An account of the making, and almost unmaking, of Chicago band Wilco's now-best-selling "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" album, "I Am Trying To Break Your Heart" is a heartfelt and heartening documentary, shot mostly hand-held, on high-contrast black-and-white 16mm stock for about $500,000. In the film, Jones mostly forgoes interviews and explanations, instead capturing process, what it's like to work hard at a craft you believe in, heart and soul, the tensions that grate, the compromises that tempt. While he admired Wilco and Jeff Tweedy's songs, Jones was searching for a subject who wasn't overexposed, but who, in all likelihood, would be making music for years to come. "I wanted to capture a musician at the height of their creative power," the genial bear of a director says. "I always thought, wow, what would it have been like to be in the recording studio for something like 'Exile on Main Street'? That's the kind of film I wanted to see."

Jones, who began with this simple notion, was in for a few doses of documentary kismet, as the album being recorded was dumped by Reprise records after delivery, and later acquired, for a much larger sum, by Nonesuch, another arm of the AOL Time Warner conglomerate. (The ten-month delay also allowed Jones' film to be released while the album is still high on the charts.) Jones was in the room when the band's manager first got the news; he also caught the fissures during the recording that led to the dismissal of band member Jay Bennett.

While he works as a celebrity photographer, Jones says, "I didn't want this to be a fan film. The worst review a music film can get is, 'Go see this film if you love this band.' I also didn't want it to turn something that told you the importance of Wilco, or to be an anthology or opinion piece. I wanted it to be like front-page reporting for the story part and real classic cinema-vérité observational stuff." He was also influenced by Canadian Broadcasting documentaries about Leonard Cohen and Glenn Gould. "Those films were both really good at mixing straight documentary with more of a direct cinema style. That freed me up a lot. There are sections of ['Break Your Heart'] where the interviews and the story are all bunched up, and there are sections where it's all observational. I guess the standard documentary thinking is that you have to break that up, a visual example for every talking head. I wanted this to feel like a three-act film, and not a this-is-why-Wilco-is-important type of movie."

He also feared VH-1's "Behind the Music." "So many music documentaries of late seem to forget about the music. You hear thirty seconds of a song, and you're back to the coke-whore stories. Why is this band interesting if the filmmakers can't even find themselves interested enough in a song?" While coolly dramatic, his film never over-dramatized. "I feel like it's accurate. A musician can watch this and say, 'yeah, that's what it's like to make a record, to have the experience of having to get rid of a band member, what it feels like to be backstage before and after a show, what it feels like to deal with the record-company freakos.'" But there's a bare minimum of explanation. "I am most happy with the fact that I didn't feel the need to put in all the interview stuff with Jeff that I had," Jones says. "I threw away ninety-five percent of the interview stuff I did with him. It became clear to me I was just more fascinated observing him. You can learn more about the kind of person he is [by behavior in certain scenes] than asking, 'how do you feel when you write a song?' or something like that. In that sense, it's more like a dramatic narrative than a standard documentary."

The film opens with Tweedy driving up Lake Shore Drive with the title song playing. "The first time Jeff played me all the demos," Jones explains, "when we were figuring out how to do this movie, he took me out on Lake Shore Drive and said, 'I like to listen when I drive, put a picture to the sound.' The whole beginning is kind of the road into the studio, here's an introduction, here's our setting. You know, we didn't have a lot of master shots or transitional stuff." But Jones found limits to be another thing to be grateful for. "We had so little money [over the course of the year] that oftentimes I was the only cameraman. I realized, gosh, we wouldn't have had the scene in the control room with Jay and Jeff [driving each other nuts] if there had been a second cameraman. By that time, they were so comfortable with me, had I brought in a second cameraman they didn't know, they would have been more reserved. And then the hand-held stuff turned out to be the greatest thing in the world. It lends an accuracy to a lot of scenes," Jones says, elaborating on one of the most telling, powerful scenes of behavior involving Tweedy's reaction to pressure, which I won't give away. "If I wasn't in totally guerrilla cameraman mode, you just don't get something like that."

"I Am Trying To Break Your Heart" opens August 2 at the Music Box.

Also by Ray Pride

TIP OF THE WEEK
The twenty-first edition of Chicago Filmmakers' lesbian and gay international Film Festival, Reeling 2002, begins Thursday and continues through August 8 at the Music Box, Landmark Century Centre Cinemas and at Chicago Filmmakers.
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YOU'VE GOT ASS
Could we talk about the weather? Been hot, huh? Need to cool off? There's the one good reason for stumbling into a theater showing "Austin Powers in Goldmember" this weekend.
(2002-07-25)

TIP OF THE WEEK
Jacques Audiard's "Read My Lips" (Sur mes levres) bears some resemblance to Hitchcock's "Rear Window" and I wouldn't be surprised if there were a dozen reviews in the month of its release demonstrating the intense knack the writer has for getting the skinny on the oeuvre of the master.
(2002-07-18)

MICE DREAMS
I liked the first "Stuart Little," and with the return of most of the creative crew, I'd hoped for a tolerable family movie. In fact, in seventy-eight sweetly calculated minutes, "Stuart Little 2" offers up one of the most beguiling portraits of the streets of New York since September 11.
(2002-07-18)

TIP OF THE WEEK
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SIGHT GAGS
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SNOW MOTION
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DOUBLE DEUTSCH
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TIP OF THE WEEK
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