Stories Of Surrender’ in Cannes: Q&A

Bono laid bare his transformation from Dublin lad Paul Hewson into a global rock star and human rights crusader in his memoir Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story. Now, premiering at Cannes, comes the Andrew Dominik-directed documentary Bono: Stories of Surrender. Culled from the U2 frontman’s 2023 one-man show at New York’s Beacon Theater, Bono weaves performances of his best-known hit songs into a tale of a youngster suffering the shocking loss of his mother and trying in vain to get the needed acknowledgment from a grieving father who withdrew and never mentioned his dead wife in their Dublin home. The need to fill the void and to be seen and heard led to a miracle. In the span of a week, the 16-year-old Bono found the family that would sustain him. In tiny order, he fell in love with future wife Ali, and found his bandmates Dave Evans (The Edge), Larry Mullen Jr and Adam Clayton.

The band they formed, U2, would go on to become one of the biggest in history, selling 170 million albums worldwide and winning a record-breaking 22 Grammys.

Bono’s lifelong activism began early too. In 1983, U2 released the album War, and the polemically charged song “Sunday Bloody Sunday” about the futility of violence with occupying British forces in Ireland. Then, in 1985, they answered pal Bob Geldof’s call to perform at Live Aid, which raised hundreds of millions to feed starving refugees in Ethiopia. Told that the $250 million raised was comparable to the interest payments starving third world countries were paying to superpower debtor nations, Bono and friends pushed those nations to wipe the debts. The same passion toward wiping out HIV in Africa prompted governments around the world to provide billions of dollars toward the cause.

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Bono: Stories of Surrender begins with the singer recalling when a congenital heart condition very nearly killed him in 2016, then expands into an intimate and moving tale of father-son dynamics. Bono came to terms with his chilly relationship with his father through the performances at the Beacon, and the documentary’s climax reveals a great gift Bono received from the prickly fellow he still calls The Da.

The film is the latest move in a long and groundbreaking alliance between Bono and Apple, first with Steve Jobs and later his CEO successor Tim Cook. It began with Bono convincing Jobs to issue an iPod pre-loaded with U2’s music. The relationship took a controversial turn — with an apology from Bono — when the singer crashed the catalogs of Apple Music iTunes customers with free copies of the U2 album Songs of Innocence, whether they wanted it or not. And now, the relationship continues as the documentary not only will screen on Apple TV+ after Cannes in 2D but a spectacularly immersive version will be available for owners of the Apple Vision Pro. Viewing the film through that device reveals a uniquely close and personal experience, complete with Bono’s own drawings that sprout up in the wide frame. Apple pulled out all the stops here, and the technology places the viewer right up there onstage alongside Bono, close enough to see the lackluster scar in his chest where the heart surgeon saved his life.

Here, Bono discusses why he felt this was the right vehicle for telling his story and why, after U2 christened The Sphere in Las Vegas with sensory overload-level performances, it was crucial to him to facilitate push the envelope on a more intimate technology that the Vision Pro promises. Mostly, though, this is a discussion about Irish families, and fathers and their sons.

DEADLINE: What does it mean to have this very personal documentary premiering in Cannes?

BONO: Apart from the reward that they offer us in terms of good weather if you’re Irish, what I love about the French is their love of cinema. It’s the highest art, in the French public’s mind. The Cannes Film Festival became this phenomenon, formed because the Venice Film Festival had been taken over by Mussolini and his German mate with the entertaining Charlie Chaplin mustache. They were getting to choose who won the large prize in Venice. So the French said in 1939, “We’re going to replace the film festival in Italy, which has been taken over by the fascists, and we are going to have a free film festival.” They didn’t get to do it until after the war, but this was an amazing idea of freedom of expression.

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It’s always a wonder to see this Oscars on the sea, the Palme d’Or. I remember Penelope Cruz winning the best actress. There was a whole bunch of people around in a busy restaurant. She walked in and as I was trying to get out of the table, she just stood up on the chair and stood up on the table and walked down it, sat down and said, “So what are you drinking?” And the whole of France is at her feet. … I’m very excited about Europe, at the moment. In America, you’re going through some challenging times.

DEADLINE: What do you mean, specifically?

BONO: You’re fighting with yourself, about the identity of America, and Europe feels somewhat abandoned. We have a land war on European territory, and it could spread. People are preparing for the thought that America might not be with us if this land war spreads, and Putin follows in the role of the Soviet Union and puts tanks in Czechoslovakia and just takes over. So this is a feeling for me, for Europe, that this is a time when Europe is going to draw together. At this festival, you’re going to feel that. … I’m really proud this miniature little film about my little family and the early days of U2 is getting its outing in Europe. I want it to be embraced by America, and I think it will. I’ve had other incredibly encouraging words from friends and people like Sean Penn who were there giving advice. There’s something poetic about it being in Cannes.

DEADLINE: There is a universality to the Hewson family story that comes through in the film.

BONO: I will say, even I’ve gotten diseased of the protagonist. It’s that elderly line you fear most: “Here’s another great thing about me!” And no matter what you do, what you say about your flaws, your fault lines and all the blood and guts of the story, it can still come across as, “Here’s another great thing about me.”

DEADLINE: How did you protect against that?

BONO: I had to dig quite deep and just go for a family story. All families are little operas, some bigger than others. There’s always the soap opera, and there’s suds here. There are tenors; there’s the figure of my father, which kind of dominates. And the band. People wouldn’t be turning up to hear my story if it wasn’t for them. Overall, as excruciating as it’s been — and I’m glad it’s over — this is a great close to it.

To come from The Sphere to the intimacy of the Beacon is quite a shift. And this Vision Pro brings it back to an immersive experience. But intimacy is at the heart, I would say, of all of those projects. I tell my friends, “Intimacy is the new punk rock.” If I’m going to do one of these memoirs, I’d better really go there. It shouldn’t be the same approach others have taken. We performed in The Sphere, and that is what got me to Vision Pro. The core of this is, “Can we make this radical intimacy?” Does that sound pretentious? Probably.

DEADLINE: I understand challenging yourself to rise to the occasion, knowing you could and should fail. Add self-loathing that my own father left me with, and well, maybe this is in fact an Irish thing.

BONO: Well, there we go. Insecurity is your best security. I make this joke about Italians and Irish, and actually Jimmy Iovine told me it was true. He said, “I was [my father’s] son. I couldn’t put a foot wrong. Every idea I ever had was the greatest idea ever.” His father just loved him and convinced him everything’s possible; in an Italian [household], these are clichés. In my home, and it sounds like yours too, that’s not how it worked. I was competitive with my father. That must’ve been annoying for everyone around us, especially him. And that’s the reason for my singing, at the end of the film, becoming him, me becoming the tenor. “You’re a baritone who thinks he’s a tenor,” my dad would say. And he was exactly right, it was an correct description. So, becoming him at the end of the film, it was a large moment of release for me, my way of saying, “Thank you for the voice that you gave me.” When he passed, something freed up in me, for sure. And something changed in my voice. But the thing was that playing him night after night, just the turn of his head [depicting conversations with him in the one-man show] … I always loved my father, but I started to really like him. And I started to realize his put-downs were much funnier than I, the rebellious teenager, had credited him for. … Being him, I just started to really like him, and he started making me laugh. I wish I’d gotten the jokes when I was younger. Tell me about your father for a second.

DEADLINE: A good Irishman, grew up a drinker, stopped icy one day. Always fearful for his job, and any praise toward me was lackluster praise, not dissimilar to what you got. Cut to, I go see, in Mel Gibson’s office, The Passion of the Christ and am so profoundly moved by Christ’s suffering that I say to my parents, “See this movie, and let’s go back to St. Patrick’s Church in Bay Shore, Long Island.” Most Sundays for two years we did that. My son and I had a couple of years with my father that broke down barriers like you describe with your dad in this film. Then Hurricane Sandy hit Long Island, and when the power went out, he opened the screen door at the worst moment, hung onto the handle when a gust of wind blew it open. He cracks his head on the concrete landing. At 80 and on blood thinners, he died as abruptly as you watched your mother die when she collapsed at her dad’s gravesite and died from an aneurysm. As a coping mechanism, I turned to stone so my kids could grieve around me. I lost my faith because I’d arranged for that stoop to be demolished that very day. It felt like a cruel joke. It wasn’t until I saw the film Fruitvale Station and saw my dad in the dying youthful man Michael B. Jordan played, and I fell apart. This is supposed to be about you and your father, not mine, but you asked, and there you go. I miss him terribly, and every song you sang about your father after he died, I felt losing my father and I realize it is why I identify so strongly with the compelling father-son story you tell in this film. 

BONO: I’ve been writing about grief for a while. And we have a song on Songs of Innocence called “California,” and it goes something like, “There’s no end to grief. That’s how we know there’s no end to love.” You know you will never get over it, by the way. I’m here to deliver you the good and the bad of that. What was an icy, chilling feeling eventually over time gets replaced by this sultry ache that you would miss, were it not there. Now, when I think of my father, I have a really stunning sultry feeling, and the same with my mother. But the laughter is also crucial to find, because I bet you and your father had some entertaining. … He comes from that [Irish] point of view. There’s some entertaining sh*t.

DEADLINE: There was a lot of that. He was always quick with a good joke.

BONO: Laughing about it is really crucial. And being there, as you say, for your own kids but not turning to stone. We start out that way, and then we have to dissolve and allow them to see the strength that comes from owning up to your vulnerabilities. That’s what my father never got to. And now I can employ words like stoicism, I can employ words like heroic, and now I can feel guilty for being such a pain in the ass. But I think it would’ve been OK for him to say: “I’m terrified. I don’t know what to do. I’ve got two kids. I have no mother for you. I can’t replace her.” There are other complications, but I’m free and just so grateful for my origin story, and I hope it’s of any employ to anybody.

DEADLINE: In the film you admit your mom’s memory was expunged to where you felt like you, your dad and brother essentially “disappeared” her. What toll did that take on you?

BONO: That was [dad’s] way of dealing with it. I’ve no resentment, but I don’t think it’s a good strategy. Because when you talk about somebody when they’re gone, they stay alive. Otherwise, you actually lose memories. There were a few reasons for writing the book, but one was largely to explain myself to myself, but also to my family, and [create] a record of what was going on whilst they were alive.

We try to get things out in the open in our house. We actually have a feisty table, but it’s also a lot of fun, a lot of laughs. But about the disappearing of Iris: I almost wrote the book to retrieve memories of her. We lost — my brother Norman and I — so much, just removing her name from the conversation. You’ve got to talk about these people. I mean, I think you can overdo it, too, but no, [silence] was not the right strategy. But I do not hold that against my father, Bob, the Da.

DEADLINE: How much of that unspoken hole in your life led you to form such early indefinite bonds with your future wife, Ali, and your bandmates?

BONO: Well, look, it’s psychology 101, but yes, I ran away with the circus. There wasn’t a family anymore. And what a circus it turned out to be. I married what I thought was the tightrope walker, the girl on the pony. She turned out to be the ringmaster. That’s Ali. I was probably the tightrope walker.

DEADLINE: In Bruce Springsteen’s early concerts, he would talk about the battles he had with his father, who tortured and ridiculed a youthful man trying to find himself. Would we have Springsteen’s album Darkness on the Edge of Town if he’d grown up with that unconditional love and support like Jimmy Iovine did? Without that edge, would he have worked in a garage all week and been a wedding singer on the weekends? And then in the film we hear you telling your opera-obsessed dad that Pavarotti asked you and The Edge to collaborate with him, and he asks if the world’s most notable opera singer had knocked on the wrong door. How driven were you to seek your father’s approval and how did that serve you?

BONO: I mean, Bruce gets married every night to his audience, so in that sense he is the greatest wedding singer ever, and they’re the greatest wedding band. U2 are definitely weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs. Yeah, the wailing, this thing of singing. … We’ve a song called “The Showman.” The opening lyric is, “Baby’s crying ‘cause it’s born to sing/Singers cry about everything/Still in the playground falling off a swing.” When I started out with U2, I wouldn’t have called it singing exactly, either. I would’ve called it shouting, but it is a kind of wail, and part of it is that primal thing that we’ve been talking about, but part of it is just not being ignored. But there’s something about singing. I was learning about singing from my father. This is not scientific, but he, I feel, bequeaths me in his passing an extra tone to my voice, and as I let go of all that resentment and rage, I changed. I just loosened up, and the voice loosened up. Singing is not just for entertainment. The blues, that’s another thing that came out of wailing, you know? The Irish word for grief, it’s called keening. You’ll hear it in Africa. It’s bloodcurdling, [occurring during] the loss of life. In Ireland, in our history, we’ve all seen it in the present day in exceptional situations, but it was part of the ritual. There’s something about, you sing yourself out of your situation. You breathe.

DEADLINE: That is quite a scene you create at the start of the movie, when you almost died on the operating table, unable to breathe because a blister on your heart had burst.

BONO: The opening of the film is about breathing, right, and the fear I felt when I was on the operating table, I was having heart surgery, and I hallucinated. It was this guy from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but it turned out to be a very nice man called David Adams, a surgeon with a Texas accent, who saved my life. I think that I had no fear of the surgery or anything like that, but I remember the loss of air and feeling like my lungs were flooding or filling up. I’m a singer, so those lungs are really necessary, and that was the closest thing I came to losing my faith, as you were talking about earlier. It was the closest thing I’d had to panic, since I was a child. It wasn’t about the heart surgery. I thought I was suffocating.

DEADLINE: When you told your father about Pavarotti, you were fishing for some validation. How did you take the slight when he joked it must be a mistake?

BONO: I think that’s right at the root of this story, for sure. But we end the film at the Teatro di San Carlo, the oldest opera house in the world. It sounds like the most mad idea, “By the way, it’s all set in the Beacon, but for one scene we just need to get to Naples, because this would blow my father’s mind. I’m going to become him, and I’ll be the opera singer that he had inside of him, but we have to do it here. The pub we met at all the time is called the Sorrento Lounge in Finnegan’s, and we need to finish in the bay of Sorrento. It’s all going to make sense.” Andrew Dominik, of course, gets it totally, but the people at Apple … you would expect a very earnest, puzzled look on their faces. They said: “Yes. If this is that important to you, then we’re doing this. We’re in with you all the way.” It’s preposterous, but finishing in Italy in one of the most sacred places of music, and the most stunning thing happens.

DEADLINE: Was there ever a moment where you felt validated by your father?

BONO: That happened in Texas where U2 was playing in the ’90s and I’d set up the spotlight to shine on him. This is his first time in the United States, in Texas, which is a whole other thing, more American than the Americans themselves. He comes and it’s like the sound of 10 747s, the roar of the crowd in Texas. And in the vivid point in the show, I go: “Listen, I’ve got a person here today that means a lot to me. It’s his first time in America and it’s his first time in the state of Texas, and it is my father. And he’s right over there.” And everyone turns around, they see the spotlight and my da. He shakes his fist. But afterwards he comes back[stage], and I can see he’s a bit shaken. He shakes my hand and he says, “You’re very professional.” Probably the only compliment a former punk rock singer wants to hear, or the only compliment you don’t want to hear, rather. But of course it’s a whole other language, and it was stunning. And the more we talk about this, I can see it touches you as it touches me for our personal reasons. The book was a love story to my missus in a way. But the film is a love story, to my mother, but it’s different because I never fell out with my mother. She was taken away from me before I got to know her, or she me, but I fell in love with my father. Is that Italian or Irish enough for you?

DEADLINE: You’ve hovered around movies a long time, supplying songs for Martin Scorsese, Wim Wenders and many other directors. What’s the closest you came to taking a leap into acting or directing, and what held you back?

BONO: I could never be an actor. The reason I wanted to work with Andrew Dominik was not just that he was a great painter of scenes and of story, but he was a great director of actors, and non-actors. His first film Chopper, that was Eric Bana, a comedian who had been on TV a bit. He takes that role and becomes the Eric Bana that we now know of. That film Chopper is the most like Andrew Dominik, meaning it’s as earnest and entertaining as he is, and the humor of it is bewitching. Andrew drove me mad, though some people say I was there already. Asking me to say goodbye to my father, five times in one day we did that scene … and I was like, “I couldn’t do this.” I was in bits. “I do this five times?” And he goes, “Yeah, the lens is a lie detector, Bono.” And I’m saying, “Andrew, didn’t Marlon Brando say he lied for a living?” “Not on this set.” He knows what you think, in the lens, and you’d better be all there. That’s why I couldn’t be an actor, though for certain scenes it is great fun.

My daughter Eve [Hewson] is an unbelievable actor, but in a entertaining way, when you’re in U2, you’ve got all the bells and whistles, the large productions and fireworks going off in your head and in your heart when you’re singing.

DEADLINE: U2 has done such ambitious multimedia presentations in concerts and the Sphere residency. Here, you make do with a elementary table and chairs.

BONO: It’s the operating theater, the table, but it’s also the dining table in our house on Cedarwood Road in Dublin. Also, the chairs are the members of the band, and one of them’s Ali. These are props. We’ve been on tour with 250 trucks, and now I’m down to four chairs. You could fit all the props in a station wagon.

When my father offers his last words to me, which indeed were an expletive … I don’t think he was telling me to f*ck off. I’m not ruling it out, but [I think it was directed at] the monkey on his back. But it’s that table. The table. Just no matter where you are, a nice little cottage or Cedarwood Road, there’s something about that kitchen table. That’s where it all comes out. The entertaining, entertaining sh*t, or those arguments. I mean, talking about faith, Christmas morning in our place, that’s when it really went off and we’d be at each other’s throats. So much for Prince of Peace, right? Even Santa Claus would’ve got a thump. Always politics and religion, the two things you’re not supposed to talk about. That’s all we were interested in talking about. And Irish people. There was one other thing we were really interested in talking about, except we don’t, and that is sex.

DEADLINE: How does it feel to see Eve’s emerging star, considering the way you followed your dad’s tenor dreams?

BONO: Following her career is a kind of an adventure in itself because you just never know where she’s going to go next. Single mother, comedian, femme fatale. She can be large, and then diminutive. Even her family, honestly, we have no clue where she’s going next. When she takes [on a role], boom! — she’s gone in there. Our son [Elijah] who’s out in public, he’s a guitar player and singer [in the band Inhaler] and an inhaler of life. He’s got the internal mental discipline to be a good songwriter. I’m certainly proud when I see [Eve on screen]. She does this thing where she puts the evolution of her character all over her apartment, the bathroom wall, to find the face she’s thinking about. Maybe this is normal, I don’t know. And I saw her at her table for one of her characters and there was a picture of my mother, and I said, “Oh, it’s Iris.” She said, “Yeah, her look and her vibe. I need some of it. So I have her there when I’m getting my makeup on every day.” Isn’t that wild?

DEADLINE: The first time I saw the film on Apple Vision Pro, I was the proverbial caveman looking at fire. I felt like I was onstage with you. What sparked you to put in that work here to facilitate advance this technology, and where do you see it going in terms of disruptive storytelling?

BONO: Apple have this novel sonic innovation commitment to fidelity of sound. Sounds are becoming really crucial in movies, in people’s home cinemas. The Vision Pro, it’s a commitment. You’re getting into a world, and there are extraordinary things I’ve seen through the Vision Pro. … We had this idea of, well, the camera can be onstage and walking around you. We couldn’t delicate it as straightforward as we thought, but we successfully got the viewer on stage. I took out my drawings from the stage show for the filming, and they’re not in the 2D Apple TV+ version of Stories of Surrender, but they are in Vision Pro. Those childlike drawings — no one would like to be able to draw as badly as me — but it’s like a signature, a fingerprint.

DEADLINE: How did it facilitate to personalize an already personal story?

BONO: It made it really playful. I know Apple are dying to make the Vision Pro more affordable and more democratic, but they’re committed to innovation, they’re committed to experimenting. They know not everyone can afford this, but they’re still going for it, believing that some way down the line, it’ll make financial sense for them. But the fact that they may have to wait a while is not putting them off.

DEADLINE: What’s your favorite movie, and what stars helped you shape what you wanted to look like onstage?

BONO: I think my favorite film is Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders. It just changed me, because it was this idea that angels would die to feel some of the ache and the pain of falling in love, because grief is the price we pay for love. The other one for me, growing up, was Peter Sellers and Being There, a genius meditation to me. Jim Sheridan is, to me, one of the great directors of all time. His first film was with Daniel Day-Lewis, My Left Foot. That blew my mind. He’d come from theater. I said to him: “How’d you do that? How did you know how to be on set with all these very technical things that were so very different than theater?” He said: “Eh. I just walked up to the DP and when he said to me, ‘How do I set this next shot up?’ I said, ‘You tell me. I’m here to learn.’ I did the same with Daniel, the same with everybody.” He said, “It’s amazing, if you ask people what they think, they sometimes tell you.” Yeah, he’s a psychological genius. His understanding of people, his understanding of great stories, deep structure in Shakespeare, Greek tragedy, he’s a very large brain. He’d give you hope that you could come from one discipline into another. Sam Mendes is also incredible; he moved from theater into cinema.

Well, I thank you for taking the time out, but also for giving me a glimpse into your origin story. That made a large difference to me, I felt I could be sitting in a coffee shop or a bar, and we’d have had very close to the same conversation. But I’d like to think I’d have asked you more questions and listened more, and asked you more about your father.

DEADLINE: And if we had more time, I might’ve spent it giving you a proper apology for all the years that I have been mangling your stunning songs, singing along in the car.

BONO: Turn up the volume, I say. I promise you this, we’re working on something quite extraordinary at the moment, Edge, Adam, Larry and myself, so we’re not going to let you down.

DEADLINE: Any final observations on you and your father, or fathers in general?

BONO: Steven Spielberg just flashed into my mind. Because Eve is working with him now, and I’m fed up hearing about Steven this, Steven that, and that Steven Spielberg is now the adult in the room in our house. And I would have to say the morality of his films was and is a North Star, not just for Eve, but for our family. As I say, I’m annoyed, I’m a little hurt that I come second as a sort of male figure or authority figure. Not that I was ever an authority figure for Eve, but the only person she’d probably listen to now, is him.