Jack White at the news conference for “White Stripes: Under Great White Northern Lights,” which chronicles the rocker’s tour of out-of-the-way Canadian locales with his ex-partner. “It gets better as the tour goes on,” White says of the film. “You start to forget that (the camera) is there and that’s when you start to get those special moments.”
The White Stripes have always paid acute attention to presentation and performance, but as regular human beings Jack and Meg White are typically pretty guarded.
Jack White at the news conference for “White Stripes: Under Great White Northern Lights,” which chronicles the rocker’s tour of out-of-the-way Canadian locales with his ex-partner. “It gets better as the tour goes on,” White says of the film. “You start to forget that (the camera) is there and that’s when you start to get those special moments.”
The White Stripes have always paid acute attention to presentation and performance, but as regular human beings Jack and Meg White are typically pretty guarded.
It was thus with some trepidation that the pair allowed a three-man camera crew led by director Emmett Malloy to accompany them on their ambitious 2007 summer tour of out-of-the-way Canadian locales from Whitehorse, Yukon, to Glace Bay, N.S.
Allow the cameras in they did, though, and the resulting film, The White Stripes:Under Great White Northern Lights, offers a rare glimpse into the private lives, emotional ups-and-downs and occasional tensions typically hidden behind the Stripes’ canny self-mythologization. And rare is the way White – who made his distaste for celebrity “reality” TV and movie fodder known yesterday during a news conference with Malloy prior to the movie’s premiere at the Elgin Theatre – would like to keep it.
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“It gets better as the tour goes on. You start to forget that (the camera) is there and that’s when you start to get those special moments. By the end of the film, those start popping up more and more,” White said.
“But, yeah, we were apprehensive and you always should be apprehensive because those are the most special things about why you’re alive and why you create what you create. To give it away too easily, it cheapens some of those special moments ... Some things don’t need to be said and some things don’t need to be seen.”
Jack and Meg, an ex-couple who are still cheekily billing the half-colour/half black-and-white film as “a brother and sister’s journey across the Great White North,” didn’t give it all up for the big screen once the editing was done, then, but Malloy does have a few moments of the Stripes at their most vulnerable.
Much of the film, of course, chronicles blazing shows in remote places like Iqaluit and the lighthearted “secret shows” – busking on the back of a Winnipeg city bus, jamming with a marching band on the Halifax pier – that went on between official dates.
But an ending that sees painfully shy Meg, who would later that summer blow out the band’s European tour due to acute anxiety problems, breaking down in tears while Jack plays her a tune on a piano in an old Nova Scotia theatre is particularly poignant.
“That’s a very powerful scene and hard for me to watch and hard for Meg to watch,” White said. “It’s beautiful. And I think it goes above and beyond anything about the band or anything about the film itself. The whole film just opens up and you forget you even watched the last 90 minutes. I’m glad Emmett was able to capture that.”
Ben Rayner is a Toronto-based journalist and a frequent
contributor to the Star’s Culture section. Follow him on Twitter:
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