‘Beastie Boys Story’ Editors Talk Working With Spike Jonze & Representing The Adventurous Spirit Of Adam Yauch [Interview]

In May of 2012, musician, artist, rapper, filmmaker, and political activist Adam Yauch (MCA) passed away after a battle with cancer. His influential group, the seminal hip -hop trio, The Beastie Boys, essentially died on the same day too. Though the group may be over, their legacy lives on and their remaining members, Michael Diamond (Mike D) and Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock) have carried on to at least memorializing their band and their de facto leader Yauch. In 2018, the duo released the memoir, Beastie Boys Book and to keep it going as a multi-media project, they also took the book on tour and adapted it as a stage show, for a few key dates around the U.S. and the U.K. Those shows were then filmed by visionary filmmaker Spike Jonze (“Being John Malkovich,” “Her”), a key Beasties collaborator who worked with the group throughout their career, and shot some of their most iconic music videos (“Sabotage,” “Sure Shot,” “Time For Livin’,” and more). The book tour turned into “Beastie Boys Story,” a documentary for Apple TV+ that debuted this spring, that presented the live book tour show, but interspersed and told via thousands of archival clips.

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In fact, “Beastie Boys Story” was something of an organic evolution. First, it began as a book, the Beasties wanting to take it on the road, and then reaching out to their friend and collaborator Spike Jonze to see if he could recommend editors to help them put photos from the book into the live show. Jonze recommended longtime editing collaborator Jeff Buchanan and Zoe Schack, but the project kept growing. Why not use photo montages, video montages, archival clips, and on and on? By the time the Beastie Boys Book was about to be taken on the road and Jonze had agreed to shoot and direct several of the New York events in the hopes of turning it into a documentary, Buchanan and Schack had already been intimately working with the Beasties for several months on the project.

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In total, they spent a year-and-a-half working on the Beastie Boys book, the tour, the shows, and then compiling it all together for Jonze’s “Beastie Boys Story” doc. “Beastie Boys Story” is a wonderful tribute to the band, Yauch, but also a bittersweet coming of age story about boys who grew up into men, and socially-conscious, thoughtful ones at that. Incidentally, another beneficial by-product of the doc: while both Jonze and the Beasties were originally pegged as prankster-ish pastiche-y stylists always with their tongues firmly in their cheeks, “Beastie Boys Story” demonstrates ones again how both matured into very emotionally pure and sensitive artists. I recently spoke to the editors about their lengthy collaboration with the Beasties, working with Spike Jonze and doing their best to capture the spirit of the band and their adventurous creative leader Adam Yauch.

This doc is a big trip down memory lane for many. Beasties were an important band in my life growing up. How does that apply to you guys?
Jeff Buchanan: Definitely, I was a huge fan. I was more of a Check Your Head era and I think that there’s definitely like three distinct fan groups, the License to Ill crowd, the Check Your Head era and then the Hello, Nasty, and ‘Intergalactic’ side of the band [laughs].

Zoe Schack: I was a Hello, Nasty kid. My older sister’s first concert was a Beastie Boys concert. I remember the first time her friend came over and played Beasties in our living room. And it’s interesting because in different phases of my life, I listened to different albums or songs. During my punk rock phase, I was more into [their 1995 hardcore EP] Aglio e Olio. But different phases of my life definitely took me to different albums and different songs.

Jeff Buchanan: Growing up with MTV and, being a product of the late eighties, I somehow knew every word on License to Ill, without even remembering owning the record or cassette—because it was always on the radio back then. Paul’s Boutique, I missed it when it first came out. But I was so into Check Your Head, even more so than Ill Communication. And once we started working with them, it’s like we already knew so much about them, their sense of humor, interests, their references—I felt like I had a head start because I was very much on their wavelength.

This doc has everything and luckily you have a band that documented a lot of their exploits. There are all kinds of archival footage, but I imagine one of the first things you guys did was go to MTV News?
Zoe Schack: Yeah, we definitely talked to MTV pretty much straight off the bat, but we also did a lot of YouTube digging and then from there we’d go back to MTV and be like, “Oh, what do you have from this era? So, it was really a treasure trove of content that we had to work with, but also not just MTV: we found these amazing, Joan Rivers interviews, interviews from Japanese variety shows, they were so popular around the world, we had so much to work with. We constantly were receiving footage, even up to the last minute. We also had access to their personal archives.

Which must be its own treasure trove.
Jeff Buchanan: Yeah, Spike Jonze gave us some home video footage that he shot in the nineties in New York. One of Adam [Horowitz’s] best friends Nadia Dajani, sent us a ton of tapes. We had a great mix of the slick, kind of MTV interviews, high in production value, and then really lo-fi home video stuff and I think that’s true to who that band was and is, and how they mixed sounds and sources. And even their music videos, they always navigated those two hi-fi/lo-fi worlds, high profile expensive videos and then like no-budget video.

Given how much material you had to work with, how long was the editing? And then of course you’ve got the narrative spine of the story, which is like the show itself.
Jeff Buchanan: Well, we actually got brought on way early to help them develop all the background content for the book release shows. I think Mike emailed Spike and just said, “do you know an editor that could help us out? And I had been working with Spike for 15 years and he connected me with them. So they pitched to me, the idea, “as we’re telling stories from the book, we want the corresponding photo from the book in the background. But it was like, why just one photo when you can have photos. And that turned into Zoe and I creating all these montages of photos and videos and morphing into what that stage show is. And that was October 2018.

It kept changing because they transformed the book into more of a stage play adaptation, and Zoe and I were there through all that too. We were at all the shows cutting material, the night before the shows, the morning of, all down to the wire. So, we were there every step of the way and then we went directly into the edit for the movie, so it was definitely a year and a half long process.

So the show is the show, but everything is shaped in the edit, so what were your biggest emotional and thematic takeaways— the things that you kind of wanted to highlight or brighten throughout? Because it’s a surprisingly intimate and emotional kind of documentary,
Zoe Schack: Overall, it’s really a story about friendship. They’re such good friends with each other and it’s really so touching how they were such good friends from the beginning and they lasted, they had each other’s back, we’re really there for each other.  And they’re good friends to the friends around them—they really care about the people in their lives and connections.

Also, the band reflecting on their own previous mistakes: one of the things that makes them so extraordinary is just how self-reflective they are about everything they’ve been through. The mistakes and triumphs and how grateful they are as human beings. All of that really was important to get through.  And them the other big thing was giving Adam Yauch a voice and presence.

Jeff Buchanan: Yeah, that was our main driving inspiration—to make sure Yauch’s represented in the film and that has his voice and spirit were just totally intertwined into the story.  Obviously, it comes through because we found moments of interviews that we could use, but also it was just like the spirit of keeping it really loose, not taking it super seriously, and even keeping bad, bad jokes that don’t work. Let it go off the rails a little bit. Because that’s what Yauch’s philosophy, which is don’t take it too seriously, whatever dumb idea you have, throw it in there, see what happens. Don’t be precious or pretentious. So, we tried to inject that into the film, like keeping crazy shit moments and mistakes—like when Spike is directing them onstage and the teleprompter fucks up, all that stuff. That’s so on-brand for these guys. It was their style, not making things slick and polished, but getting creative in a fun and spontaneous way. So that became another big thesis to our approach.

It’s definitely a wonderful tribute to Yauch, but I also find it this really beautiful and touching coming of age story of men who matured and grew up into these really wonderful human beings.
Jeff Buchanan: The structure of it was the classic structure of a great band. They have a dream to start a band, but they immediately got into it for all the right reasons from the start: just a fun thing to do with our friends. It was never calculated. And then out of nowhere it explodes, and there’s all the baggage that comes with that, but then they reinvented themselves. So yeah, I guess it’s coming of age, but it’s almost like constant reinvention because that’s just who they are. They did Check Your Head, then they made a punk album and then a jazz-funk instrumental album. They was just so hard to pin down, so, they’re always sort of coming of age in a weird way.

Tell me about working with Spike Jonze on this project because he’s obviously known and worked with the Beasties for decades.
Jeff Buchanan: Well, Spike’s thing is—and I don’t know if everyone sees it like that because they think visuals or goofy stuff, but— emotion, emotion, emotion. How can you tell the story in the most emotional way possible? We’re never vague about it, when it’s in a sad moment, you honor that feeling. For Zoe and I, it was like, how do we tell this story? It’s imbuing the most emotion possible, and including the feelings that are the most honest and true. And that’s Spike’s thing, honesty, and truth, never bullshitting around it and attacking it full force.

Zoe Schack: The great thing about working with Spike is that he always strives for the best of every moment. Like, we have a montage, there’s a good photo at the end of it, maybe not perfect, but pretty good. Spike lets you go with it, but he tells you that he thinks we could all look and find something better.

Jeff Buchanan: Yeah, it’s not perfectionism. It’s just an intuition of how something can feel better. So, you keep looking and looking and you find that thing that just lands that moment so much better. He’s got this amazing way of making you look so much smarter for an idea he planted. That’s why it’s so beneficial to work with great directors, you can really feel their equation of this line of dialogue, with this photo and this piece of music—he just makes everything so great.

Zoe, final thoughts?
Zoe Schack: No, I think that’s perfect!

Jeff Buchanan: Zoe, you have to land the plane! It’s funny, Mike D would always tell us these elaborate stories and thoughts and ideas, and he has this kind of way of talking in this beautiful long circle, but then we’d always have to say, “Mike, you’ve got to land the plan, you’ve got to land the plane.” [laugher]

“Beastie Boys Story” is available now on Apple TV+.