Billion-dollar dreams




German TV interviewer: 'You own expensive hotels. Now, you've made a movie of a hotel. Why hotels?' Bono: 'Rock bands often know a whole lot about hotels. Hotels are where we live.' Almost Decade ago, after an afternoon's drinking at the lake in the Sunset Marquis hotel, I found myself sharing a cab with the lead singer of U2, heading on the cluster of skyscrapers that comprise downtown L . a .. The spot, Bono warned me along the way, was obviously a place of extremes even by LA standards: during the day, populated by bankers and bond traders; by night, a magnet for that disaffected, the down-at-heel and the plain and simple deranged. Our destination was the Million Dollar Hotel, a building which had captured the singer's imagination later in the event the band tried a photo-shoot on its roof in the tour to come the discharge with their 15-million-selling album, The Joshua Tree. Within moments of our own arrival, it absolutely was easy to see why the Bono, then infatuated with the writings of Charles Bukowski and Tennessee Williams, was so mesmerised through the place. The Big Hotel had once been symbolic of the truly great American dream, and am named because it was the initial such establishment to cost that talismanic amount to construct. This being America, the actual fact ended up being duly celebrated in illuminated, 20ft-tall letters on the top.Now, though, it turned out a shadow of their former self, and many types of greater intriguing for that. The 30s art-deco lobby looked like a mixture of a motion picture set and also a welfare queue. Its once-opulent rooms were now home to a microcosmic cross-section in the lower echelons of LA's fiercely divided society: blue-collar workers roomed across the street from welfare mothers; misfits and drop-outs mingled using the inevitable flotsam and jetsam of Tinseltown,cheap gucci handbags, the wannabes and might-have-beens stranded in this cruel limbo-land where Hollywood was both a cab ride and a world away. We gained use of the roof and stood within the shadows cast by the giant, rusty sign, surveying the gleaming glass-and-steel towers and, way beyond them in the distance, the hazy, sun-burnished hills. Then, Bono led me across towards the edge of your building, nodded with the rooftop opposite, which have seemed reasonably close at walk out but which from this point was separated by a yawning gap dropping 25 storeys to the street, and asked only thought I can "make the leap". His beefy minder twitched visibly, wondering, like myself, where this became leading. The leap under consideration was that's doubtful that big, however the drop... well, let's just say that a cursory glance on the side was enough to dispel any margarita-fuelled bravado and send me scampering time for the relative safety with the garish hotel sign. Much on the relief of the minder, Bono eventually followed me. "It's do-able," he said, even as left the rooftop, "but you'd desire a good long run-up to it." Nearly 10 years later, The Billion dollar Hotel, a film directed by the German director Wim Wenders, starring Australian actor Mel Gibson and scripted by American writer Nicholas Klein, from an original story by the Irish rock star, is opening the 50th Berlin film festival. Metaphorically, at the very least, Bono - following a good long run-up - has finally made that leap. "It was likely to be a play in regards to a leap of faith," he elaborates, automobile on the way towards the gala opening with the film festival, "but it mutated into something bigger and darker. I'd think of it as a dark fable about the redemptive power of love. And love, naturally, could be the ultimate leap of faith." Italian TV interviewer: 'Ciao, maestro! Why do you pick this Big Hotel? This is a sad place, no?' Bono: 'Very sad. I became there once whenever a woman was given away of a window.' Italian TV interviewer: 'Fantastic!' The film opens which has a long, single-take helicopter shot of downtown LA, accompanied by the opening verses of Initially, painstaking, reflective U2 ballad through the 1993 Zooropa album. Since the camera pans as a result of, and then across, the Million Dollar sign, we percieve a new man standing alone on the roof. In slow motion, he runs across the rooftop and makes an altogether different leap into - depending on where you're received from - nothingness or eternity. While he falls to his death, we hear, in voice-over, one of several great opening lines of recent times: "After I jumped, it occurred to me, every day life is perfect . . ." It can be a moment of pure cinema that recalls Wenders' last great work, Wings Of Desire, and reminds you why the director, though and not on type of late, remains so influential. Similar bravura moments punctuate a motion picture that is, by turns, baffling and strangely seductive, but that also, like lots of contemporary films, outstays its welcome by some lots of time. Though it features strong performances from Jeremy Davies as Tom Tom, the holy fool at the story's centre, and Milla Jovovich, the model, actress and current face of L'Oréal cosmetics, the dreamy and narcotic narrative - part doomed romance, part murder mystery, part art-scam - unfolds at the meandering pace. The storyline, though ultimately heartbreaking, is peopled by way of a cast of damaged characters whose weirdness reflects the singularity with the real Billion dollar Hotel. Gibson fans can be unwise to anticipate an action-fest, given that he wanders through the film in the metal neckbrace and wears a permanent grimace; the effect, we learn, of the botched operation to get rid of another arm that grew beyond his back. Rumours Stateside were that Gibson was below enchanted with all the final product, and the man would not attend the festival. After i express my very own reservations to Bono, he could be unexpectedly candid with what continues to be, in the end, a long-term labour of affection. "I think first and end are fantastic, along with the last third is great," he states, "but the initial act carries a few too many lines that are not funny enough. But there you go. It had been a small budget, a 36-day shoot, so you're always going to decrease a couple of balls." Austrian TV interviewer: 'Do you imagine in angels?' Bono: 'Yes, I really do. And so does Wim Wenders.' On the opening night of the Berlin Film Festival, the invited audience, initially buzzing from a high celebrity presence then lulled into near-sleep by four long introductory speeches in German, give the film a chronic ovation. It is later awarded the Silver Bear jury prize. Nonetheless, this really is Wenders' city, the landscape he mythologised in Wings Of Desire, anf the husband is considered here using a reverence that seems undented by his recent run of less engaging films."I think Wim marches to his very own tune," says Bono afterwards, "and it's a very unmodern position he takes. What i'm saying is, I've nodded off during Until The End Worldwide - he demonstrated the entire, five-hour version in his apartment - but he's just like a jazzman to me. He takes the melody line and changes the chords underneath, he improvises and extracts the essence. All is here what you're using. That isn't where we're at at this time, though, and that he recognizes that, but he doesn't care. Wim once declared America had colonised our consciousness, these days I do believe it's advertising and MTV that have colonised our movie consciousness. It's Boom! Boom! Boom! Quickly, very self-conscious, and he's the contrary of this. His films are only for what hangs around in your thoughts and your heart afterwards; that lingering resonance. Even those who haven't liked the film have realized it nagged at them for days afterwards. I cannot see how he is doing it, but it is fine beside me." To me, probably the most successful scenes are the types without dialogue, when Wenders' allegorical urban landscapes are enhanced by some extraordinarily sensual music. The soundtrack tends towards what may be called "ambient jazz", and serves the narrative in the manner the previous classic scores utilized to, creating and counterpointing a mood. In addition, it features two new U2 songs, and also Jovovich delivering a pretty good version of Lou Reed's Satellite Of affection. Essentially the most intriguing track, though, may be the Ground Beneath Her Feet, lyrics authored by Salman Rushdie, and a part of his "rock novel" of the same name. Bono and Rushdie first met in the event the rock star invited mcdougal - who was at that time an online recluse due to the post-Satanic Verses fatwah imposed on him by Ayatollah Khomeini - on stage throughout the Zoo Tv program at Wembley Stadium noisy . 90s. Rushdie has described the song as a "kind of an rock version of Orpheus' lament... a lovely, sad, ballady love song, perfectly fitted to Bono's voice". He could be obviously a large fan of U2: he recently named them - alongside the Beatles, Elvis, Dylan, the Velvet Underground and REM - in a very roll-call of his favourite groups. What, though, did Bono make of Rushdie's rock 'n' roll novel? "I was taken aback because when accurate areas of it were. Okay, he may have got these shoes wrong - though I don't know he did - but who cares? His subject is ideas and the ones, and he certainly got that right. I am aware he is doing that magic-realist thing, which may be a get-out, but, honestly, I used to be shocked by his grasp in the pop life." Another German TV interviewer: 'Do you decide yourself a pioneer, musical or otherwise not?' Bono: 'I would definitely consider myself to get one of several inventors of the mullet. I think it depends upon Patrick Swayze or me.' The interviewer looks puzzled. Bono: 'Anyone have in mind the German for mullet?' Besides once sporting a similar awful haircut as Patrick Swayze, Bono has, because Big Hotel illustrates, done a spot of pioneering a single or two other spheres. In the past 10 years approximately, having already made U2 the greatest rock group on the globe, then deconstructed their stadium-rock sound using a brace of challenging albums and 2 state-of-the-art, round-the-globe multimedia tours - 1993's Zoo TV and 1997's Pop Mart, respectively - he's pursued an ambitious extra-curricular schedule. He's recorded with Pavarotti and Sinatra; opened a hip hotel, the Clarence, along with a successful nightclub, the Kitchen, in the native Dublin; brought John Hume and David Trimble together on a Belfast stage within the lead-up to Northern Ireland's historic Yes vote. Previously year, she has overseen the building of the film, written and recorded the soundtrack, penned presenting The Book Of Psalms to the Canongate mini-Bible series, fathered one third child - a boy called Elijah Bob - and seized your hands on Jubilee 2000, the campaign to draw awareness of, and hopefully abolish, the duty of Third World debt. German radio interviewer: 'Recently, you've met Bill Clinton and also the Pope. Who's next - God?' Bono: 'Oh, I'm certain I'll get to meet him some day. But maybe not just yet.' Bono describes Jubilee 2000 as "bigger than anything Let me ever have almost anything to do with again as along because i live". It has to date adopted a year-and-a-half of his time, and his awesome global lobbying with the great and the good has helped ensure that a minimum of $100 billion is cancelled the 3rd World's crippling debt on the west. "Not a bad year's work, eh?" A recent issue of Newsweek, inside a cover story called Bono's Crusade, neatly summarised how he acted as a catalyst on the was, in place, a stalled cause. "Since the mid-80s, advocates have attemptedto call awareness of the increasing burden of Under developed debt, just to get their arguments disappear to the yawn of public apathy. Their cause lacked sex appeal, visibility. It lacked . . . celebrity. Improvising an advertisement hoc network of academics, celebrities, demi-celebs and debt-relief advocates, and ultizing his own star power as a phone card, Bono finagled his distance to the varnished corridors of real power." The truth is: Bono has successfully argued the truth to eliminate debt and ethical investment with Clinton and the closest advisers, with hard-line Republican economists, with European presidents along with the British prime minister. Alongside Live Aid veteran "Saint" Bob Geldof, he even was able to blag a crowd with all the Pope, whose rosary beads he now wears draped round his neck - "I swapped them for my Zoo TV shades." But why did he get involved with Jubilee 2000 in the first place? "I remember ever coming back from Ethiopia with Ali [his wife],Louis Vuitton Wallet, a year within the camps for any month there in the 80s, and both us promising never to forget. But you do forget. Initially when i first read about the campaign, it struck me as achievable, as well as desirable. Therefore I'm able to open doors simply because I'm a celebrity, then I'll use that for many it's worth." To date, the celebrity ticket has got him into the Oval Office at the White House, and in the office from the chairman of American Express, plus the Vatican. He even turned up in Sandy Berger's office around the very morning we were holding doing the deal on Kosovo - "Maps everywhere, and him going, 'Fine, Bono, but wait, how much will it ended up costing?' It has been surreal, okay, but it is apparently working." What's been probably the most surreal moment? "The Pope was pretty out there. He'd some amazing footwear underneath the white frock - kind of Gucci-style oxblood slippers. Serious dancing shoes!" Many people, I suggest, will dsicover the thought of a rock 'n' roller meeting with the Pope - in particular the present one, who's mysterious for his liberal tendencies - something of an sell-out? "For sure. I realize lots of women, specifically, are fed up and upset using the Pope for his get up on issues like divorce and contraception, and i also can recognize that, particularly being an Irish man. But, in this situation, he was a natural ally. He was into this cause in a big way. It seemed the well-known course of action to try and make contact with him. I needed him to come to Cologne recently to the G8 meeting, but he couldn't make it, so he sent for all of us instead. Me and Geldof inside Vatican - What i'm saying is, you have no idea how surreal that has been." Thus far, 37 countries out from the 46 targeted by Jubilee 2000 have decided to all or partial cancellation with the debts owed them from the Under developed, with Britain and so the US in the lead. It is hard to quantify just what this can mean for debtor nations in the long term. As Newsweek noted, "much in the G8 forgave servings of debt which are realistically unpayable", but, despite some economists' predictions that some countries could actually make higher payments inside the proposed new deal, Bono insists that "certain terms will be set in place the African countries are insisting on - start up business deals, new trade, new investment, but with an altogether fairer basis. People forget," he adds, "that Germany was availed of debt help as soon as the war and that is what kick-started the best economy in Europe." This is often a rock star who may have done his homework. "I possess some awesome people backing me up, like Jeff Sachs, who's an economics professor at Harvard. He can crunch the numbers after they try and bamboozle me. But, yeah, you have to know what you are talking about or them simply eat you for breakfast. After all, think it over: I'm a scruffy rock star marching in to the White House. It's a bit cheeky." Perhaps precisely what is most intriguing this is not Bono's long-term embrace of the ideal of rock star as both activist and philanthropist, though the sense that people live in a historical moment if the intercession of caring, credible celebrities will surely have an impact - regarding global realpolitik - that will have seemed impossible even a decade ago. As Bono highlights, since likes of Clinton and, latterly, Blair came into power, there is what could certainly be a one-off strategic window for pop-culture idealists to make a real difference. "These guys grew up with rock 'n roll, they speak an alternative language through the likes of Reagan, Bush and Thatcher, who saw the 60s since the decade that poisoned their nation's youth. I might donrrrt you have got 12 inches in the door in the White House in the old days, i might not exactly again after Bill Clinton goes. So, basically, you will need to seize the second." How, exactly, would you seize the moment with someone for example John Rockefeller, the Amex chairman, and all the other global über-capitalists whose corporate creed surely regards the cancellation of debt as anathema. "Well, I was told over and over again how the bankers would stop this going through because it's against their religion. That it's hardly in their genetic make-up. That, in my experience, just meant I had to shift the target in the politicians on them. My whole vibe was, 'Who's Elvis here?' I wanted to reduce the crap and go directly to the very best." At the top, he finally encountered "the real Elvises", famous brands Larry Summers, the 43- year-old secretary in the American treasury, and Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman, builders in the healthiest US economy recently. At this altitude, Bono's previous celebrity contacts arrived very handy. A celebration with Bobby Schriver, a Kennedy nephew who also is surely a music producer, led to Schriver's brother-in-law, Arnold Schwarzenegger, calling up hard-line Republican, John Kasich, about the singer's behalf. "The Kennedys can open doors that we cannot even get within stone-throwing distance of," Bono laughs, still obviously relishing his head-to-head using the American right. "The meeting I had with Kasich [House Budget Committee chairman] was probably as far-fetched since it got, because this dude could not be a liberal if he tried. I became told repeatedly that he was the guy whose ear I want to inside Republican camp. I finally got to him, and that he goes [breaks into loud American drawl], 'Hey, Bono, exactly what do I really do for you?' I told him, then waited for the phone to click, but he just said, 'Right. Okay. I gotta consider this, but, hey, just one question - think OK Computer is superior to The Bends?' The guy would have been a total Radiohead nut." French TV interviewer: 'Is it difficult to generate music if you have a lot of other activities to accomplish?' Bono: 'Nah. Making movies is difficult. Saving the world is less hard. Making music is straightforward. The modern U2 album could be the easiest thing I'll try this year.' The morning following your film's premiere, on the plane from Berlin to London, I find out maybe this all extra-curricular activity signalled an unconscious frustration with all the limitations of pop music. "That's a unique thought, and one which has crossed my thoughts a couple of times," he replies, "but, essentially, it comes down to not frustration but to boredom, and my own curiosity about the globe. I'm definitely driven by that and, in a single way, pop music doesn't satisfy that drive. The truth is, I've found it easier to spend time with writers and film-makers than I actually do with musicians. And, that's my fault, not theirs. I actually want to be away from my depth - I thrive on it." It sounds as you could possibly be bored with pop per se ? "No way - before year, I might keep getting out of bed wonderful these tunes in my head and achieving really frustrated as the band weren't around me to apply them. It filled me with a real feeling of what we do, and that which you flourish, and the way much I missed carrying it out. Plus, we're leaner and tighter than we've lots of people. If something, I'm more fired up by U2 than I've ever been." For the actual, at least, Bono has returned at his day job, together with the extra edge, Larry, Adam and long-time studio collaborators, Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno. A new, up to now untitled, album is currently being recorded in the group's Dublin studio and is scheduled for release in August. It'll be followed by another planet-straddling tour that, reading between your lines, may come with a come back to rock basics following the full-on - and no doubt cripplingly expensive - extravaganzas which were the Zoo TV and Pop Mart jaunts. Bono describes the feel of the album-in-progress as "stripped down but joyous. It does not take sound of 4 guys playing in a room, rediscovering what they're great at." Though 1991's Achtung Baby and 1993's Zooropa albums both saw U2 successfully embrace a more moderen, hard-edged sound, 1998's Pop would have been a less realised make an effort to merge rock and dance music. Specialists him if he considered that the group had maybe lost their way on Pop; that they had, perhaps, sacrificed their essence within the race to be before game. "I don't view it as just about any failure. It sold seven million copies for a start. We'd strong material and, though we worked everybody into the ground, I do not think we finished the songs or cracked the arrangements. We just ran from time. The tour was booked and now we was required to undertake it. We won't make that mistake again." If Pop was an album that might be thought to are already born beyond a specific moment - "I became a fan of club music, of drug culture, of the things that has been happening at that time. I just immersed myself inside all" - then the new album seems like coming back to many type of tradition. "Pop involved assimilation," he admits that, warming for the unstated subject of U2's invest the pop scheme of things, "but now I think that maybe assimilation isn't the future. "Ironically enough, it absolutely was Howie B [the DJ-cum-producer who worked on Pop] who turned us on this. He's fascinated by what rock bands can perform which he can't. He kept saying, 'You're a band, you don't need every one of these samples.' And it is true. We've become a three-piece rock band using a singer again. It is a good feeling." Suddenly, about the packed plane, he bursts into song, an a cappella fragment coming from a new track called In Some time: "In just a little while/This hurt won't be any more," he sings, his hands clapping time to the melody. "In just a little while/oh Lord . . ." As besuited necks crane, he repeats the lines, louder now, an audio lesson, and also a feeling, materializing with this crowded cabin. "That's the vibe," he laughs, swigging from your bottle of airline wine, oblivious towards the slight commotion he has caused inside the hermetic world of club-class privilege. "It's totally upful. There's another song called Tough, that i wrote for my father - a type of you-don't-have-to-be-tough-all-the-time song - along with a big soul tune called Stuck In A Moment You can not Get rid of. Brian Eno has bet me £100 that it will are the biggest song we've ever written." The spirit in the old pre-Zoo TV U2 - the fabled "big music" of Gloria and Pride - may be reasserting itself yet again. "It's very little such as the old stuff," he says, "but, Perhaps, if you don't just like the spirit of U2 - should you not such as the moods and colours of U2 - pay day loan want it." Once, when I asked him in regards to the dark tones of Achtung Baby at about the time of this album's release, he told me it was "a number of variations on the theme of affection betrayed". I wondered, then, in the event the new album a similar unifying theme. The result was long in coming - and somewhat surprising. "It's all written from the certain perspective, and when you will find there's governing idea it appears from something the Irish poet Brendan Keneally once said - that the easiest way to publish would have been to imagine you're dead. You lose all vanity, then. I'm approaching it like it's our last record, really." Is he suggesting it may be the group's final album? "No, by no means. I'm just approaching the writing of it that way, being an experiment. I suppose what I'm saying is you should treat every album just as if it's your last, as though your lifetime depended on it. The new stuff has fire possesses spunk. It's ecstatic music . . . There," he laughs, "that should put plenty of people off." Ecstatic, though, 's what U2 prosper. As Bono indicates, "it's an easy task to do angst and anger, but happiness can be a whole other struggle". He has, according to him, been energized lately by the "swagger and joy of Oasis on his or her day", and by the originality of Radiohead - "There are some extraordinary moments on those latter albums that, to my ears, are as well as anything ever made in pop music" - and, reading between your lines, it is such groups, in lieu of any of his contemporaries, that U2 are eager to take on. "I don't want to be in a band unless oahu is the best band on the globe," he'd told a gaggle of European radio interviewers earlier within the day, not boastfully, but merely as an illustration with the drive that still burns inside, that also undercuts everything he puts his overcrowded mind to. "These days, everybody wants John Lennon's sunglasses, accent and swagger," according to him, as being a parting shot, "but nobody is prepared to get their clothes off and stand naked like he did in their songs. Putting your mind on the parapet means something very different currently, but it is still a big part of what rock is all about for me. You will need to make use of celebrity, negotiate your posture and become conscious of celebrity can diminish a contributing factor just as much as illuminate it. It's risky, but rock'n'roll is about taking risks. For it to mean anything more, you need to take different types of risks, you have to keep making that leap." © Sean O'Hagan. The soundtrack for the Big Hotel is released on March 13. The film opens April 28. The newest U2 album will likely be released inside late summer.