i first met murona russell in 2015. i was in los angeles and um having been a fan for a long
time and so you become like an evangelist and pretty much everybody within earshot
you try and turn onto sparks and i was doing exactly that with a friend of mine whilst i was
writing my last movie baby driver i was we were listening to like a lot of sparks and uh i happen
to think i wonder if sparks are on twitter so i looked on twitter and it said sparks follows you
and having followed the band for decades this was really like a big deal to me so i
immediately direct messaged and said hey is this actually the band i'm such a big fan and russell
replied and said yes this is russell we're big fans of your films too and even before we met
edgar i mean we were we were familiar with all his films so you know his films are personal and have
a real sensibility to them so we kind of felt that we knew edgar even before we knew edgar so then
within like 48 hours i was having breakfast with ron russell in los angeles it was sort of amazing
to me having sort of thought of them as like rock stars maybe from a completely different planet
to discover that they were only 25 minutes drive away so edgar and his team
came around with us initially to shoot sparks in various places around the world so it's really
not only fun but it was just great for them to be able to capture us in different settings so
initially our very first thing we did was to well for initially we did a concert in london that that
edgar and his whole amazing team uh shot for the proportions of the documentary and but what was
really fun for us was to have edgar come and kind of see us in sparks in different settings so he
came with us to uh to tokyo uh shot us there for several days it was amazing experience and then
mexico city and los angeles and then more in in in london and so it was really really great for us to
um have them be a part of the thing kind of be the fly on the wall in in those various settings and
that was the start of a beautiful friendship and now like six years later we have a movie
as far as the interviews that that they did for the documentary which there's over 80 interviews
which is kind of astounding in its own right but ron and i tended to not take part in those
uh shoots because we we kind of felt it it would put everybody more at ease and probably have your
thought the same but put all the the interviewees more at ease not having to uh give their
testimonies about the ban in front of us sitting there staring at them yeah what do you think what
do you think uh and i think part of that the way that they all come across with edgar personally
interviewing everybody everybody came across so so well and seemingly relaxed in that in that process
throughout all the years that i've been making music if you get on a tour bus
with a bunch of musicians
eventually the conversation will go to sparks
i remember just seeing him all the time like who are those guys
they are a band you can look up on wikipedia and know nothing we are sparks dude please welcome
frequently asked questions about sparks how many hams are there 25 albums
are you brothers we are brothers how did you first meet we are brothers music at its best
you hear it you go oh my god what is that it's insane but it's fantastic each time you'd go to
the rehearsal there'd be something new there like that's good it wasn't like anything else
all pop music is rearranged sparks that's the truth
there are throwaway riffs that other bands have built whole careers out of one of my
favorite moments is john lennon ringing up ringo starr you won't believe what's on the television
it was the sound of the future sparks is way more prolific than all of the artists we consider to
be the greatest in the world they sort of set a template that a beetle would pretend to be wrong
that's amazing they were taking all their creative juices and putting it into something
that they loved they were a bit much for most people the culture just wasn't there yet
is there anybody out there at all right now they've reinvented themselves several times the
thing that marked them was their unwillingness to give up that sounds like the scene from our biopic
our time has come here
they may have given birth to other bands who don't even know that the lineage goes back to them
still are waiting to get paid back for that why have you resisted doing a documentary until now
we didn't want to do the standard documentary full of talking ants it would become too dry
you