< 'Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé' is maximalist excellence

STEPHEN THOMPSON, HOST:

Beyonce's album "Renaissance" drew on generations' worth of Black and queer dance music, and the subsequent tour packed stadiums with an epic, lavish spectacle. It had massive screens, towering props, dancers, hydraulics, the works. Now she's released a maximalist concert film that captures the experience and shows why the tour was such a phenomenon this summer. The film topped the box office over the weekend. I'm Stephen Thompson, and today we are talking about "Renaissance: A Film By Beyonce" on POP CULTURE HAPPY HOUR from NPR.

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THOMPSON: Joining me today is NPR music correspondent Sidney Madden. Hey, Sidney.

SIDNEY MADDEN, BYLINE: What's up, Stephen?

THOMPSON: Also with us - NPR senior editor Bilal Qureshi. Hey, Bilal.

BILAL QURESHI, BYLINE: Hi, Stephen.

THOMPSON: It is great to have you both. So Beyonce's album "Renaissance" was a blockbuster. It won four Grammys earlier this year and inspired a world tour that has earned more than $500 million. Now "Renaissance: A Film By Beyonce" recreates the experience of watching the tour play out. It alternates concert performances with behind-the-scenes footage that places the tour in context. The film shows quite a bit of the work that went into putting on the Renaissance Tour, while also providing a sense of Beyonce's own journey as a highly driven artist who's determined to be the best at everything she does. "Renaissance: A Film By Beyonce" is in theaters now. Sidney Madden, I'm going to start with you. What did you think of the movie?

MADDEN: Oh, my gosh, how to synthesize this singular moment in life? Very much like the brain-melting, synapse-firing, soul-soaring communal experience of the Renaissance Tour, this is an experience in the visual that I will never forget. I mean, I went to go see this film twice this weekend - you know, journalistic...

THOMPSON: Wow.

MADDEN: ...Due diligence. And one time I saw it with someone who's, you know, BeyHive like me. And the other time I saw it with someone who at worst we can call them a fake hater. At best, we can call them someone who, you know, quote, "doesn't get the hype" about Beyonce.

THOMPSON: Wow, OK.

MADDEN: And seeing it with that second person - almost indescribable. They left the theater, and they were like, OK, I get it, because that's just the sheer awe-inspiring, overwhelming effect of what she does in this. I mean, I've been BeyHive for a very long time. I've seen her live as many times as I could afford to. I've seen every visual work she's done. And this just hits different. Like, it really does. Like, she herself has gone through a metamorphosis, a renaissance and a rebirth. And it's a rebirth artistically and personally that's benefiting all of us tenfold.

Like, this film is about so many different facets that I feel like we've never really gotten a full picture from before from her. Obviously, she's always doing legacy building, but she talks so much in this film about having nothing to prove, about how she's divesting from being a people pleaser, how she feels more confident in herself as a singer, as a performer than she ever has before. She doesn't feel the need to dance around as much. She feels like a fuller person in her 40s than she ever has before.

You also get so many snippets of Blue Ivy that - I feel like I've never heard Blue Ivy say a full paragraph before, and now I know her preferences. I know her - you know, I know her hairstyles. I know what her grandma is oiling her scalp with. I know her own insecurities and fears and how she works through them. I just feel like this is the best picture we've gotten of Beyonce as a multifaceted, multilayered person and how deep she digs to create such singular pieces of art. And I know we'll get into the queer representation and the relationship with Uncle Johnny, 'cause we absolutely have to. But, yeah, this is the one. It's a yes from me - 10, 10, tens across the board.

THOMPSON: (Laughter) All right. How about you, Bilal?

QURESHI: I feel like I've run out of superlatives to talk about what happened with the album and, like, how great all of it has been. I think what I found myself most - and I, like Sidney, went twice to see it this weekend in IMAX. And I think for me it really, like, cemented was how much I've actually responded to her and my fandom of her is rooted in her as a filmmaker. It really, like, underscored that I actually found myself realizing I listen to her less than I like to watch her films. And in this I think what maybe, Sidney, you might remember too, from the show, is that there were so many cameras on the stage, cameras rigged to every part of the stadium, and they were flying and soaring. And she has been known to gather tons and tons of raw material. And so what I was blown away by with the film was the reason I think of her as a filmmaker so - and she's really a cinema-maker - is all the sequencing, all the editing that had to be done because I think this film is so brilliant because of the way it's edited and put together.

And I think in all of the films that she's made - and she's made several now, including "Life Is But A Dream," which was 10 years ago - this - "Homecoming" was a concert film also, a more traditional concert film, I'd argue, than this is, and I just found this to be something that really cemented why I think - I really do think of her as, like, a visual artist of our time. And she reminded me a lot of of Michael Jackson in this film and the kind of concert and - not concert films, but the music films he made, whether it was "Moonwalker" or even the "Remember The Time" music video - like, someone who thinks as a narrative filmmaker. And so for me, that's what I would say, like, compared to all the things that are amazing about the album and were amazing about the tour, this is an amazing cinema experience.

THOMPSON: The superlatives around this movie - I think you've stated them. I think they speak for themselves. Like, this tour is clearly a towering technical achievement. She is a pretty unparalleled live performer. She is somebody who, like, as a maximalist, like, deploys maximal resources to maximal effect. You can't recreate Beyonce. Like, if you - aspiring to be Beyonce is really being unfair to yourself because this is somebody who has every resource at her disposal and all the drive in the world and uses those things to maximal effect. And so watching this film is a maximalist experience. I'm going to keep coming back to that word because it just kept popping into my head throughout.

My one critique of this film is I wanted it to be two films. That sounds kind of contradictory in a way. Like, what I want from Beyonce is more. But to me, the documentary stuff is often illuminating, as Sidney said. But to me, I wanted the concert. I wanted a recreation of the concert experience. I do not have Beyonce ticket money. And so I wanted the experience of, like, what is it like to go to the Renaissance tour? And I wanted to see the concert. And to me, combining a concert film with a documentary - I wanted a little bit of, like, one or the other.

MADDEN: But the documentary vignettes are what gave you, like, the SparkNotes to illuminate the visuals even more because I remember I went to the show in late summer. I went to the Miami show. And my seats - you know, I was not in Club Reni. I don't have Club Reni money. So I was kind of off to a little bit stage right. And I didn't see a lot of what was going on in that cylinder. I didn't hear a lot of her little adlibs that you hear a lot more in the film. I didn't - you get the sense that she's a lot more free. Like, you know, she drops some glasses. She doesn't really care - or if there's something happening with a smoke machine. But you just get such a deeper appreciation for all of the little speeches that are happening inside the cylinder.

One of my favorite little snippets and details that I don't think enough people are talking about I see online so far is that the stage set-up took four years to do. And at the end credits of the film, you can see how big and how brolic the stage crew was, the steel team (ph) crew. She's flipping through that book of four years of iterations of making it feel as much of a cycle, a cylinder as possible so that the energy just, like, flows through the arenas, flows through the stadiums. To think that level of dedication to getting the energy right is something that, even if you went to the show, even if you went to the performance and even if you just saw just the performance in order - because that's another thing. The songs are not exactly sequenced the way they were on the real tour. Even if you got all of those, you wouldn't have the same appreciation for the creative control and the depths of how deep these references and influences go.

QURESHI: See, even I would say, like, to me, actually, that was the thing that I liked the most about the film - was that I actually found, having seen the Eras tour, which we talked about on this show as well, and then seeing the film version - and I'm not engaging in the, like, you know, pitting them against each other at all thing. I'm just saying as a concert film experience, because I was just - I had just seen that film, too, it's much more of a literal approximation. That was like, you can go to the SoFi shows that Taylor Swift did. And I felt like in a way, after it was finished, it was kind of, for me, a flatter experience.

What I thought was really brilliant was the show, to everyone's point, is maximalist. It's extraordinary - the staging, the machinery of it. And she uses this term, the machine. The show is a machine. And I think it is, like, designed with the "Metropolis" stuff, the spaceship stuff, her as a robot, all this kind of stuff. The whole thing is this machine. I remember noting down, like, this really is a film about the human and the machine. And the human is the parts of it that are the vignettes that I think really give the whole feeling of, like, how somebody makes something like this and how somebody envisions something like this.

And to me, that layering is what made it feel much richer than an approximation of the show. And I know that, like, with the Taylor Swift film, a big play of that film was a lot of people couldn't get tickets to it. So here's the show. And a lot of people, I have noticed, went to that film to almost recreate the experience of going to the concert...

THOMPSON: Yeah.

QURESHI: ...'Cause they missed the show, and I did not find this to be the experience of this film at all. This was...

MADDEN: Yes.

QURESHI: As someone who went to that show, I actually felt like this was a distinctly separate thing. And not that - and that, I think, I found much more cinematically interesting than a eloquently, articulately recreated version and approximation, frankly, because a film could never recreate the experience of being at a show.

THOMPSON: Yeah.

QURESHI: And I think that one of the most amazing things is actually the audience footage in the film, I think, is so...

MADDEN: Yes.

QURESHI: ...Beautifully chosen. They're not just, like, random intercuts of people screaming. It's such hilarious choices of people and what they're actually doing. And I think that gets you closer as a viewer, again, watching a film version that can never recreate. And some people tried, but I think they kind of mostly were also part of the subdued audience that I was seeing it with. But that was my experience of it in the theater. It was not so rowdy, and it was more, I think, really in awe of a film that people were watching.

THOMPSON: I wanted to get back to Bilal's point about the human versus the machine and the way this film is kind of trying to balance those two and kind of show this kind of portrait of the person behind the spectacle. There's a point early in this film where Beyonce talks about embracing her flaws. And Sidney talked about some of the documentary footage and how she's kind of come away not caring what people think and feeling liberated and stuff. Did that ring true for you? Because I felt like even our audience of, like, very enthusiastic Beyonce fans, of which I myself am one, I kind of rolled my eyes in IMAX (laughter) at at the idea that, like, Beyonce is suddenly embracing her flaws because, I mean, there's literally footage in this film of Beyonce running on the beach to sort of signify how liberated she is while wearing a full face of makeup...

MADDEN: With the wig on.

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THOMPSON: ...Looking like she is in one of her videos. Like, did you buy every minute of it? Because, like, there is - it is so curated. Like, everything she does is curated to the 100th degree.

QURESHI: I think I'm beginning to pick up on the fact that that is some of the, like - the reasons some people are not maybe as much of a fan because they do find that curation and that extreme kind of image management, like, a bit off-putting, even though we all know that every, like, celebrity is manufactured to a large extent. I think the thing that I realized is after I saw this, I went back and watched "Life Is But A Dream," which is this film she made ten years ago for HBO. And she actually said a lot of the exact same thing.

THOMPSON: Yeah, she says some of the same things in "Homecoming."

QURESHI: She said the same stuff exactly like - you know, it was very, almost similar verbatim in a way, which is fine. People do have continuing threads. But the same thing - like, now I'm going to be real. I'm going to forgive myself. I'm going to be easier on myself. I think the thing that touched me most in the human thing is the dissection she did of the three parts of her - the mother, the kind of mother of the house, the performer and then, I think, the businesswoman. And I feel like she seemed to me in this film to make those parts of herself clearer than I have felt before. And I actually thought the stuff around her relationship with her kids in this film is extremely moving and really beautiful.

MADDEN: That's exactly what I was going to say, as well, Bilal. I feel like I know who Beyonce is as a mother so much more, as a normal - not normal.

THOMPSON: (Laughter) She is not normal.

MADDEN: 'Cause she hopping on the PJ. She hopping on the PJ. But there's so many times in this film where you see her children so much more. Like I said earlier, there's the reason why, as a running joke, that Blue Ivy is her manager because at the end of the day, Beyonce is just her mom. And, you know, she gets embarrassed by her mom. And she's like, mom, you're making the wrong decision. The part where she's like, no, we have to keep "Diva" in the show. And she's like, you got to chill out, OK? You can't cut people off. And then they proceed to keep "Diva" in the show. Or when she's like, we're wasting our time on fingers. OK. So Blue Ivy - this is Blue Ivy's tour, too, because she said our time on fingers.

But there's a really quick flashpoint that you can tell Bey is about to hit the stage. Like, she's in that golf cart, and they about to speed through that stadium to get her to where she needs to go. And Rumi is on her lap, and she had just finished crying. And this woman in a multimillion-dollar, probably bespoke, piece of couture is wiping away her baby's tears. So that's the type of balancing act that I feel like I appreciate the most in the behind-the-scenes moments of this film.

And also, on the point of letting go and having more freedom, I think that's a constant struggle, that she is always going to chafe against the fact that she is Beyonce. You are Beyonce. And at the end of the day, she sets the bar so high for herself and residually for others that she constantly needs to maintain that. And so her version of freedom is still going to have a red lip and doorknocker earrings on. And her version of freedom is going to be, like, her kids holding the camcorder so that they interview her so that it really will be the most caring and intimate and honest answers because on the flip side of that, she got to put together a whole show where people are telling her that this is the widest fish-eye there ever is. And she has to constantly fight against people telling her, these are the limitations. These are the ceilings. Like, this is not possible. Being able to switch gears and still have standards for what you want your representation to be, what you want your own beauty standard to maintain - that's still - feels very on par with the humanness and the human experience of this film.

QURESHI: And the other thing I wanted to just mention is that I think, to Sidney, that scene that you mentioned with Blue Ivy - I also found this very funny film, the funniest version of her films that she's made because her image and her kind of portrayal is often this kind of, like, you know, impeccable perfection. And the show is also this spectacular intergalactic, like, journey to, like, you know, an audience with this otherworldly being. And so I think that the - some of the choices made in the movie, her kids kind of backstage replicating some of her dance choreography in awkward ways - like, I think that stuff is the humanness she can share. And I think the show's also so camp and ridiculous. And I actually realize watching it this time again that so much of it - when you're watching it in the stadium, it was, like, so overwhelming to see this amazing stuff and then seeing her, like, dressed as a bee in, like, a crazy leather - the ensemble is, like, also meant to be ridiculous.

THOMPSON: Right.

QURESHI: And I think this is the most fun that she was herself having. And I think that felt also really human. And I think it's captured by the film.

THOMPSON: Well, and I also want to give this film credit for contextualizing the album in some useful and interesting ways. I think the stuff about her Uncle Jonny, who helped inspire the album and kind of inspired her to embrace, you know, not only generations of Black art but generations of queer art and queer dance music. And using this tour to create - you know, this term gets thrown around a lot - but to create a safe space not only for the audience but for the performers, many of whom are queer themselves or trans themselves. And kind of delving into that a little bit deeper was something that I really appreciated, that allowed me to appreciate where the album is coming from a little bit more. That stuff really, really worked for me.

MADDEN: Yeah. I think this film really synthesized or just gave me a eureka moment in terms of her discography or filmography. Bey is really a vessel for things that she sometimes has not directly experienced. You know, for example, she didn't go to HBCU, but, you know, you feel the fullness and the swag of what that experience means on "Homecoming." She did not grow up in Africa, but as a member of the African diaspora, she pulls from all these ancestral roots, and she churns them and connects them to her own lived experience as a Black woman in America. You know, like you're part of something way bigger, right?

But now with "Renaissance," which you truly - in the film, her commitment to repping the Black, queer community and championing Black ballroom culture is so detailed throughout because of how deep dance music runs in her family, in her blood, because of her Uncle Jonny. Like, I always knew that Uncle Jonny made my dress was a reference to the prom photo, right? I didn't know - and this is from Tina Knowles, her mother's interview - that Jonny really helped raise her children. Jonny helped raise Beyonce and Solange. And that's why house music was always, like, pulsing through the home where they grew up in. I thought, I honestly - just as a novice of someone who hadn't, you know, researched enough - I was like, OK, she pulling on house. House is having a moment. All right. No, it's deeper than that.

And I love how during the section at the end of the show - the voguing section, which kind of in the film comes more in the middle - you get a mini vignette of Kevin JZ Prodigy, who is this ballroom legend, who provided not only the announcement of tracks on the album. He rocked the mic live on tour at the Atlanta tour stop. You get a nice encapsulation from Kevin Aviance, who is another iconic drag queen and who is sampled on the album and who was at the tour. And he said to hold us up and see us and say these kids have stories to tell and they have great music - she owned it, she digested it, and she became part of it.

And that's all over because we're part of her, you know? And it totally trickles down to the decision to have The Dolls, who are Black ballroom royalty in New York City - like, Honey Balenciaga alone - being on her stage team this time - it just feels like a full championing of a community that she knows she has so much to thank. And she knows that the bones and the veins of what they contribute are in so much of pop culture, but it often goes unnoticed or unchampioned. So that's what I really gained a lot more appreciation for in the film.

QURESHI: And what I really enjoyed about all of this history of the album and how the album was made, to your point, Stephen, was actually the way the stories were told. Because in the case of the Uncle Jonny's story, which is, of course, the line from "HEATED," is that when the "HEATED" performance begins on the stage, she takes out the fan. And it's like, you know, the fans go clack, clack, clack. And then the camera cuts to the Uncle Jonny story. And what happens is we get almost what's, like, an eight- to 10-minute short film within the film about Uncle Jonny. And then it's almost as if the live performance in the stadium, in the middle of "HEATED's" first notes, has kind of been paused, and we come right back to the performance. And it's just like the way you feel embedded into that song in that scene, to me, was the kind of filmmaking that I was film nerding out on...

THOMPSON: (Laughter).

QURESHI: ...To be honest with you - is that - it sort of like was as if, you know, it's like a pop-up video in a really big way. Like, the pop-up part of it is a tunnel that's made with the song. And it's done quite a few times where I actually felt like, when I read about the film before it was released, people were like, oh, there's a lot of behind-the-scenes footage. There's documentary stuff. She talks. But I actually found the sequences that we're referring to, the vignettes that, Sidney, you described - they are like mini films within the film. And they're quite beautifully directed themselves with archival stuff, with interviews with the dancers, with people who made things. And they're quite distinct. And I think that the stuff that made a lot of sense was the stuff about the origins, the references. And I think the fact that it happens in the middle of a crazy performance and you're right back in it and you're kind of like even additionally electrified watching it, I think was a really effective way to use them. And I think that was a really interesting choice. And I loved that scene with Uncle Jonny, and I think it was really beautifully told in the film.

MADDEN: Yeah. And Tina - she says at the end, every night I see him. I see somebody in the audience who reminds me of Uncle Jonny. And that makes her cry. That was beautiful.

QURESHI: Yeah.

THOMPSON: All right, well, we want to know what you think about "Renaissance: A Film By Beyonce." Find us at facebook.com/pchh. That brings us to the end of our show. Sidney Madden, Bilal Qureshi, thanks so much for being here.

MADDEN: Thank you.

QURESHI: Thank you so much.

THOMPSON: This episode was produced by Liz Metzger and Hafsa Fathima and edited by Mike Katzif. Our supervising producer is Jessica Reedy. Hello Come In provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to POP CULTURE HAPPY HOUR from NPR. I'm Stephen Thompson, and we will see you all tomorrow.

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