Bon Jovi Snags Kopple For Documentary
Bon Jovi has commissioned Academy Award-winning director Barbara Kopple to make a documentary about the band, which she’s started working on as the New Jersey rockers prepare for a U.S. tour to promote their latest album, “Lost Highway.”
“We just realized that (over) all the years, we really didn’t document enough stuff,” guitarist Ritchie Sambora explained today (Feb. 13) in a conference call with reporters. “Musically we documented things pretty well; we put out a box set (2004’s “100,000,000 Bon Jovi Fans Can’t Be Wrong”) a few years ago, but we look at other bands, contemporaries like U2, even Tom Petty and Aerosmith, and they had cameras rolling all the time. We didn’t have a lot of footage like that going on.”
Sambora says Bon Jovi has charged Kopple — whose work includes the Oscar-winning “Harlan County, USA” and the Dixie Chicks’ “Shut Up & Sing” — to “capture the story about our success and the anomaly of our success, and then some of the trials and tribulations and stories and back stories.”
The documentary will include both new and some archival material, including interviews and performance footage, but there’s no title or tentative release date yet. “We’re conceptualizing it at this point,” Sambora said. “It’s a work in progress … I don’t think it’s gonna rear it’s head for awhile.”
Bon Jovi will certainly give Kopple plenty of material to work with. After rehearsals in DeKalb, Ill., the group hits the road Feb. 18 in Omaha, Neb., and promises a mix of hits and “Lost Highway” material, as well as “a lot of media, a lot of visuals,” according to keyboardist David Bryan. “There’s some pretty amazing screens, and the stage is just awesome.”
After wrapping on May 1 in Atlanta, Bon Jovi begins a European tour on May 22 in Gelsinkirchen, Germany. There will be another leg of the tour after that, but keyboardist David Bryan said, “we don’t have July figured out yet.”
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