IT’S SO EASY AND OTHER LIES, based on Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan’s New York Times best-selling memoir, is in theaters now. The film chronicles Duff’s rise to fame, his near fatal struggles with addiction, and his transformation into the person he is today.
Recently, I had the chance to speak with director Christopher Duddy. Check it out below!
The doc also features exclusive archival footage and interviews from Duff’s closest friends including fellow GNR band member Slash, PEARL JAM guitarist Mike McCready, and MOTLEY CRUE bassist Nikki Sixx.
How do you adapt a book into a film? That must have been quite the undertaking at the start… What was your approach, and did it stay the same throughout?
It is a tricky undertaking but I had an extra template with the story telling besides the book and that approach was through the live performance Duff gives in the movie. He reads from the book as his band scores his spoken word in a very fucking cool way. Duff enlisted a steel slide guitar and a string quartet and arranged all these iconic Guns N Roses and Velvet Revolver songs with classic orchestration specifically for the movie and that is the catalyst for the whole journey throughout this documentary. It’s more a hybrid of a concert film and a documentary. We even use a lot of animated sequences. We really wanted this film to be out of the box and not make it self indulgent and not make it a Guns N Roses doc. Now this didn’t make the executive producers or distributors very happy but we made the film Duff and I wanted to make.
You deal with some pretty heavy material, such as addiction and recovery. How did you find the balance as a storyteller while navigating through footage?
Good question, making a documentary like this is really an investigation into someone’s life and its a scary thing because as a film maker you are asking someone to pull the curtain back exposing themselves enough for other people to see into their shit, good or bad, enough to make it interesting also and Duff was very adamant about showing not only the good, but also the bad shit a lot of bad shit that he went through and struggles he had with addiction. Most people want to hide behind the good so people don’t think bad about them. I think we balanced it well but you know, this is his journey and I hope it inspires people that they too can overcome struggles with addiction.
I was impressed by your interviews with some of the Sunset Strip royalty – Nikki Sixx, Slash… A lot of people would consider it a dream to interview them. How did you find it, and what were some highlights for you?
Those are the perks when you get the opportunity to make a film like this. I’m a fan of those guys, I’m the same age as Duff so I grew up on their music. It was a real pleasure to get to meet and interview Slash and Nikki, they were both really cool dudes. I went to both their homes to shoot and Slash’s was classic. When I got to his house I asked him where he wanted to shoot his interview and he said in his studio. So his assistant takes us down to his studio and we walk into this all black leather room with a brass stripper pole right smack dab in the middle of the fucking studio. Even the ceiling was covered in black leather. I was like “this will do just fine!” I’m a big Pearl Jam fan so meeting and shooting Mike McCready was also a treat. That’s the cool thing about Duff, he is really well liked in the music world and with fellow rock stars so it wasn’t hard to get these guys onboard. That did make this a fucking cool experience making this movie.
Was there anyone you didn’t get to interview that you would have liked to?
Yes for sure. When we started out I made up a wish list of potential interviewers but as the film started to find it’s own narrative the movie takes over and determines what stories your telling and who to interview. That’s the nature of documentary filmmaking and you can’t force anyone into that narrative if it is not justified. So there were some interviews we shot and didn’t end up in the movie and then there were some guys I had on the wish list that we ended up not going after because it didn’t work.
What do you hope audiences take away from this film?
Like i said earlier, we wanted this to be a different and unorthodox film so I hope they are first entertained and enjoy the experience and I hope the audience is inspired by Duff’s story of struggle and recovery and perseverance through the dark parts of his life and that we all have it in us to win against our demons and to follow our dreams and passions and find happiness and success no matter what you do. An uplift of human spirit. We need it these days.
