Talk about a power couple. Nicholas Bruckman is a Sundance alum, a former Film Independent fellow and recipient of their Sloan Producer’s Grant, and the producer of the award-winning documentary La Americana, among others. Gingger Shankar was a composer on The Passion of the Christ, the composer for Circumstance, and has collaborated with Smashing Pumpkins, Cheap Trick and Trent Reznor, among many others. She’s a Sundance Composer’s Lab alum. The two came together recently to do a video for Shankar’s new song, a cover of the U2 classic, “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” They spoke to us recently about making the video.
Paste: Let’s talk about both of your backgrounds. Since I’ve got both of you here, I’ll have each of you brag on the other one. Nicholas, tell us about how awesome Gingger’s career has been.
Nicholas Bruckman: That’s hilarious; right before we got on this call, I said, “I want to get on the phone and tell Michael how awesome you are.” I met Gingger back in 2012, when I had a movie there and she was doing this amazing multimedia performance piece. And I already kind of knew who she was, and that she was someone I wanted to collaborate with in the future. So I made an approach right away to see what she was working on next, and to start a creative dialogue, even back then. We’ve done a couple of short film projects since.
But Gingger’s obviously an incredibly accomplished person across every medium, and has excelled at everything she’s done so far. In film, in opera, in rock and roll—I’m very much in awe of what she has managed to do across mediums. And I’m really interested in the multimedia project that she’s been developing, that combines film and music, and that’s the kind of thing we hope to collaborate more on in the future.
Gingger Shankar: It’s funny, I had actually met Musa, who he did Valley of the Saints with, because one of our friends thought that since we were both Indian, we should meet. Then I met Nick, and he was just really charming and really smart. And when I saw the film, I was completely blown away. Then I started checking into Nick’s other work that he had done. There was a film called La Americana that he directed, which is a documentary about immigration. It’s a really beautiful piece of work. I found out, too, that he had studied New Media, so I was very interested in collaborating with him. So this music video kind of came out of that—how can we combine everything we’ve done and create something really cool together?
Paste: What made you decide to tackle a song as iconic as “Sunday Bloody Sunday”? I mean, you’re both babies, so I don’t know if you understand for someone of advanced years like me, just what an iconic song that is. Especially for people of my age, and my temperament, and my artistic interests.
Shankar: We were rehearsing for a show last year, at the Largo in L.A. I was talking with one of the musicians I work with a lot. We were trying to figure out how to really make a statement, and we started talking about the song, and what it meant. It’s one of those songs that defies any timeline—the stuff they’re talking about in the song is going on now, it was going on twenty-five years ago, it was going on a hundred years ago. It’s kind of this timeless song. And we tried to figure out a way to put a new spin on it, to do something different. And it sort of became a no-brainer to make this the first video we wanted to debut. I think it was really important to everyone to really maintain what the song was about. It was a really hard song to cover.
Paste: I’m just a very amateur musician, but I have a short list of artists whose songs I will not cover, period. Because I feel like there’s no way for me to even come close to living up to what they did with it. As you approached the song as a vocalist, how do you try to have a different take on the vocal without just being different for its own sake?
Shankar: It was a no-brainer not to go anywhere near what he did with the song, because obviously you’re not going to top Bono. He’s an incredible singer. It was the idea of how to re-imagine the song. I’m not a rock singer, so we kind of made the arrangement very, very different. It starts very melodic and very soft. We also wanted to start it like an acoustic version, so that people would say, “What is that? I can’t figure out what that song is.” Then when you hit the chorus, you go, “Oh!” So we kind of wanted to mask it, in some ways. This is sort of an homage to the original. We’re definitely not trying to pretend like any of us are Bono, ha!