SXSWORLD

One Love, One Heart: MARLEY Shows Reggae Legend's Lasting Impact by Ed Ward posh Primrose Hill neighborhood and knits his eyebrows. "Hmm. Th ey're not playing anything now, but if they were, at some point in the day, you'd hear something by Bob. Th at's how ubiqui- tous he's become." "Bob" is Bob Marley, with whose ghost Macdonald, the Oscar-winning director whose credits include Th e Last King of Scotland, Touching the Void and One Day in September, was living for a few years as he painstakingly assembled MARLEY, a two-and-a-half-hour bio- graphical documentary about the iconic reggae star. "It's funny," he adds, "I fi g- ured that by now I'd be sick of him, but I still listen to Bob's music every day." MARLEY is no ordinary documen- K evin Macdonald looks up at the speaker on the wall of the cozy café in London's he didn't have time to do it, and the project was passed on to Jonathan Demme, who abandoned the fi lm after shooting wisely decided to start over: "Th ey were taking the fi lm in another direc- tion, and I saw I'd have to start from scratch. Th ere was no re-interview, no retread of the people who'd talked. All the interview footage in Marley is new, and mine." He has gotten some amazing stuff , not only from the obvious people, such as Island Records head Chris Blackwell and some footage. Macdonald ducer Steve Bing, whose Shangri-La Entertainment had backed Martin Scorsese's Rolling Stones documentary, Shine a Light, and Scorsese initially took on the Marley project. Eventually, though, he decided 30 SXSW ORLD /FEBRUAR Y 2012 tary. It plays with big themes both personal (Marley's father was a white British colonial offi cer) and political (the intimate relationship between life in Kingston's slums and the island's two political parties) to show how they met in the short, remarkable life of an artist driven by a compulsion to make sense of himself and the world he inhabited. Full disclosure: I wrote about reggae in Creem in 1971 and was up to speed with Jamaican music by the time the Wailers' fi rst album appeared. I met Marley twice, saw the band several times (including a hair-raising rehearsal in 1975 for his concert with Stevie Wonder at the National Stadium in Kingston, to which there were only three people in atten- dance), and read numerous biographies and countless articles, and I walked away from the screening of Macdonald's fi lm fi lled with new insights and previously unknown facts. "To portray someone with as rich a life and afterlife as Marley's is hard to do in 90 minutes," Macdonald says, explaining the fi lm's length, but there were challenges beyond that. Not only are the Marley families (Bob had 11 children with seven diff erent women and left no will) leg- endarily contentious, but "there are no pictures of him until he was 16, no fi lm until 11 years into his career, so that any time a scrap of fi lm of a performance showed up, you had to go negotiate for it. We were very lucky that way." It is lucky that the fi lm got made at all. Th e project started with pro- Bob Marley Wailers' members like Bunny Wailer and Aston "Family Man" Barrett, but also lesser-known important associates of Marley's, relatives both black and white (including some in Nine Mile, St. Ann Parish, the rural Jamaican vil- lage in which he was born), girlfriends and fellow musicians, including Breakspeare, Miss World 1976), and former well as it does is that Macdonald was looking at the big picture. "When we were shooting Th e Last King of Scotland around Kampala, Uganda, I was amazed at how much Bob was there: murals, graffi ti and, as you saw at the end of the fi lm, people singing 'One Love.' " He is referring to the sequence under MARLEY's closing credits, in which people in not only the expected places, but also Turkey, India, Japan and elsewhere, are singing this song and doing other Marley- related things like spraying his portrait as graffi ti. "Th is got me interested in what his message was, why it resonated with so many people, why who he was was so important to them. My goal was to humanize him. I'm not a crazy music fan, to tell the truth. But I knew this was about more than music. "My aim is to make someone who's seen the fi lm go back and listen to Edward Seaga. "It's the fi rst time so many people have talked," Macdonald notes. "It was a big challenge, and it was a lot of work, especially in Jamaica." Part of the reason the fi lm succeeds as baby-mamas Jamaican Prime Minister Marley's music in a new way, to realize why he was so sensitive to race, for instance. So many people love him, but know so little about him. No matter how much you do or don't know about him, I want people to lose themselves in the story." ■ MARLEY is scheduled to screen at SXSW Film 2012; for more information, visit sxsw.com/fi lm (including Cindy PHOTO COURTSEY OF THE BOB MARLEY FOUNDATION

• Cover