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Acording to the Associated Press initially reported, the social network will allow users to rent the film for $6.99 starting the same day it opens in theaters. This is unprecedented territory; though Facebook has been offering movie rentals since March 2011, it has never hosted a film that’s also appearing on movie screens.
In an interview with EW, Sandi Hemmerlein, General Manager of Tuff Gong Worldwide stated
“It’s a unique opportunity for a film that’s not a blockbuster. One of our goals is to give as many people as we can access to it.” The streaming will be available in Caribbean territories including Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and the Bahamas as well as the U.S.
It makes sense that this specific film is Facebook’s first foray into simultaneous streaming. Bob Marley has such a strong presence both online and offline. He’s reached such iconic status, particularly in the years since his death.”
Marley’s Facebook page currently has over 38 million “likes,”, and according to Hemmerlein “They can watch videos, see old photos, quote lyrics back and forth to each other — it’s one of the more engaged, interactive places,”
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Kevin McDonald director of "Marley" interview...
The director of "Marley" Kevin McDonald recently did an interview with "Speakeasy" where he talked about making the film and what he learned in the process.
What is it about Bob Marley that has made him so enduringly popular more than 30 years after his death?
I think the key for me to understanding him is that he’s really the only third-world superstar. Nobody from the developing world has ever gone on to have that level of fame and international success. The whole reason why dreadlocks are in fashion, that’s because of Bob. No country is as associated with a single individual as Jamaica is with Bob. Go anywhere around the world, especially in the developing world, and you find people who worship him. His mural is all over the place. Even in the Arab Spring, in the closing credits [of “Marley”] we have a clip of people singing “Get Up, Stand Up.” Then you have the whole musical thing—there’s nobody who doesn’t like Bob Marley’s music.
I thought that the back story about the song “Cornerstone” was really sad and inspiring, how Marley wrote it after being rejected by his white relatives who owned a big construction company.
I was struggling up until that point, trying to get a grasp on how to tell this story who Bob was. I was interviewing and interviewing loads of people, trying to find my way through the thicket. To me that was the key to understanding him, taking painful life experience and turning it into art. He was saying to his white relatives, “Just watch what I can do.” I liked also that whole thing about “the builder refused” and they were a construction company. It’s just so great, so poetic. It’s nice in documentaries when you see something happening spontaneously in front of the camera. You see the cousin and the sister listening to the song [after hearing the story]…and then the sister says “He’s THE Marley.”
Had that back story ever been published or related before?
I don’t think anyone knew about that before. Allan Cole, the footballer who’s Bob’s great friend—he knew him best in the ‘60s and ‘70s—he’s very religious, very Rasta. He said “I was in the car with Bob once, and we went over there,” to the construction company owned by his family. So it was one of those great biographical moments where you can put the life and the art together, and then you start seeing it in everything.
Where did you find all that footage of Marley, particularly the concert where he unites the hands of the two leaders of the rival political factions in Jamaica?
We had a great archive researcher. One of the most difficult things about making the film was that for the first 11 years of his career—until 1972 or 1973—there’s not a single piece of moving footage. He started in ’61. These days any shitty little band will have hours and hours of footage on YouTube. But that’s what happens when you grow up in a third world country. The first photograph of him was when he was 16. That’s what was so amazing, he comes out of a world where there’s no record kept. Even when he was successful in Jamaica, he wasn’t making enough money to survive. That’s why he went off to Delaware and worked in a car factory and thought about quitting music.
It seems like there weren’t many filmed interviews with Marley.
There’s a very limited archive. There’s only four or five interviews with Bob, and in most of them, he’s just toying with the interviewer, refusing to answer the questions and talking about Rastafari. I sensed there was a bit of insecurity because he wasn’t that educated. He left school at 11, and he found journalists intimidating. So his way of being superior was to not play the game. I don’t think he was such a great talker. His friends all say he was interesting to talk to, but it had to be one-on-one, late at night after they smoked pot. Otherwise, he was a man of few words.
What was the budget on this?
For a documentary, it was a lot. The biggest part of it was the music rights. That was like $1.5 million – we have 50 songs in there, so there was like a blanket agreement. I think the total budget was around $4.5 million. The guy producing and financing it—Steve Bing—was driven by passion, not money. This song “Selassie is the Chapel,” we used it twice, at the funeral at the end and when Selassie [the Rastafarian spiritual leader, the former emperor of Ethiopia] visits Jamaica. It turns out to be an adaptation of a song that was written for Elvis, which was called something like “Jesus is the Chapel.” The melody is the same. It’s partly owned by the Elvis Presley estate so it was really expensive to license. I said “It’s OK, we could only use it once,” and [Bing] said “No, this is the right track. Let’s use it twice.” To have someone like that who could say, “This is the right thing and I’ll pay extra for it” was great.
This is a long movie, at 2.5 hours. Were you concerned about that?
I was contracted to make a 2-hour film and then I said, “I’m finding it so hard to get it down to two hours.” What was so interesting was the detail, and not trying to force it to fit into a standard documentary three-act structure. I wanted to let it breathe. So, even though it makes it harder for him to sell, [Bing] agreed to make it 2 hours and 25 minutes.
You won an Oscar for the 1999 documentary “One Day in September” about the 1972 Olympics, and last year made another film “Life in a Day” comprised of hundreds of YouTube uploads from around the world. How does this documentary differ in structure from some of the other docs you’ve made?
Well, this one is the simplest, formally. The story was so good and the songs were so great I didn’t want to get in the way. I made it very straightforward, birth to death, and nothing too fancy stylistically. It’s not about me, it’s about the story. I realized a good story can be told very simply.
You had wanted to make a film about Marley for a long time, but couldn’t because Martin Scorsese was supposed to be directing this documentary, then Jonathan Demme, and then you wound up being tapped to direct it. What happened?
I had tried to make a film about Marley seven years ago to coincide with Bob’s 60th birthday. I was going to make a very different film, following some rastas from Jamaica going to Ethiopia for the 60th Birthday celebration concert. That film didn’t happen, but I got to know Chris Blackwell from Island Records. [After Demme left the project] Steve Bing spoke to Chris and Chris said “You should talk to Kevin because he’s interested in Marley.” So I got a phone call from Steve saying “I still want to make this film, and I’ve been at it for four years already.” This was about two years ago, and I was just finishing something else. So I started working on it in September 2010.
There’s been a lot of talk about a Bob Marley biopic over the years, most recently there were talks of Jamie Foxx starring as Bob Marley, but it never happened. Is it because his children felt that nobody could really embody their dad in a believable way?
I talked to Ziggy [Marley] a bit about that. That’s his take: who’s gonna play Bob? It’s like that Muhammad Ali effect. You get Will Smith—a huge actor, a huge star—and yet it doesn’t quite work. Because everyone knows what Muhammad Ali was like, his presence, his unique charisma. It’s the same thing with Bob. And there are a lot of different parties involved, not just the family, but Universal Music and Chris Blackwell, which makes it more complicated.
I didn’t realize how important he was in Jamaican politics at the time.
What was hard for us to grasp now was that he saw himself as being on a spiritual journey and the music was a form of preaching. He was driven not by the usual things people are driven by—fame and money—but he was driven by the desire to get a message across. At the beginning I was more skeptical about him because he’s been so commodified, with his image on t-shirts and posters. But the more I looked into it, the more fascinating and heroic he became. Part of that is realizing he’s not a hypocrite. Normally, the more you look into celebrities’ lives, the less you admire them. The more I went on with this, the more I admired him.
What was the most surprising thing you learned?
There’s this image of the ganja smoking, lazy Caribbean guy who just got lucky. But actually he fought for it. He was driven and ambitious and so disciplined. That’s why The Wailers were so amazing when they performed live.
Given that, how do you feel about Magnolia Pictures decision to release the film on 4/20, which as you know is a quasi-holiday for marijuana enthusiasts?
It wasn’t my decision. I see it as a commercial decision. You’ve got Marley fans out there, who will go see it regardless. I guess they are trying to connect to a younger audience.
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