In a world where the consumer market is being driven by an insatiable need for the next mindless fad at the click of a button, products with a sense of purpose, meaning and the ability to change peoples’ lives for the better are a rare commodity. ‘What About Me?’, the new multi-media project from 1 Giant Leap duo Jamie Catto and Duncan Bridgeman, is one such product.
By Gav Britton
Four painstaking years in the making, ‘What About Me?’ is the follow-up to 1 Giant Leap’s double-Grammy nominated self-titled album and the ‘Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost’ DVD. Looking to explore the concept even further, the core duo of Catto and Bridgeman set off on a six-month journey through 50 locations worldwide, collecting audio and visual recordings with the aim of “exploring through music, the complexities of human nature on a global scale”. Armed with the skeletons of pre-composed musical tracks, the two UK producers collaborated with everyone from R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe and Spearhead’s Michael Franti to Gabonese pygmies and Tuvan throat singers. The lyrical and musical vibe of each track was based around a philosophical theme that was then further explored in the film side of the project. Some of the world’s greatest minds, including Eckhart Tolle, Stephen Fry, Ram Dass and Noam Chomsky, shared their thoughts with Catto and Bridgeman, who then combined the footage with the results from the music sessions to create ‘What About Me?’. Split between a feature length film and a seven-part TV series, the result is one of the most interesting and unique multi-media projects ever committed to tape.
It’s an unusual path for Catto to have taken. The former founding member of electronic music giants Faithless turned his back on a successful career with the group in 1999 to begin work on 1 Giant Leap. Catto admits he’s never had any formal journalism training, but it’s this unconventional approach that has produced such amazing results. “My interview technique isn’t like, ‘Here is a list of questions’, it’s more like starting an informal conversation that I lead to go in certain places. But it’s also very undirected in many ways,” he explains. “Some of the themes of the film are just things that they [the interviewee] wanted to talk about… I don’t like to have a fixed plot in life or in creation. John Lennon said, ‘Life is what happens to you while you are making other plans’. It’s best not to have a fixed map, otherwise you’ll be disappointed.”
This unstructured, ‘anything goes’ attitude led ‘What About Me’? in some unexpected directions. Catto says the film really started to get interesting when it became personal. “My wife was basically leaving me while we were making the film,” he laughs. “I was in a really desperate state throughout the making of this film, which is why a lot of the subject matter is about love and need, and about pain avoidance, insatiable desire and all these things – it was a map of my trauma.” While most people battle their demons alone or spend hundreds of dollars on therapy bills, Catto was able to turn to the world’s elite for help. “I’ve got to be the luckiest freak alive,” he jokes. “When all the shit starts falling apart in my life I get to talk to Eckhart Tolle, Neale Donald Walsch, Marianne Williamson, Ram Dass – I get all the wisest people in the world to talk to. I must have been born under a lucky star.”
Living in the present, instead of wasting life worrying about the past or the future, is one of the film’s dominant messages. This is all good in theory, but, as Catto admits, practicing what you preach is not always easy when you’re pulling together a project of this magnitude. “It is quite stressful to have to make it work every single day. It’s wonderful to travel to all of these countries and meet all of these amazing people, but we do two or three sessions a day and there are no days off for six months. So in the morning you are doing a violin session, after lunch you’re interviewing Deepak Chopra and in the evening you’re doing a flute or a singer. You’ve got to be on top form for each one of those three people to honour the fact that they’ve given you the luxury of working with them and to honour the fact that this is the only time you’re going to get to work with them because tomorrow you are going to be in Calcutta,” he says. “It’s a battle to stay present… It’s a minefield. Everything is set up for us to not stay present. Everything is set up for us to isolate with our iPod and our laptop. We’ve got a paradox we’re working with here and it’s going to take all of us to sort it out.”
‘What About Me?’ covers universal themes such as sex, religion and materialism, but it was the theme of death that struck a particularly pertinent chord with the film’s two creators. “Both of our dads died quite suddenly during the making of the film,” reveals Catto. “[Then] Duncan got cancer, I broke up with my wife – we’re back together now - but the whole thing was probably the most traumatic two or three years we’d ever experienced,” he says. Despite everything Catto and Bridgeman learnt during their interaction with the world’s leading authorities on relationships, their own relationship buckled under the pressure of the film’s stressful creation process. “We’ve only just started becoming good friends again,” says Catto. “We really, really went through it together. It was very hard, but the subject matter is all about the battle - the battleground of the soul.”
Their personal struggles and sacrifices have not been in vain. ‘What About Me?’ has the ability to change the way people live their lives. It makes you think – it’s like ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ for the soul. The two have since had time to reflect on the project, repair their relationship and look to the future. “At the end of it I feel pretty good about myself and so does Duncan,” reflects Catto. “I think we produced something quite original and quite intimate. To give people an intimate, personal experience is not always the easiest thing to do.”
The ‘What About Me?’ DVD is out now through One World Music.
A ‘What About Me?’ screening and Q&A session with Duncan Bridgeman will take place at Byron Cinemas, Byron Bay on November 19.
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