For the band, the film was never not a part of the music. “Our best-case scenario was that the first time people hear the record, they’d be hearing it while watching the film,” frontman and the film’s co-director Brendan Yates tells me. While the demand for Turnstile on the big screen grew and grew (theaters including Hamilton, Ontario’s Playhouse Cinema and London’s the Prince Charles had to keep adding more shows beyond the premiere), the priority was always accessibility.
“We were going to put [the film] on YouTube on the day the record came out,” Yates adds. “We didn’t even know there would be an opportunity for theaters—we didn’t plan for any of it. We did want people to watch it with good speakers, but the most important thing was accessibility. We didn’t want it to be super exclusive and come out a year later.”
While the film’s sound mix is, no doubt, a thing of beauty in the theater, Turnstile guitarist, co-director and keen member (“I do revere my five-star ratings.”) Pat McCrory was never under any illusion that folks would exclusively watch Never Enough in that specific way. “Nowadays, even if you make a crazy 4K version and shoot it on film, still a lot of people will consume it whatever way they can or want,” he says. “You can’t prepare for someone to watch it on their phone anyway.” (Confirmed: Serena first watched the film as Yates intended, before going for round two on a smaller screen: “Watched this on my phone at work and locked tf IN on that google spreadsheet.” Still five stars and a heart.)
Tech specs aside, it was the forced in-the-moment experience of the big screen that spoke the loudest when deciding how the film would be seen. “The only thing that bummed us out when thinking about YouTube was that you’d get interrupted by ads the whole time,” says Yates. That’s true of film, music, TV—almost every piece of sensory art is now also forced to exist as an artist-powered marketing opportunity (this episode of Search Engine perfectly speaks to today’s frictional relationship between advertising and culture, circa eighteen minutes). Indeed, Sawnnj writes, “We don’t often sit down and just listen to music, without distractions, to fully immerse ourselves.” They add, “What an incredible way to experience an album for the first time.”
