Bruce Springsteen says his new film, Western Stars, is "sort of the completion of that little trilogy," following his memoir Born to Run and his Broadway show.
He tells London's Telegraph, "[It's] the tying up of philosophical threads that I’ve been working on my whole life, since I was a kid. Making the film allowed me to tell a story that I hadn’t directly told before, in a way I’ve never told it.”
But the original plan wasn't a concert film with dialogue in between songs. Bruce laughs and says the performance footage was going to be augmented with “interviews where people talk about how great I am to work with and what a pleasure and honor it was. The usual [crap], you know! So we started that and it didn’t quite feel right.”
He adds that the script he wrote for a voice-over “really traced the emotional arc of the [Western Stars] album”.
Bruce also commented on turning 70 last month -- September 23rd. “I miss a lot of people that aren’t here now to share in your defeats and your victories. Your family thins out a little bit. My mom hasn’t been well. It’s just a part of life, but it registers on you and finds its way into your work, as it should do. And we carry on.”
And the person closest to him is his wife, Patti Scialfa, who is in the film. "Nobody knows me better than she does. So that look in her eyes is frightening, but it's lovely at the same time. The film is really kind of a love letter to my wife and the changes that we’ve been through... There was no ‘before’ my wife!”
Western Stars will have its U.K. premiere Friday at the London Film Festival. The U.S. premiere follows on Sunday at the Hamptons International Film Festival on Long Island, New York. It then hits theaters on October 28th, three days after the release of Western Stars: Songs From the Film on October 25th.