THE DOCUMENTARY Guns N Roses, The Making of 'Estranged:' Part IV of the Trilogy!!!, 1994, Dir: Andrew Morahan
THE VERDICT What, what, what?! A post that's not on a Thursday?! A post that's not about a music video, but about a documentary about the making of a music video?!?! What can I say, people. It's the holiday season, and even though Christmas is over I'm still all about giving.
"Estranged" is one of the most-viewed posts on this site, so clearly people are curious about it. At least, the people who aren't busy searching for bizarre David Lee Roth quotes are.
Okay, technically I wrote the following post (as attentive readers may be able to tell) almost a year ago, not long at all after I wrote the original post about "Estranged." But then I was wayyy too lazy to deal with images and links and such, so I just dropped it until now.
Plus I didn't really know what to do with it — it's not a music video, and I'm always all "I don't think I really have time to get all into documentaries and Vh-1 countdowns and such." Anyway, here it is — my holiday gift to you — how your "Estranged" sausage got made:
Okay before I begin though, full disclosure: Ever since my post on "Estranged," I have become obsessed with the Use Your Illusion albums, and particularly with listening to the trilogy of "Don't Cry," "November Rain," and "Estranged." I can't explain it, except that I am just continuing to try to wrap my head around these videos, and particularly "Estranged."
So what luck when my boyfriend tracked down The Making of 'Estranged:' Part IV of the Trilogy!!! (sic) on what appears to be maybe some kind of Korean version of YouTube. It was cut into three parts, but otherwise fully intact — no dubbing, subtitles, or anything like that. It had approximately the same resolution as one would have on an old VHS tape, so I feel I got the real experience.
And let me tell you, what an experience. You will not believe the words that come out of Axl's mouth. And for everything that I had maybe slightly overestimated the cost of, there were like three other things that I had apparently greatly underestimated the cost of. Who knew they needed to travel to like eight places to shoot all this stuff, which looks like it's all just in Southern California?
Well, this is why we have these "Making of" videos. I can only hope they have them for the other parts of the trilogy.
But enough of my introductory remarks — this is already the second post on this one (admittedly 8-minutes-plus) video! So without further ado, here's what we can learn from The Making of 'Estranged:' Part IV of the Trilogy!!!(sic).
- Axl describes the song as about the ending of his relationship with Erin Everly (at the time he wrote it), but also says it applies to his relationships with Stephanie Seymour, Steven Adler, and various family members. He gives Slash credit for the guitar parts, but otherwise it's pretty clear the whole thing is his baby (and even more so when people other than Axl talk about it). Throughout, Axl keeps talking about the dissolutions of his relationships like NONE of it involved him being in any way part of the problem.
- The mansion is Axl's effing house in Malibu. Of course he decorates with giant crucifixes. The room he is sleeping in at the beginning, with the rocking T Rex, is Stephanie Seymour's son's room. Axl says this whole long thing about how much he misses the little boy and how he actually fell asleep up on that shelf while they were shooting, and felt refreshed and at peace. He felt he communed with her son during the shoot.
- Side notes about the interview footage: Slash's voice is higher than I remembered, Axl's is much lower. Why the heck did he sing like that? You wonder what he'd sound like if he just sang instead of making the trademark Axl howl. Another weird reversal: This video is the one hour where Duff is fat and Gilby Clarke is thin. Duff is honestly kind of hard to recognize, and it's easy to convince yourself Gilby is really Izzy Stradlin (who has obviously gotten the heck out of there by this point).
- The long shots of concert footage (stage from afar, overhead shots) and the stuff of fans was all shot at an actual live show in Munich, Germany. All of the close-up shots that appear to be live are actually shot on a recreated set of that live show, somewhere near LA.
- They all talk about what a pain in the butt "Estranged" is to perform live, and how they find the starting and stopping annoying. Dizzy has to have all the music in front of him to play the piano solo in the middle. Axl claims the piano parts came to him in a dream, and that that was the first part of the song he wrote. He woke up and immediately started trying to play all the piano stuff himself, and somehow this led to the lyrics. All the parts of the “Making Of” where you get a window into Axl’s life are extra weird.
- The women and children shown watching those TVs in the room with all the candles do appear to all be real-life GNR wives, girlfriends, and hangers-on. The only one who's clearly associated with a specific band member is the girl with chin-length blonde hair, who manages to get in on most of the interviews with Matt Sorum. We only hear her talk to complain about how Matt's never around because it's taking them freakin' forever to shoot the video. I'm not 100% sure on this ID, but I think it may be his longtime paramour Ace Harper.
- They don't in any way explain the dream sequence in the middle, or where Axl got all those extra children from. Seriously, they don't even touch any of that stuff. Are those his dogs? We'll never know.
- The band shutting down the Sunset Strip did make the local news in L.A. — side note, I always love seeing news footage of stuff like this!
- Apparently some hapless assistant director or PA who was crawling biker bars looking for extras for the Sunset Strip scenes attempted to cast Gilby Clarke as an extra. See, I told you he's unrecognizable here!
- For the first guitar solo, Slash appears to "float" past the people on the Strip because he is strapped into ski boots that have been attached to a little dolly. They just kind of crank him down the street past everyone. Slash talks about how it's weird to be back there, the Strip has changed, and he doesn't hang out there anymore.
- The dolphins are meant to symbolize "grace," but mostly just became a motif in the video because the sound of the music in the middle of the song reminded them of whales. CGI whales must have been too large or something.
- The actual footage of the super tanker and Axl jumping off was shot about 30 miles off Corpus Christi, Texas — because there aren't super tankers around LA or San Diego? Who knows. Probably because the water in the Gulf of Mexico is warmer. Also how could I forget to mention the steadicam operators for all these helicopter shots in my list of expenses in my first post? Not just the stuff with the boat, but also overhead shots of the concert, mansion, etc.
- Axl apparently did his own stunt of jumping off the boat, which is identified as a super tanker. This I'm not 100% sure about — I feel like they may have just tried to make it seem like he didn't have a stunt double. They make it sound like Axl just did one perfect take and that they didn't have to shoot the jump multiple times (slightly plausible, since either way it appears they shot it with multiple cameras). Heck of a long way to jump, so who knows.
- It turns out it was Duff in the rowboat trying to save Axl! I had misidentified him as a roadie. Duff said the shoot was very stressful for him and that sometimes he felt like Axl was really drowning and he actually needed to save him. Based on his phrasing in the interviews, you can tell he's already out of the band, so it's kind of surprising he doesn't say it was easy to let Axl drown.
- For whatever reason, Axl with the live dolphins was shot on or around Treasure Island in the Bahamas, as far as I can tell at one of those tourist-y "swim with the dolphins" places. Really, they couldn't have just shot this at Sea World?
- They do reveal that for the second guitar solo where Slash rises up out of the ocean, he indeed had a stunt double (there's a cute part where he encounters the stunt double). Slash had to wear a wetsuit under his clothes for the parts of this shot that are really him.
- On a similar note, whenever they have to shoot anything in water, all the band members complain about how cold the water is. Whenever the director describes the water, he refers to it as a hot tub.
- All of the close shots of Matt Sorum inside the helicopter, Axl drowning, and Axl being saved by the Coast Guard helicopter were shot on a giant soundstage in San Diego. They set up a mock helicopter over a giant wave pool. Axl bitches a ton about how stressful it was being in the water, while Matt Sorum seems to think it's kind of funny that he got to be in the video.
- The video was meant to conclude the trilogy, but as everyone talks around in the documentary, since Axl had broken up with Stephanie Seymour, that couldn't happen. Whatever the original concept was, it involved explaining how and why she died in "November Rain." Del James, the guy who wrote the story the "November Rain" video is purportedly based on, talks about how his book is coming out, and you can read it to find out how the story really ends. He is also one of the main interviewers in the Making Of.
- Speaking of "November Rain," everyone but Axl (who doesn't really talk about it) mentions how much they hated shooting that video, too. Axl also mentions having considered buying "November Rain" from the band so it would never air, then realizing this was not financially feasible. This means timeline-wise he and Stephanie Seymour had split up before that video premiered. Hmm.
- They do all this hemming and hawing about how you're supposed to be able to make your own interpretation of the video. They also make a lot of the significance of attempting to save Axl three times (Gilby and life preserver, Duff in rowboat, Matt and helicopter) and Axl ignoring it three times, but call me old-fashioned, doesn't he wind up getting pulled into the helicopter? Why wouldn't that count as being saved? Eh, whatever.
- They don't even touch the animatronic dolphin at the end of the video. They just don't even mention that thing. Instead, everyone keeps talking about what a classic the song is, and how meaningful and emotional the video will be (mostly the director and Axl make the latter point, but everyone claims they think it is a great song).
Just, you know, a great song they hate to play that has underscored for the zillionth time what a control freak their lead singer is.
P.S.: Again, just in case you missed it, click here to read my original post on “Estranged.”