Are you done with the film and the record?
The film is being edited right now. Hopefully, we’ll be submitting it to Sundance in September, so the plan is that it debuts there in January and we’re hoping it will be out in IMAX theatres in February is what we’re looking for. But we don’t know, we’ve got a long ways to plan that out and get that all ready. We’ll see what happens.
As I recall, it was originally the I-Empire film and now it’s the Love film.
It’s really kind of evolved three different times. We started out, we wanted to make a documentary that kind of blurred the line between documentary and cinema but the documentary took on a life of its own, because there was kind of a big story. I was going through a lot of stuff at the time—the breakup of Blink and then drug use. That ended up being its own giant project. The documentary called Start The Machine went off on its own, then we started the actual film. We were thinking for I-Empire that’s what the goal was. Then the film was too good. It was way better than we all thought we could pull off, honestly. We just kept building it and building it. Now, somewhere along the middle of the I-Empire run, we said we can’t let it come out with this record because there’s so much more we want to do for this film and so we started negotiations to make everything be free, to be able to release the album and the movie for free. We’re at a perfect moment in our career with that band to do something really ambitious like that, so we’re really excited.
It was originally sort of a collection of vignettes connected to the I-Empire theme. Is it still vignettes?
It’s hard to describe. The story is about a guy that gets sent up into an international space station and he’s left there as a human time capsule. He finds digital archives on the ship of people’s lives. That’s how vignettes come to play. There’s dialogue. There’s a lot of CGI. It starts in the civil war. There’s a very kind of science fiction feel to it. We were always loving movies like 2010 and Solaris and these kind of movies where you sit back and soak into your seat and it takes you somewhere. It’s a much more cerebral approach that what people do when they normally make a movie. This is very much an art piece, and I wouldn’t necessarily think that you’re gonna see a bunch of mainstream kids from high school going to see the film. I think it would be young adults and people who are really interested in cinema. I don’t know how to describe it because this hasn’t really been done by a band in a very long time because it’s very hard to pull off. We’re using the same sound designers as Darren Aronofsky, we’re using Oliver Stone’s editors, it’s a big deal.
Is the budget spiraling out of control?
No, that’s the thing. I think what happened is we went around after three years of filming all this stuff and we met all these incredible guys and we showed them the footage and told them the story and they signed on and started the week after. It’s one of those rare things where everybody wants to work on it, not because of the budget but because of what it is and what it stands for and the philosophy of the entire thing. Coming out on Valentine’s Day, Love, it’s not a boyfriend girlfriend thing, this is more of a humanity kind of thing. That to me is really exciting. That’s what Angels & Airwaves is. Angels & Airwaves is a band built on this spirituality component that I think young Americans and young Western societies are slowly moving into and understanding. Angels & Airwaves is an interesting band and I think people will find that out moreso over the next year. We’ve been involved in a lot of really interesting things and I think people will soon start to find that out.
