‘It’s My Job To Be Professionally Nosy’: Q’s With ‘Ronnie’s’ Director Oliver Murray

Titled “Ronnie’s,” the documentary is as much a journey into the building’s rich history, as it is a portrait of the two men who founded the place: Ronnie Scott and Pete King, who were not just business partners, but also best friends.  Pollstar spoke with Murray about the making of “Ronnie’s,” which is available now on streaming services including Amazon and iTunes.

We touched on the incredible archive of artists performing at Ronnie Scott’s, the challenges of making a documentary, who’s main protagonists are no longer with us, the delicate task of getting friends and family to open up, surprises along the way, and much more.

Oliver Murray: I love music, movies, photography, graphics, I love theatre, so it was almost like not having to make a choice, filmmaking encompasses all these things. 

I graduated in 2008, right in the middle of the financial crash. It meant getting into an industry when there wasn’t much money in it. At that point, I didn’t have any money either, so it wasn’t a concern. And, really, the door was open to young filmmakers who wanted to make things like music videos. Online content was a word that got used a lot. I just got really stuck into that, and through music videos I got to know labels and management companies. 

I was always interested in telling stories. That’s really why I make films at the end of the day: the audio-visual angle is my favorite way into a story. That’s how I got my first opportunity to make a film with Bill Wyman, the archivist and historian, as well as the base player of The Rolling Stones, and went from there. That came out, and I was asked if I was interested in putting together a Ronnie Scott’s movie. Of course, I was.

That must have been 2019. There’s usually a catalyst for these kinds of films to be made, and Ronnie’s was going to celebrate its 60th anniversary. To be honest, it’s never a great way to make a film: just because there’s an anniversary doesn’t mean there’s a good story. But there’s always 100 reasons not to do it: films are expensive, with music docs there’s tricky rights issues, and loads of risks. And there’s only ever one or two reasons to do it, and if one of those reasons is an anniversary, I’ll take it.

I said, I love going to Ronnie’s, but I’m not a jazz head, I’m not an expert already, I’m not going to be able to get in on the first day of pre-production and tell you everything about this place and the people. But I feel like I am the audience. I am, like many people out there, going to be interested in finding out more than I first knew, especially about the man behind the name. 

What I did know was that jazz is often considered quite a closed form of music, quite an academic form of music. Therefore some people feel like it’s not for them; that it might be too complicated or not particularly easy to listen to. But somewhere like Ronnie’s and other jazz clubs, it’s really not the case. It’s a much more open and forward-thinking medium that is all about pushing boundaries. 

Sometimes the music might be kind of crazy or a little bit harmonically tricky, but the thing I really wanted to get across was that it’s the perfect place for a performer and an audience to come together and create the best atmosphere to play and listen to music. The not-so-secret ingredient of Ronnie’s, or any good venue, is: if the audience is having a great time, then the performer sits in that feedback loop where they want to give their best, the audience is willing them to do their best, and it just creates this alchemy, which is an extraordinary thing to witness. It does seem to have got into the walls of that place, the history, it drives the audiences and performers to be their best.

It’s so intimate. John Fordham, the jazz critic, is in the movie and was a huge source of inspiration for me. He was saying that sometimes you were sitting so close [to the performers] that you could see their sweat bouncing off your shoes. On the one hand, it’s an amazing privilege to be asked to play, but there’s no backstage thrills that come with that. If you want to play there, you play for yourself. That’s why the performances are so good. You don’t go there for huge amounts of money because they can only sell 250 tickets. You could go down the road to the Royal Albert Hall and sell out thousands of tickets, but musicians are searching for something, musically and sonically, and that atmosphere. Time and time again it seems to draw out the best in them.

Knowing that there was going to be an archive of extraordinary musicians that wouldn’t have been widely seen before. We’re very lucky in the U.K. to have the BBC, because it’s such an old, large archive of well-produced films and television. I knew I would be able to dig out things like Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Van Morrison and Miles Davis. The problem is, because [the archive] is very old and very big, things get lost, it’s so hard to catalogue all this material. The unsung heroes of this film are the people who restored the film and cleaned up the audio. It wasn’t that it was unloved, it’s just that it was old technology, mid-1970s tapes and things that we needed to clean.

That’s one of my favorite bits: you want to tell the best story and immerse people in the material, but the reality of getting to that place involves a lot of exploring these archives and talking to the music community of Soho, and the South of England – all these people who kept things or had a shoe box of tickets or polaroids. My memory of making these archive-heavy films is being in the car on the motorway, driving to see these people. I call it being professionally nosy. It’s my job to go and sit with these people or push to see material that may or may not be good for the show. It’s a very intimate, very personal [approach]. You have this window of opportunity when you start to take chances and try and find as much as you can.

Sometimes. Some of these people don’t really want to be found. The club was founded in the late 1950s, some of these people are almost 100 years old, if they’re alive. They don’t have Instagram accounts or want to jump on Zoom calls to talk. Sonny [Rollins], for instance, who lives in upstate New York, wasn’t particularly easy [to get], but then you just have to be patient. 

It depends on if they’re touring as well. When musicians are on tour, forget it, they’re focused, they’ve got a job to do. The pandemic didn’t feature on Ronnie’s, we finished beforehand, but if musicians can’t play, they’re up for talking. A lot of it is patience and stamina, and making sure, if you can in your schedule, that you don’t spend any money early. I always try and keep the crew small, no big thrills of a production office. I just need time, money buys time with these docs. 

I was very lucky to have a great archive producer, James Hunt, and a great music supervisor, Gary Welch, who handled the rights side of things. I was talking to those guys every day to make sure that the film we were building was a film that we could afford to license. You could start small, and just license it for the U.K.. But we wanted to make an ambitious film, so you try and license this for worldwide, which can be very complicated. 1960s contracts for music are famously difficult or sometimes nonexistent. And we turn up and ask them for some multi-territory deal, and they just say, ‘what the hell are you talking about?’ It was a wild west, and still is in a lot of ways.

Working very closely with the families to make sure that you get them in a comfortable place to talk about these things. It’s quite traumatic for them. It’s a hard part of the job, but a very necessary one. You know that when you’re traveling to speak to Ronnie’s daughter, or to Pete’s wife, that these wounds are still there, they never really heal. You know that you’re basically going to go and ruin their weekend by asking them to go to these places. 

It’s a responsibility I take really, really seriously. If you’re going to ask them to do that, you need to make sure that you’re making a film that is going to deliver on that front. 

I don’t film in the interviews. It allows you to go into these people’s houses, sit down on their couch and take your time with them. And even if for whatever reason they don’t want to do it on the day you turn up, it’s no big deal for me to just find a hotel and come back the next day for another go. Whereas if you’re filming, it’s a big ask to say to your production manager, ‘I think we should all come back tomorrow.’

People have lives, crews need to travel, and kit needs to get returned to prop houses. When I’m just by myself, that always works better emotionally, there’s no pressure. After a while, they forget that I’ve got a mic. It comes back to this idea of time. The more time you can allow, the better, the more emotional depth you’ll get, the more interesting archive you’ll find.

Although we needed to get it finished as quickly as possible, we didn’t have a broadcast date or cinemas booked. It’s a risky way to do it, I don’t think producers would say it was the best way to do it, because you end up with a movie that you haven’t sold, and then you have to try and sell it. But in our case, it works out well.

I felt that if you have the archive, you can use it a bit like a time machine, rather than keep showing a face of someone 50 years later. I often find that it doesn’t help the audience immerse themselves in the story. Especially if you’re looking at a 17-year-old drummer in the 1950s, and then you cut to them at 98 years old, they’re not really the same person. In a movie, you wouldn’t, for instance, add prosthetics to an actor until they can play the same character [they played decades ago]. If you would never do that in a drama, why do it in a documentary where you’re trying to take people into a world of 40, 50 years ago. Let’s just stay there. 

Also, to focus it on Ronnie and Pete, we had a bit of a rule. We see Pete and Ronnie, we see the musicians performing, and wives and girlfriends pop up as photos. But, ultimately, it’s Ronnie and Pete’s film, so you don’t need to keep cutting back to other people. If Ronnie or Pete had been alive, that might have been a different story. But if you’re not going to see [new original footage of] your chief protagonists, why do you want to see anyone else? 

What is more, if I can have three days with Ronnie’s partner Mary, instead of two hours if I want to film it, I’ll take three days every time. They need to get to know you, they’re not actors, they don’t do press. You’re not going to get them to open, if ten people turn up in their living room. It’s about reading the situation and putting utilizing the best techniques to get the best out of these individuals.

That came from all sorts of places. There’s the BBC, there’s ITV Granada and all these other bits and pieces. We found things every which way. Ronnie was a celebrity in the U.K.. He was interviewed on American movie shows, and appeared on French or German television, when they were doing a show about London. 

It’s cool to see an outsider’s view of the best places, because it gives you that distance and perspective on it. We looked around for that kind of stuff in the European archives, where all sorts of interesting stuff would often pop up. He, for instance, went to Scandinavia, some jazz fanatic working for Norwegian TV found him and interviewed him in a cafe. The images were not very good, but the sound was fantastic. It had been kept in the archives for safekeeping, and we found it 30 years later. Sometimes it’s as random as that.

The interesting part is the life that the film has had, the way the ground changed underneath us. When we started making the film, Ronnie’s was doing okay. It’s a jazz club, so it’s always got to be careful, but it was selling out, it has a really healthy global membership, it was a thriving small business. Almost as soon as we finished, people started talking about this thing called COVID, which no one really knew what it was going to be. We managed to have a theatrical release across the U.K. after the first lockdown, and just before the second one. The big surprise has been [to see] just how vulnerable these institutions can be.

To be fair, no one plans for a long-sustained pandemic to impact your business, but I think it’s been really interesting for people to understand that even somewhere like Ronnie’s needs looking after. And if we really cherish these institutions, we need to go to them. We need to vote with our feet and turn up. I think maybe that’s one of the reasons why the film has been working for audiences on the other side of the world, who may have never been to Ronnie’s. 

Everyone, I think, has a kind of a place, whether it’s a music venue or a cinema or even a restaurant or something in their local community or in their city that they can’t really imagine life without. Possibly one good side of the pandemic can be that, as we move out of it, every high street business, every cultural institution needs to be looked after, because they’re not all going to stay around forever, and especially music. 

One of the things that surprised me, to answer your question more directly, was my connection to music. I’ve been lucky to be working in it. And so, to see a story emerging of what happens to Ronnie when music’s taken away, was very profound for me, because I kind of feel the same when it comes to making films. You get emotionally invested in the ride of making these things. Depression in the 1950s and 1960s was not something that a man like him would admit to. And his friends, far from saying, ‘do you want to talk about it or seek help,’ would say, ‘someone buy Ronnie a drink.’

That realization of how important music and having a creative outlet is to me. The idea of having that taken away was really amplified by making the film, and really came into sharp focus in a year of not being able [to work]. A documentary maker who’s not allowed to leave the house, it’s tricky. Music was Ronnie’s medicine, and in a lot of ways, music’s my medicine too. I was surprised how much I learned about myself through learning about him. If that starts to happen, you know you’re in a good place. That’s why we watch stuff, right? To learn about other people and thereby educate us on ourselves as well. It was a very enlightening process to go through.

Rule number one was to treat the performances in the same way the club treats the musicians’ sets. We’ve all watched music documentaries where the performances are more like clips to illustrate a point. I wanted them to be immersive, I wanted everyone to really be there in the room for a minute or so with each of these people. I knew that it was going to be performance heavy, because that’s what Ronnie and Pete would have wanted if they were around curating it. 

I was worried that every time we talked about Ronnie, we’d lose the thread of the music, and that when we went and listened to these performances, the audience would lose the emotional thread of him. There was some luck involved and also just good curation, so that the flow of the music was designed to match the story. It did mean that there were some fantastic performances that never made it. 

Where we’re talking about Ronnie’s depression, for instance, it was such a great needle-drop [moment], if you like, to be able to have Van Morrison singing ‘Send in the Clowns,’ because he could literally be singing about Ronnie in that moment. But it meant that one of the things that Gary, the music supervisor, had worked so hard on [had to go]. We got Jeff Beck playing ‘A Day in the Life’ by The Beatles. Just him, it’s so beautiful. Gary was over the moon, we got special permission, we got permission from Jeff, and then from the Beatles camp, but it didn’t work. For the emotional arc of the film, it was holding too much of that negative energy. That can be tricky, but I’d rather be in a tricky position of too much music then too little. If it didn’t serve the story, it had to go, that’s basically how we decided on it.

Yes, that was a hard one to tell the team after a month of negotiation. I don’t think there was anything quite as spectacular as that. It was doubly hard to lose, because it was another kind of what I call gateway musicians. They’re the real deal, but they also have a lot of radio play. People know Jeff Beck, they know the Yardbirds, and all that stuff. So, the producers weren’t particularly happy when I said that we’re losing Jeff Beck, because they though, he’d bring [a lot of people] to the documentary. But we found people like Jimi Hendrix also bring a huge amount of people to the documentary.

Artists like Hendrix also helped to bring Ronnie’s to a young, inquisitive audience, who might not feel this was a movie for them, because it was about a harmonically tricky, old style of music. But it’s music for everyone. And I defy anyone to watch it or not find something in there. You don’t have to be into drumming, but I defy anyone to watch Buddy Rich for 30 seconds and not think he was the best drummer in the world. Hopefully, Ronnie’s brings a lot of new people to a music that is endlessly fascinating to me.