“New York is an apparition generated by those who come together to breathe life into something not quite temporal, something that has to be conjured. And it’s not possible without the particular alchemy generated when every last person who happens to be there at that precise moment — the famous and the anonymous — come together serendipitously.”

That’s author Lizzy Goodman poetically describing the way a cultural moment begins in her book Meet Me in the Bathroom. It’s a seminal, 640-page account of the music scene in New York City at the turn of the millennium, a text which Pitchfork called “the juiciest book on rock’n’roll in years.” That time has now inspired an intimate, inviting, and energetic documentary from filmmakers Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern, who previously documented one of this film’s subjects in their great concert film Shut Up and Play the Hits. The pair spoke with MovieWeb about their film, the cultural significance of this period, and how rebels come of age.
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This is the way scenes start — like organic chemistry, a kind of evolution. There wasn’t a council of bands and record labels who got together in 1975 and said, “Okay, let’s arrange punk rock.” Instead, a scene is like a ricocheting bullet, chaotic but with causality, and that’s exactly how the NYC music scene of 1999 started, and how it died roughly nine years later. Initially small bands like The Moldy Peaches, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, The Strokes, The Rapture, LCD Soundsystem, TV on the Radio, and others seemed to explode overnight, and Meet Me in the Bathroom captures it all.

Lovelace and Southern weren’t there for it, but a cavalcade of amateur cinematographers were, and the filmmakers scoured the records to edit together something personal and immersive. 1999 saw the birth of the camera phone, along with much cheaper camera equipment, so there was a sea of material for the directors to wade through.

“We were based in Liverpool in the UK during this time, so we weren’t there. We were kind of aware of the scene and the music, but not filming any of it,” said Lovelace. “All the footage is from people who were either in those bands or around those bands, or people in New York who happened to be interested in music and were just filming stuff. The ambition was to find as much new stuff as we could and try to find the right material that would help place you in that time. It was a bit like being detectives diving in and searching wherever we could find footage.”

“At the very start of the project, we had to decide how we wanted to tell this story,” said Southern. “We were sort of averse to the idea of seeing the artists and musicians as they are today, or having cultural commentators or critics pop up and give context to the story. Our intention was really just to drop you into the time and let the story unfold with the archive that was available.”

Lovelace and Southern Explore the Personalities of Rock Stars

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Meet Me in the Bathroom is certainly not the kind of VH1 documentary with talking heads that Southern was averse too. It’s more like a shared memory, a very personal fly-on-the-wall that is also frequently poetic, including the voiceover narration from the artists themselves. “Where we could, we used interviews from the time that would give you an insight into what it felt like in the eye of the storm,” said Southern. “We also conducted contemporary audio-only interviews that helped us kind of make the story whole […] It did happen 20 years ago, but we tried to find a way to interview the subjects in a way that made it feel immediate and not a kind of retrospective.”

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“And some of those archival interviews were from journalists’ recordings when they had been doing a print interview,” added Lovelace, “so some of that had been written down but hadn’t ever been heard before. So you get quite a free way of talking that might not have been the case if there was a camera on them even back then.” The musicians (Karen O, Adam Green, James Murphy, Paul Banks, and more) have a tender, reflective way of speaking that complements the extremely honest and vulnerable images of Meet Me in the Bathroom, in which rock stars express doubts, regrets, insecurities, and hopes.

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Lovelace and Southern had their own conversations with the musicians because this is their story; in many ways, this is a coming-of-age film about the struggles and maturation of young people thrust into the spotlight. “It was very collaborative. All the artists were really, really helpful in terms of providing us with their own archives. We could get in touch to ask questions anytime. James [Murphy, who they documented in Shut Up and Play the Hits] was especially helpful in terms of giving us time for interviews and taking stuff out for us,” said Southern.

“We also spoke to most of the artists in the film before we did any interviews or anything,” added Lovelace, “to make sure that the story we were telling was faithful to their experience of what it was like in those times. Obviously, we had Lizzy’s book as a kind of guide because they’ve all talked in that book a lot.”

Meet Me in the Bathroom and a Musical Coming of Age

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Lizzy Goodman’s book might be a definitive document of the NYC music scene in this new millennium, but it exists in a specific medium; Lovelace’s and Southern’s film is able to bring words to life, turning an oral history into an audiovisual tone poem. Her book wasn’t like a script to them, but more of an inspiration. “It was a jumping-off point initially,” said Lovelace. “We read the book and loved it, and knew straightaway you can make a great documentary on the same subject. We felt that the first part of her book was the bit that we would like to make a film about, those early years. I think Dylan described it as like the origin story of these bands really.”

“Well, the book already exists, so you don’t just want to make a carbon copy of a book,” added Southern. “One of the things that we took from the book was the coming-of-age stories, they have all the beats of a coming-of-age story. You know, Karen comes from outside New York and reinvents herself, and that can bring its own troubles. James is really interesting, a coming-of-age story happens in his 30s. So we really looked at it from a narrative point of view. To tell the story of New York at the time, it was interesting to look at through the prism of these various coming of age stories.”

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The coming-of-age narrative in Meet Me in the Bathroom is a complicated one. It doesn’t just depict the development of a particular musical style (very hip indie rock that becomes surprisingly popular) or the way certain musicians grow into themselves, but also the culture’s coming of age into the 21st century. The film documents the ways in which 9/11, the birth of the internet and online file sharing, the migration from Manhattan to Brooklyn, the gentrification of Williamsburg, and the digitalization of the music industry all forced the music scene and its city or origin to come of age. Aside from the great music, that’s partly why this transitional moment in time is so important to document.

Lovelace and Southern Capture the Cultural Transition of the 2000s

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“This is a really interesting time,” said Lovelace, “because it’s sort of the beginning of the internet, the end of this sort of analog age and into the digital age. We found it really interesting that the way you meet people, the way you promote music and make music, this [the early 2000s] felt like it was the last time that would happen before it would change. In some way, that must have fed into the bands that came out and the music they made, and the fact that it all happened in that one moment.”

“The particular time we focus on is that cusp, that short time when things are changing from one to the other before everything just starts accelerating,” said Southern. “It’s just really interesting that these are people who saw a lack of something in the culture, there was something missing for them, and they self-actualized it. It was very do-it-yourself, and this kind of scene just grew out of nowhere and happened at such an interesting time historically.”

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Meet Me in the Background is bookended by a reading of Walt Whitman’s poetry in Leaves of Grass, in which he writes yearningly about New York City, and it provides a kind of mythical backdrop to this historical moment. It’s hauntingly beautiful, like that “apparition” that Gordon writes about in her book. “The intention,” explained Southern, “was to place those bands, the bands that you’ve just seen in the film, and kind of ask the question: ‘Can that happen again? Is it impossible now?'” He continued:

The world’s moved on so much, in terms of technology, in terms of geopolitics, in terms of gentrification as well. Are the ingredients, is the perfect storm there to allow something like that to ever happen again? I guess that’s a question to the audience at the end, because we consume music differently now, we make music differently now. I’m sort of optimistic that another scene can kind of emerge at some point, but it probably will never happen the way that it did 20 years ago.

In the meantime, Meet Me in the Bathroom immortalizes the memory. From Vice Studios, XTR, Pulse Films, BFI, and Utopia, Meet Me in the Bathroom will be in New York and Los Angeles theaters on Nov. 4th, before its wider theatrical release on Nov. 8th and a future digital streaming date.