One of the most unusual visitors to this year’s Cannes Film Festival was a 65-year-old Irishman named Paul David Hewson, better known as Bono to the world at large and especially to the millions of fans of his rock band U2. In 2022, Bono wrote a memoir called “Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story,” which he promoted with a handful of theatrical shows in which he talked about his life, played characters including his father, with whom he had a troubled relationship, and sang a few U2 songs accompanied by the Jacknife Lee Ensemble, a cello/harp/keyboards trio that sounds nothing like U2.
The show found Bono sharing the stage with three empty chairs, which represented his missing bandmates The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. It made for a dramatic night of memories, and he upped the drama by hiring Andrew Dominik who directed “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” and a pair of brilliant music movies featuring Nick Cave, “One More Time With Feeling” and “This Much I Know to be True.” Dominik filmed additional footage on a bare stage to create the bold and glorious Apple Original Films presentation “Bono: Stories of Surrender,” which premiered in Cannes and comes to Apple TV+ on Friday. (It’s also available on the Apple Vision Pro mixed-reality headset, in a different version that puts you onstage with Bono and includes new footage.)
I spoke to Bono about the film in Cannes, 44 years and two months after we first met backstage at the Country Club, a 1,000-seat rock club in the San Fernando Valley where U2 made its first appearance in Los Angeles in March, 1981. At the time, Bono was only 20 – and since I was the West Coast music writer for Rolling Stone, a magazine that strongly supported U2 in its early days, our paths crossed many times throughout the 1980s, from the club in Reseda to a show where Bono risked his life by jumping off the balcony of the Los Angeles Sports Arena to a pub in Dublin where I interviewed the band for a cover story at the end of their breakthrough “Joshua Tree” tour.
Our paths have not crossed as often in many years, though I saw him at the Oscars in 2004 and the Palm Springs International Film Festival in 2014, and continued to go to his shows, including the spectacular run at The Sphere in Las Vegas in 2023. We caught up for a few minutes before turning to “Surrender,” taking stock of his life and trying not to be so serious all the time.
Given how far back we go, it’s strange that in recent years I’ve talked to your daughter Eve more often than I’ve talked to you.
She counseled me for today. (Laughs)
Did she? She’s good at this.
She called and said, “Listen, you just got to be yourself and be really grateful that these people (in Cannes) are allowing a non-actor their red carpet.” (Pauses) You know, that show at the Country Club, that is in a way emblematic. Because I had a white flag in my hand, I went into the crowd and people started pulling the flag out of my hand. I was like (mimes cocking his arm to throw a punch). And then I started catching myself: This might be a little hypocritical. Did I nearly throw a punch at somebody for stealing my white flag? And I went, OK, I have a lot more to learn about non-violence. (Laughs)
(Note: Bono has confused the Country Club show, which was in a small club and did not include him carrying a white flag into the audience, with the 1983 Sports Arena show at which he went into the audience with the flag.)
But it also is emblematic because that flag is still at the center of the story: the flag of surrender, the flag of non-violence. And also, by going out into the audience and jumping off the balcony into the crowd, that’s what all our video innovations has been about. That’s what the Sphere was about. I know you were at Sphere, so thank you for that. And even doing Vision Pro, these are all ways of trying to get closer to people, get to this intimacy.
You know, we have this totally pretentious description, “radical intimacy.” (Laughs) It sounds like a sort of yoga sweat room.
Once you have written a book that’s about grappling with success and singing “giant songs,” you can’t do a normal book tour, right?
Yeah. I came up with the stage play to avoid having to do a big book tour, and to try and have some fun with it, to try and play these characters that are in my life. Because all singers are mimics. We have the ear, the musical ear. So it was fun to play my father night after night. And it was fun to play Luciano Pavarotti and do the big Italian voice. And then I realized, OK, this could be fun.
My father is definitely the star of this. He as well was giving me something to fight against, but I also realized there were values that he had, like charity. He said to me, “I appreciate what you’re doing for charity, but you wouldn’t need charity if the world was more just.” And that’s the same man who was a Catholic, who would marry a Protestant and not have his family turn up at the wedding. He had courage and he followed through. And then he said to my mother, “It’s the mother’s choice. You bring up the children as you see fit.” And so we went to this little Church of Ireland church, and he would wait outside and go up to the little Catholic church up the road.
Eventually, I became somewhat ambidextrous. In fact, multi-dextrous. (Laughs) I’m happy in a synagogue. I just want to be near the presence, whatever we call what we can’t explain, what we are in awe of. In music, in rock and roll, we go to church in the dark, right? And we root for light. Same with cinema. You’ve got a church in the dark – that’s cinema.
We’re all looking for the same thing: something to transcend our life and something that gives us connection beyond ourselves. (Laughs) People think, is he really still going on about this? I promise I’m coming back to rock ‘n’ roll. And, and instead of intimacy being the new punk rock, punk rock will be the new intimacy.
After writing the book and exploring all these issues, did it change what you want to do from here?
Yeah, it did. (Shrugs) Not enough. (His wife) Ali will still say to me, “Read your own book. When is this period of deep listening about to take place? ‘Cause I haven’t noticed it.” (Laughs) But I think I listen a bit better. I’ve been listening to the band. We’ve been playing and I’m realizing I’m one-quarter of an artist without them. It’s not just that we have chemistry. I really need them. And I’m one half of a person without Ali.
She would probably survive, maybe even be delighted to thrive outside of the relationship. She’s such an extraordinary person. But no, I need these people. So I suppose that’s what I learned at the end of it. I am dependent on others. I was frustrated that I needed these musicians. I had these melodies in my head as a kid. I grew up with all these melodies in my head, but I couldn’t play.
And there would be very funny things, like my grandmother had a piano and she was getting rid of it. I’d say to my mother, “Should we get the piano?” “We don’t have the room.”
A great one was sitting in St. Patrick’s Cathedral Grammar school. They have a huge choir. I was young, 10 or 11, and I was trying to get into the school. The headmaster said, “We have a choir here that’s quite renowned. Would you be at all interested in singing?” I was trying to say something, and my mother said, “Not at all. He’s not interested in singing.” And you might say, “How could a mother not know her child?” But she felt my discomfort, and so she was just making it easy for me. I did know that I had this thing, but my great fortune was that I needed to depend on Edge, Adam and Larry to get there. And even though that would make me a bit frustrated at times, it’s what made me.
One of the things that I love about this film is the way that U2’s music is used, but it does not try to pretend that those guys are there. Instead, it takes the guitar line from “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and gives it to the harp. It’s U2’s music, but in a different context.
Yeah. You see, I’m not playing a character. I’m playing myself in a story that all these other people wrote with me. The band. Ali. My family. My friends. Steve Pond, when he interviewed us over the years. And the people who wrote the story are still around. (Laughs) I don’t want to screw up. But without Edge, Adam and Larry, I had to find a different center to the songs. They were there to drive the story forward. They were not just there because they’re the greatest hits or the songs that people know, grateful, but they’re there to open up particular situation.
I had Bob Marley in the back of my head for “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” I wrote the lyric in in Jamaica in the house that he once owned. And if you listen to “Sunday Bloody Sunday” as a Marley song, it makes a lot more sense. But while I was singing it, I just felt this jazz thing come over me. And that was Jackknife Lee and his arrangements. I was like, “Is that Nina Simone?” I don’t really get to do that with these other musicians because they’re rock and roll bands. They want to kick your ass.
How did you tweak change the stage show for the film? Obviously we’re watching more than just what happened on stage at the Beacon Theater.
Yeah. It’s tricky to just roll cameras on your stage show. It’s a different format, a different art form. So Andrew Dominik would explain to me, “I know you think it’s intimate having people right at your feet, but the lens can see right into you and knows when you’re lying.” And I’m saying, “It knows when I’m lying? I thought Marlon Brando said he was lying for a living.” “No, when Marlon was great, he wasn’t lying. And any actor knows that, and you’re going to have to learn it.”
He was tough on me. He made me laugh, but he was tough. And yeah, it was tricky saying goodbye to your father every night. (The show includes Bono’s memories of his father’s death.) But it was a lot tougher five times in one session (with Dominik) without an audience. And Andrew going, “No, try it again.” That was a particularly bleak day for me.
Is it satisfying to look back at it now?
It’s excruciating.
Really?
I can’t watch it very often. In editing, I’d just come in every once in a while and go, “Ew.” Or, “Is it funny?” There’s a reason why Shakespeare loves tragic comedy, ’cause It’s tragic and it’s comic. But if it’s just a tragedy, it’s just whining rock stars. Like, it’s not enough to talk about losing your father and your mother, now you’re telling us about what’s going on in Northern Ireland and Africa, the squandering of human potential, blah, blah, blah.
Really, I’m having the best time of anybody’s life. That better come across. And what gives you permission to tell the tragic is the comic. I think the audience, U2’s audience, has developed a suspicion of people who are not funny.
My heroes are all comedians at the moment. Amy Schumer! I’d send her anywhere in the world to sort any situation at any time.
