST on Oct. 26th to see what Corbijn and Coldplay have cooked up. And the album comes out two days before, so you superfans out there will probably have all the lyrics memorized by then. As for Corbijn, he says he’ll get to work on “A Most Wanted Man” once he’s done his webcast duties, and we can’t wait to see that one come together.