At 62 years old, Jon Bon Jovi He’s in good shape and has thousands of fans — but not everything is rosy. With his vocal chords affected, he doesn’t know if he will continue to be able to perform live as often as he used to, despite plenty of passion and cutting-edge treatments. The free time caused by indisposition, on the other hand, provided him with the necessary breather to revisit more than 40 years of memories about his career and colleagues, an activity that resulted in the documentary Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story, available on Star+ streaming. In conversation with LOOKrocker and documentary filmmaker Gotham Chopra comment on the research process and the group’s legacy, a stamped sticker from the festival Rock in Rio.
Jon, these are your own memories. What is it like to see them again in the third person thanks to the amount of preserved records? I don’t think about the scale of the events, but it is somewhat surreal to witness on film. It’s like seeing your whole life before death. The documentary encapsulates my entire life in four episodes, and I believe the feeling was the same for the other band members. Gotham captured the essence of the journey.
Gotham, you have a great privilege in relation to other documentary filmmakers, which is the amount of ready-made material about the band. What was it like unraveling such a vast archive? All the members of the group have cultivated an incredible collection over the years and, as the band was a phenomenon in the 1980s and 1990s, I had access to many television programs, especially on MTV and VH1. We could have done 14 episodes, but we cut everything down to four. It’s a dream come true. Plus, Jon is still active, an unstoppable force, which gives the film a certain uplifting urgency.
Jon, documentaries like this can end in pure reverence and nostalgia, so what did they do to ensure greater complexity to Thank You, Goodnight? All creative control was in Gotham’s hands, none of us even went near the editing bay. We sat for interviews, but the rest was in his hands. Meanwhile, I continued to live my life, focusing on my health and writing the new album. My biggest contribution to the final result was thinking that we should record the band’s 40th anniversary and that Gotham was the right director for it.
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The documentary also shows delicate moments about the man’s health. Did you impose any limits on what would be recorded? There were no limits. Only for certain moments in Los Angeles, when I was recording demos and having creative problems, did I ask Gotham to leave the room, after he had managed to record everything he needed. It was a matter of work and focus, and filming could be a small distraction.
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