For those who have read Lizzy Goodman’s “Meet Me in the Bathroom,”The book is an epic oral story that covers 10 years worth of New York City rock music, starting in the 2000s. The book’s carefully constructed conversations are unique because they include dozens of voices from those who experienced it. So a film adaptation of the book couldn’t just be any old music documentary.
“What we didn’t want to do was make a ‘Behind the Music’ type of documentary. We wanted to make something that lives and breathes and makes you feel like you had been dropped into that time,”Dylan Southern, co-director of Sundance Studio. “We just wanted to do something that kept the spirit of the book, because when you’re reading the book it felt like a live conversation that’s happening, and with film we had the added bonus that we could drop people visually into that period, and we didn’t want to break that spell.”
“Meet Me in the Bathroom” is wholly constructed of archival material from the time and doesn’t include any talking head interviews or voices of people telling the story who weren’t actually there. You get rare footage of artists like The Strokes or The Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Interpol as they rose in the New York City rock scene.
To make the film engaging as a visual medium, the filmmakers had to conduct additional research beyond the many interviews Goodman compiled in the book.
“We definitely looked at it and thought, how do you make that into a film,”Will Lovelace was co-director.
“We had to find the pictures that go with those stories or tell new stories, and that involved new detective work,”Southern addition. “We got LCD Soundsystem’s first show right at the 11th hour.”
Two directors discovered footage by looking through old message boards. They also spoke with journalists who had hidden audio or undeveloped film. Through the coronavirus epidemic, they built a rich archive. “Meet Me in the Bathroom.”
“COVID really helped us out weirdly. We were going to come to New York and shoot some bits up first, but COVID allowed us to make it 100% archive,”Southern. “It also meant that a lot of people who were stuck in their houses and willing to go up into their attic. They were much more amenable to be given a task than if their normal lives were going on. I’m not saying thank god for COVID or anything.”
Goodman’s first writing venture “Meet Me in the Bathroom,”It was a surprise to her that the film would ever be made. Also, she had to be able to visually tell her story or experience the same things that her readers enjoyed reading her book. Being able to relax and allow other professionals to tell her story through a different medium proved to be a blessing. “total fantasy”That captures the most important parts of the book. “a much fuller way than I could have ever hoped for.”
“In a way, the whole ‘Meet Me in the Bathroom’ of the story kind of eluded me in terms of the actual emotional impact of it. The joy that people have felt, which is amazing, reading it, I never had that. I never had that. ‘Oh my God this is our time,’ I never had that feeling coming back until we started working on this,”Goodman said. “I feel I actually understand that I was part of something really beautiful and meaningful, and I got to experience the viewer’s side of that.”
Listen to Dylan Southern, Lizzy Goodman and Will Lovelace discuss the topic “Meet Me in the Bathroom”Sundance, above.
’s Sundance Studio is presented by NFP and National Geographic Documentary Films.