Daryl Hannah, who directed the new Neil Young film, ‘Coastal’
Dana Fineman
The Daryl Hannah-directed documentary, Neil Young: Coastal, a wonderfully intimate look at Young’s 2023 solo tour, his first post-COVID run, is in theaters today, April 17, for what is right now a one-day run.
The film isn’t just an incredibly human portrayal of Young by the person who knows him best, his wife, it’s a revealing look at what life on the road is like for many musicians. It is a very humane study of the highs of sold-out shows and the loneliness, particularly of as Hannah points out, a solo tour.
I spoke with Hannah about the film.
Steve Baltin: It’s such a great film. I really love the way you capture the intimacy of it and one of my favorite scenes is when Neil is standing around and he looks at the venue and he says that’s a great stage. As someone who has been to 5,000 shows easy I never thought about that as a fan. And I love the way that in the film you capture these little moments.
Daryl Hannah: Thank you. That’s what I was hoping to do with this documentary is show people an aspect that they would have not seen before, but of Neil as a person and as a performer, and help people get a little bit of an experience of what it’s to be like on a solo tour. And then we had the added bonus of having these just beautiful theaters as well, which was so lovely to have, the John Anson Ford [in LA]
and the space age Star Wars Bean shaped shell in San Diego and then the classic Greek theater in Berkeley. They’re so beautiful and stunning and the show is obviously so intimate.
Baltin: I love the way you started too with the bus stuff. You say you wanted to show a different side of Neil. I’ve been fortunate to interview Neil at least three or four times. But I think what’s really cool is that you capture life not just for Neil, but what it can be like on the road for so many different people.
Hannah: Yeah. And especially on a solo tour it’s very solitary and, so in a way, the audience becomes his collaborator. Also, I wanted to really show the sort of loneliness of a solo tour. After the show you’re back on the bus and it’s not the sort of rock and roll show perception that people really have. There’s more of a normal life quality and that’s why I edited it the way I did in terms of leaving in the pauses between a conversation and making it feel like real life rather than like here’s a joke and there’s another one. I wanted it to feel like you were really there and, in the moment, rather than making it unnatural.
Baltin: Because of COVID, this was Neil’s first tour in five years. And, as you say, doing a solo tour is such a solitary isolationist thing in so many ways. So, were there things about the tour two that surprised you? Brause you may know him better than anyone in the world, but when you see him in this environment, it’s still a new environment.
Hannah: Pretty much everything surprised me. His sense of humor takes me by surprise all the time; his observations, his timing and the rye nature of it. But I was surprised that he was nervous, I was surprised that he was so nervous before the first show. And of course, I’m always taken by surprise by what song he’s going to play because you never know. There’s a line that’s pretty hard to hear in the film because the audio was on my cell phone. But Bob Rice, who is organizing his guitars, is asking him if he should tune Old Black to a G for a certain song. And Neil said, “Well, it will reveal itself in the moment. You have a 50 /50 chance.” That’s just the way it goes. Even with us, me as a filmmaker, me and my cinematographer, C.K. Volek, who helped me set the cameras on the stage, for the performance part, we only had three cameras or something. We had to guess which instruments to focus them on, and we couldn’t readjust them during the show. So, sometimes we would choose a piano that he played, say in soundcheck, and then he would never play that piano during the entire show. There are so many surprises I can’t even tell you.
Baltin: In a weird way though that’s got to be fun as a filmmaker. That’s a rock and roll thing is to just go in and accept whatever happens. That’s what makes a great show, that spontaneity.
Hannah: Yeah, that’s, what I love so much about documentaries, particularly cinema verite documentaries. I was hoping to make a cinema verite documentary, but I guess this wouldn’t exactly qualify because occasionally he looks right into the camera, and I talk. So, it’s not, it’s not a purist cinema verite. That was something I also wasn’t anticipating, like I really did not want to have that aspect be in the film, but then when then when I kept seeing it come up and I was trying to cut around it in the editing room, eventually I fell in love with it because I really loved the warmth in his smile when he’s talking to me or when he’s talking about talking to Ben. Or about Ben, it’s just such a beautiful openness that he has in those moments that you rarely see from Neil.
Baltin: Even that moment when he gets on the bus and he sees you and he says, “Oh, I missed you on the bus last night.” That really captures life on the road. As someone who’s interviewed so many musicians, life on the road is brutal.
Hannah: It can be. And that’s why we really make an effort to make the bus our second home, we have the dogs there and I’ll cook dinner. It’s not like a soulless adventure that it can be if you don’t put that that kind of effort into it.
Baltin: I love the interplay between him and the bus driver because it shows them as not just employer and employee, but as friends.
Hannah: I really was hoping to capture these, I call them my “Beavis and Butthead moments,” these goofy conversations cause they have such a funny easy humor with each other. I hate this word because it sounds judgmental but these mundane moments, but I don’t think they’re mundane in a boring way. I’m talking about mundane in an everyday way. I love the humanness of that realness, and so that’s why I left in those conversations and those pauses because I wanted to show how that the conversations that he shares with Jerry down on the bus or they flow right into the conversation that he continues to have with his audience. It’s a continuum, it’s not like, “Now I’m going on stage, and I’m going to be a different person and put on a persona and all that.” I think that’s the key to appreciating life, appreciating those little moments. This movie is a collection of those little moments. It’s not a really magnified examination of someone’s psyche and their psychological problems or issues or anything like that. It’s this appreciation of those little life natural moments.