-David, it's so lovely to see you.
-Hi, Seth Meyers. Good to be here.
-Hi. -You're on a real set.
You're on your set, unless you remodeled your house.
-No, this is the real set now. Yeah.
Yeah, week two of trying to pretend like things are normal.
-Okay. An odd thing happened to me just now.
I'm in my office, and I realized that,
you're going to be on TV in a few minutes.
So I went to -- I thought, "Oh, my God,
I better, like, spruce up."
I went to the bathroom and sprayed my armpits with...
you know that air freshener stuff?
-Yeah, yeah, yeah. -That we keep in the bathroom.
And I thought, "Oh, that's good.
I'm going to smell okay on television."
[ Laughter ]
-We don't have that technology yet,
but I would love to -- if we could get smell
through Zoom technology, that would help.
David, your show was the last Broadway show
I saw before everything shut down.
And it is an incredibly optimistic,
uplifting show that felt very necessary for that time.
It seems even more necessary now.
Is it a show that you hope to get back on stage again?
-Yeah, yeah, we hope to get it back on stage.
I think it's gonna be -- realistically,
I think it's going to be about a year.
-Mm-hmm. -I mean,
there's the vaccine and there's how long
it takes the vaccine to get out there,
and how long for people to feel comfortable,
even with masks on, sitting right next to strangers,
because, you know, the Broadway thing is
you can't do Broadway theater with 25% capacity.
-Of course -It has to be like 80%.
And so -- Yeah.
That might take a while. That's okay.
We've got this movie coming in the meantime.
-Now, so this is -- you have this production filmed,
and you had it filmed by none other than Spike Lee.
How does that collaboration come about?
-I texted Spike. [ Light laughter ]
Yes. Text is a wonderful thing.
So...
We'd crossed paths a few times,
and so I had his text number,
and I -- there was --
there were stirrings that somebody might want to make
a movie of this show, so I texted him and said,
"There's -- Somebody might make a movie of this.
Do you want to come see it? Check this out."
So, he came to Boston.
It was a two-show day.
We do two shows on Saturdays.
And by the second show,
afterwards he came to my dressing room and said,
"I want to do this."
So then it was like, okay, get the money in place,
and all that kind of stuff.
It was kind of a scramble to get it all together.
And it worked. I was thrilled,
very, very, very happy with the way it came out.
-I was wondering, for someone like you,
that obviously you're on stage.
It's not something that you --
I'm assuming in rehearsals you step back and watch things.
But are you someone who can enjoy watching yourself?
Like, when you -- is it nice to have this sort of
now timestamped moment of when you were doing this show?
-I realized when I saw the first cut
that Spike and the editor showed me,
that it's the first time I've seen the show.
And I thought, "Oh, my God, I've been doing this
for a couple years now and I had never seen it."
And of course, I'm looking and going,
"Look what they're doing back there.
Look what those other musicians are doing back there.
I had no idea they were doing that."
But also, in general, though,
I'm a little older than I used to be.
I don't take as much pleasure looking at myself
as I used to.
-Well, there are -- It should be noted,
there are a lot of other musicians on stage
for you to look at, so...
-Yes, there's very handsome
and beautiful musicians on stage, yes.
-I wonder, you know, you --
for my money and for a lot of people's money,
you made the greatest concert film of all time,
"Stop Making Sense," and I wonder
if there was anything from that
that you brought into this
insofar as what you wanted to be grasped
from a live performance?
Because this does have such energy,
the same sort of energy I felt when I was in the audience.
-Um, with "Stop Making Sense" --
Oh, gosh. I know. I know. I know. I know.
It's a tough bar.
Jonathan raised the bar pretty far, and so did we, the band.
But, I think we're up to it.
I think we're up to it.
There was a moment during the filming where Spike,
who was good friends with Jonathan,
kind of looked up to the ceiling and goes,
"Jonathan, how we doing? How we doing?
I think we're doing pretty good here.
[ Laughter ]
-That's fantastic. We also talked --
you have a magazine, "Reasons to be Cheerful."
And you're starting a new, I guess...
maybe you can describe it to us,
the "We Are Not Divided,"
it's sort of a project that is, again,
has this same sort of optimism, that in this time that,
you know, were you to watch, you know,
cable news most of the day, you would think that
there's two halves of this country.
But you sort of have found that maybe people are
more similar than we're willing to let on.
-Yeah, so I have this kind of
solutions journalism... website, magazine
that we look for, well,
evidence of people who have found solutions to things
that we think maybe are intractable.
And my colleague suggested that, well, kind of
in the run-up to the election,
that we do a series called "We Are Not Divided,"
where we report on instances where people are actually
bridging the gaps between themselves
and finding that we're not maybe as divided
as we are led to think we are.
I know.
So when they first proposed this,
I responded and said, "Are you kidding?"
You know, I mean, I wake up in the morning,
I read the papers, and I think we're all
ready to kill one another.
And they said, "Can you show me some examples?"
Which they did, which they did.
And I said, "This is really great.
So let's do this. We're going to do this
for, I don't know what it is,
like, six weeks or so up until the election.
And hope that it will make people realize
that maybe we're not as divided as we think we are.
-I will leave it on that, because as always,
I am in a better mood after I see you than I was before.
That is true whether we talk or whether I see your show.
And I'm so glad that those who weren't lucky enough to see it
on stage can see it on HBO.
And it's just always a delight, David. Thank you.
-Thank you very much. Good to see you again.