In a post-viewing Q&A, director Tim Wheeler and others who worked on the film talked about their process and why the band chose to allow such intimate access
Green Day’s documentary ¡Cuatro! screened at Los Angeles’ Sonos Studio on Wednesday, a month after it premiered at South By Southwest and one night before the band headlined the nearby 16,000-seater Sports Arena.
Indeed, Green Day may be one of the biggest rock bands in the world, but in this intimate, 90-minute look at how the three-album collection ¡Uno!, ¡Dos! and ¡Tre! came together, the punk trio went back to its roots: playing clubs and hunkering down in a multitude of studios, where singer Billie Joe Armstrong mined through some 65 songs.
You could say the creators of ¡Cuatro! didn’t quite know what they were getting themselves into when the project started as none of the new material had been written before filming officially began. “At one point it’s like, how are we going to fit all of this onto one record, let’s do two, and then let’s do three, and that’s really what happened, and everybody ran with it,” director Tim Wheeler said of the band’s seemingly endless inspiration during a Q&A moderated by Hollywood Reporter music editor Shirley Halperin.