Bruce Weber
The cult photographer talks about Let’s Get Lost, his searing documentary on the flawed, fast-living jazz icon, Chet Baker
In 1988 Bruce Weber made a film about Chet Baker, one of the most intriguing musicians of the 20th century. Rising to fame with the Gerry Mulligan Quartet in the 1950s, Baker embodied the notion of “Doomed Youth” — a handsome, talented trumpeter who became more renowned for his addiction to speedballs and fast women than his music. In what turned out to be the last year of his life, Weber followed Baker from smoky LA studios to his hometown of Oklahoma, piecing together his fascinating, alebit tragic, life story. The result was Let’s Get Lost, which earned Weber an an Oscar-nomination for best documentary. This interview took place in June, 2008.
Tim Noakes: You’re re-releasing Let’s Get Lost. Why were you compelled to make a film about Chet Baker?
Bruce Weber: What Chet did in his music, not just the way he looked, but the freedom and openness that he had in his head, I felt like I wanted to try to find some kind of understanding in that for my own work. I look back now on the film and see Chet as a teacher. He helped me, in that laid back feeling of his, even to be able to do this interview, because I’m really shy and I think Chet was really shy. I think a lot of photographers and filmmakers are very shy and that’s why we love cameras. It has helped me to come to terms with my shyness and try to understand it a little and be able to open my photographs up a little bit.
“A lot of photographers and filmmakers are very shy and that’s why we love cameras. Chet helped me to come to terms with my shyness and try to understand it a little. It opened my photographs up a little bit.”
So it was a personal exploration for both of you?
Yes. Chet kind of taught me how to almost not do drugs, he taught me how to be able to get out of yourself a little bit and connect to what’s around me. When we were making the film we were going to these film festivals, they always expected me and my team to be these really hip people, and we were a bunch of squares! At some festival, men and women would come up to us and say “I had an affair with Chet Baker” and we would go “Really?” I thought was what that like? And a lot of these people had children and used to have Chet babysit for them. So I thought that’s so incredible that Chet could be who he was and also be a babysitter.
Were they telling the truth?
They all kind of fell in love with him and thought it would be the big love of his life and they were shocked they were in the film. But he went through life a little like that. He would have never made our film if we were sitting around getting high with him, he was very sensitive to that and he didn’t really encourage people to do drugs, he didn’t believe in it.
“He would have never made our film if we were sitting around getting high with him. He was very sensitive to that and he didn’t really encourage people to do drugs, he didn’t believe in it.”
Were drugs just part of a role he created for himself?
When he came to LA, he was an 18 year old kid from Oklahoma. A white boy who played trumpet and wanted to be like Charlie Parker and all the East Coast guys like Miles Davies. Here were all these white guys, who lived on the beach, and they played music and it had the sounds of the ocean in it, and the sky and the wind and the Pacific Coast highway. They thought we have to be tough and greedy and like the guys on the East Coast. I think the amazing thing was that Chet played music because of who he was, and at first I think he really got into drugs because he was naïve and he really felt that was the way to go to become the musician he wanted to be. I think later on in life he realised that it was the soul that he had that really made him the musician he was.
“Chet got into drugs because he was naïve and he really felt that was the way to go to become the musician he wanted to be. I think later on in life he realised that it was the soul that he had that really made him the musician he was.”
A lot of people would think that the 1950s when he first came to popularity were quite an innocent time, but in a way he defied that notion, maybe he was on the surface the cute guy playing the trumpet, but behind it he was running off with all these women, smoking whatever.
Do you think he was one of the first musical rebels ever America produced, in a classic sense that we’ve all got used to in the last few decades?
Yes, you know so many people like Dennis Hopper were saying to me “How did you get him to show up? People would always say that to me, but he showed up because he knew that we were not just there to party with him and that we really honestly cared for him and for his music. We kind of befriended him and when you befriend a stranger, their world opens up and sometimes you don’t know whether you are going to end up liking them or not.
“Twenty four hours in Chet Baker’s life that was like four years in a normal person’s life.”
I guess that must be the same when you take pictures?
Yes — when you take pictures, make films… It really scared him, because when you make a film about somebody you are kind of married to them for years. After 20 years I’m still doing an interview about him. I feel so lucky, I feel so fortunate that I had chosen Chet and that I still love him. I used to say to him “God, I’m so happy and I love you and I’m not in love with you.”
You didn’t have your heart broken like the others then?
Exactly. This is not the typical interview about a film. We are not talking about technique, and that was sort of what Chet was about too. One time he said to me “You know my daughter is a poet” and she showed my her poems. He said to her “Not everything has to rhyme” and I just thought that was so great, because it captured his abstract way of seeing things. It could be a beautiful day and most people would have said “The ocean’s so beautiful today” or “the air is so great” but Chet would say, “It’s such a nice day for a kite”. He had a kind of funny way to describe people that he didn’t like, he would say “They’re really nice.”
He would never just come out and say “I hate them”?
Never, I never heard him say that.
From the film, it seems that he was a gentle man who was haunted by a lot of personal issues that never got resolved in his lifetime.
He was incredibly manipulative, yet he was so good at being a good person too? You couldn’t help but admire him for it. It makes me laugh sometimes, when I meet somebody who’s a real grifter. I see through them right away and think to myself, “Man I’ve been taught by the best!”
Do you think that was because the ‘junkie side’ of him kept him on his toes constantly?
Definitely, always looking for the next not just gig for music, but gig to get high, or get to connect to somebody, who can help him at no matter what. But he had this extraordinary side to him that was so much fun. Twenty four hours in Chet Baker’s life that was like four years in a normal person’s life. So many thinks would happen: he would get busted, someone would bail him out, he’d get out and have a fight with his girlfriend in a pie shop north of Santa Barbara, he’d then drive around looking for a hotel, see a little nice motel by the Greyhound bus terminal and say, “This is nice I’d like to stay there”. He would make something completely wonderful out of nothing in a way, and yet the drama was always around, the drama was always happening, and yet there were these moments of sunshine.
Do you think he was a fantasist who wanted to inject excitement into the mundanity of everyday life? Did he do that on purpose to build the mystique, or was he just bored?
I think that he had a great fear of everyday life. I have this photograph that this lady took of him in Rome and he is on a bed and he is wearing two pairs of eyeglasses, and he’s wearing them like sandals and it’s like the dead or winner? He was always revolting against being locked in. The sad thing about that is when he passed away, the family didn’t have any money, and so my whole crew put money together for the funeral and to pay for his burial.
“The sad thing about that is when he passed away, the family didn’t have any money, and so my whole crew put money together for the funeral and to pay for his burial.”
He wasn’t a wealthy man?
No, he would go to Japan and do an album in one day, make a couple of grand and then he would live off that for the next couple of months. He’d rent a hotel, he loved cars, old cars, he knew a lot about cars.
What was his funeral like?
His family wanted to bury him in Oklahoma, underneath his mother. We were just horrified, because the idea that he’s his ashes wouldn’t be scattered out into the sea, which he loved, was pretty terrible. His Mum was a really lovely person, they always had a lot of respect for each other, but I wasn’t sure that was what he would have wanted. At the end, his wife Carol said to me “Why didn’t you come out and film this?” Chet was the kind of guy, who should have never been a father, should have been an uncle, should have never been a husband, should have been a lover and so it’s the way that I wanted to remember him, because that was the way that I knew he felt comfortable.
“Chet was the kind of guy, who should have never been a father, should have been an uncle, should have never been a husband, should have been a lover and so it’s the way that I wanted to remember him.”
When you talk about going to the funeral and filming everything, his family got to California, we put them in nice hotels and they were partying by the pool and hanging out. I just didn’t want to show them that, I wanted to have more respect for Chet. Also he had been away from his family most of his life and his life had changed so much, he was a stranger, in a strange land when he came home to Oklahoma. So I more wanted to show what this man was like on the road, what his other life was like. The way we live our lives and the way we die is very different sometimes, sometimes you obviously don’t have a choice when you die, and I think I just wanted to show Chet’s choices in life.
I thought it was interesting that his lovers and wives hated each other, but they still loved him. They didn’t have a reason to hate each other as he was the guy who was causing all the pain. Why do you think there was still this tension.. or jealousy?
I think it was jealousy. He was this beautiful man, and his music was a form of seduction. Chet went into other people’s lives and was so powerful that all these women felt that they were the strong ones and they were going to change him.
Did you hope your film would help free him from his demons?
It’s funny, when we finished the film the whole crew felt that this was going to be something wonderful for Chet and that his CDs would be in record-stores again and he’d get a little house on the beach somewhere in Southern California, like a little surf town, and have a beautiful car, a girlfriend, and just make music. It would have this beautiful white fence around it. That was our dream for him. His dream was actually to be freed from this world.
“The way we live our lives and the way we die is very different sometimes, sometimes you obviously don’t have a choice when you die, and I think I just wanted to show Chet’s choices in life.”
How did you feel when your dream for him did not materialise?
When we heard that he had died we were in the editing room and had finished our final cut of the film. We were just going into printing it, making some changes, but it was pretty much our final cut. We all laid down on the floor and cried. We closed the door to the editing room and didn’t talk to each other for two weeks. We thought that we would never finish our film; we didn’t know how we would.
How did you get through that?
We started calling each other and said let’s try to finish this film. It was so important to us, it was like coming to terms with a lost love. And by working on the film we knew why we had made this film. We all had our own individual feelings of expression for it and we knew what we had learnt from Chet and so many things about ourselves, including the way we handle tragedy and the way we handle dying. That’s why we were able to finish the film.
Let’s Get Lost received global critical acclaim. Did it feel strange not to be able to share it with Chet?
I was very disappointed that he wasn’t around when we went to Venice to show our film there. It won the Critic’s Prize which was really an honour for us, and an honour for Chet. We always talked about Venice together. It was always going to be the first festival we were going to show the film at. We got standing ovations nut a lot of my crew couldn’t stand up because we were petrified. We almost felt we were emerged in one of his songs. Normally we would have gone out afterwards, got completely drunk, but instead we had a quiet meal and got to know each other even better.
Did you have any regrets about making it?
When you asked me earlier, did Chet always tell the truth, well, no, nobody does. So when you make your film and it’s something you’re just going to live with. Part of it is the truth and part of it was to make people fall in love with him even more. I always like it when people make a choice, if they are trying to pick up somebody, what they say, and I think that’s almost more telling than what the truth is.
Do you think that his family — the wives and sons in Oklahoma — were putting forward a representation of themselves that wasn’t true either?
You know, I think they had a lot of anger and a lot of disappointment. When they talk about when he just stops going to see them – they go home and he’s gone – that was very hard. So they had a lot of anger and disappointment, especially the oldest boy who had a very serious illness and an operation and Chet was nowhere to be found.
As I said, he was never meant to be a father, he was always meant to be like an uncle to hang out and have a few beers with, share a joint with them whatever, that’s the kind of guy he was. Chet’s idea of romance was so unique and it was sometimes unattainable, and I think that’s why so many women and so many men fell in love with him. But I think as he got older, he really wanted people, I think he really was afraid of that intimacy, that’s where he put his music, you know his feelings about intimacy went much into his music.
“Chet’s idea of romance was so unique and it was sometimes unattainable. I think that’s why so many women and so many men fell in love with him. But I think as he got older, he was afraid of intimacy. That’s where he put his music.”
When I mention Chet Baker to anyone of my age group they usually pull a blank expression or say they walked past his monument when stoned in Amsterdam. Why do you think his reputation as a musician is not as widely known as it should be?
I think we look differently at beauty in art to music. People have a tendency to distrust somebody so beautiful, because they feel they don’t have substance. And I always felt for me that we were all given these really special times in our lives and what we do with them is really indicative of who we are. Chet’s music was about romance, about picking people up in bars, going home with them and making love, or sailing with somebody or hanging on the beach with your dog or riding in a car and thinking you’re in a movie. So these things — as light weight as they sound — are very pivotal things, and people just don’t write about them or sing about them anymore.
You focus a lot on the young people he hangs out with as well. He may have aged physically but do you think he ever grew up?
He never really wanted to be with people of his own generation. His band, the guys he played with, were much younger than him. He didn’t have a relationships to older people. One time I was having dinner with Gerry Mulligan after I made the film, and asked why he didn’t want to be in the film. He said “We were young, we played music together, we bought beautiful clothes, we had great girls around us, and in a way, saying goodbye to each other was like… we just didn’t want that good thing to go bad.”
So, hanging out with young people stopped him from aging, in a way?
Definitely.
Rock fans have plenty of doomed youth idols to choose from, but jazz fans don’t really. Do you think his self-destructive urges fascinates people more than his music?
I think so, it touched something in them. A lot of us have this idea of saving people, saving our friends, saving somebody we’re in love with. Look how many women stand outside the walls of a prison and want to marry this guy, who is in prison, who is never going to get out. It’s ironic, the first song I did with Chet for the film was a song called “Blame It On My Youth” by Oscar Levant. I really felt that Chet looked at all these younger people and saw himself in them. He never realised what age he was. He probably never even knew.
He recorded over 900 songs, but most of them have gone out of print. Do you think that he liked the fact that his recorded music was hard to find, because it echoed his own life in a way — he made something beautiful then moved on and no-one could really trace it back…
I think he wanted to get lost, but I don’t think he wanted his music to. His music was his connection to living and loving and I think it embodied everything that he thought about things. Yes true, he didn’t write the lyrics, but his interpretation of these songs struck a chord in him that really expressed what he wanted to say. That’s the thing I learnt from him – he was able to be so shy and put a lot of his feelings and intimacy into his work. Like we were talking about earlier, I feel that most photographers and filmmakers that I admire do that.
My world collided with Chet’s and I was able to make a film not just about music, but also about that intimate world that we all try to shy away from that we all try to hide. As a writer you’ll understand that. It might be harder if I was talking to some guy I had just met at a pub, but I feel that you might be able to show that intimate side of yourself in your words, which will touch people and make them have a feeling about you, like Chet’s songs did for him.
“My world collided with Chet’s and I was able to make a film not just about music, but also about that intimate world that we all try to shy away from that we all try to hide.”
