The Speaking Heads Rock Toronto for ‘Cease Making Sense’ Premiere

The most popular ticket at TIFF this 12 months was for a 40-year-old live performance movie of a band that broke up in 1991.

Toronto audiences Monday evening had been handled to the world premiere of the brand new, IMAX, 4K restored model of Jonathan Demme’s Cease Making Sense, initially launched in 1984.

The band members: Frontman David Byrne, bassist Tina Weymouth, drummer Chris Frantz and keyboarder/guitarist Jerry Harrison all attended the screening at Toronto’s Scotiabank Theatre and took half in a Q&A afterward with Spike Lee, who directed the live performance movie David Byrne’s American Utopia — which premiered in Toronto three years in the past.

“I wish to go on the document: That is the best live performance movie ever!” mentioned Lee of Demme’s film, which was shot over the course of three nights at Hollywood’s Pantages Theater in December 1983, as The Speaking Heads had been touring to advertise their Talking in Tongues album.

“This was kind of our tour,” mentioned Bryne of Cease Making Sense. “It appeared like [the show] had a type of development to it, a narrative, and it occurred to us this might perhaps work as a movie [because it had] a starting and a center and an finish.”

The Toronto crowd went wild for the movie’s rerelease, whooping and clapping after each Speaking Heads quantity and twice — throughout “Burning Down the Home” and “As soon as in a Lifetime” — leaping up en masse to bounce.

Harrison famous that the music for the unique movie was recorded digitally — “this was manner again in ‘84, we had been pioneers in doing that” — however that the newly restored model is just not the identical because it was. It takes the sound high quality past what is feasible to listen to within the authentic or within the first rerelease of the movie in 1999.

“One of many great issues is there’s new know-how, which meant we nearly have a burden to adapt and to deliver [the film] as much as what folks can hear now in theaters,” mentioned Harrison, who pointed to the multi-channel audio on the 4K model permitting audiences to select the sounds of the person performers, together with that of late keyboardist Bernie Worrell.

“Speaking Heads was such band,” mentioned Frantz, “and once we had that expanded lineup [for the Speaking in Tongues tour] with Steve Scales and Bernie Worrell and Lynn Mabry and Ednah Holt and Alex Weir, they only took us into a complete nother dimension. I’m very grateful to be right here tonight and to have the ability to watch this and to take pleasure in it a lot.”

The remainder of the world will get an opportunity to re-enjoy Cease Making Sense later this month. A24 is bowing the movie first as an unique IMAX exhibition on Sept. 22 earlier than rolling it out in typical theaters on Sept. 29.