Duran Duran and director David Lynch recently teamed up for a concert film collaboration that is slated for a one-night-only theatrical engagement next month, the Associated Press reports.
September marks a big month for the band who are finishing a new album and appearing at the Fashion Rocks concert in Brooklyn's Barclays Center before releasing Duran Duran: Unstaged in more than 300 North American theaters on September 10.
Lynch originally put out the film in 2011 has improved upon it for the upcoming version. The American Express Unstaged series pairs musicians with directors to design a one-off live show.
Founding member and keyboardist Nick Rhodes told the AP that he was initially nervous about the one-take live aspect of the project.
"It literally was live live," Rhodes said. "It was one of those moments where we all looked at each other and said, 'Good luck, let's see what happens.' And it went out on the Internet just exactly as we played it, and of course there were some things that didn't work quite as well as others, and footage that didn't sync up in the most beautiful place that it could have done ... so it's had a proper polish. It's been refined for cinema, and it looks beautiful, too. The print is fantastic."
Lynch said he only agreed to oversee the project if the band made it "radically different" than the staid concert-film formula.
He ultimately shot the piece in black and white, in the style of his film The Elephant Man, which Rhodes and bandmate John Taylor saw together as teenagers and which later influenced their music. He also created a series of images to run over the top of the band's performance.
"There was a room filled with smoke all the time," Rhodes said. "There was another room where there were a lot of actors doing strange things. Then he pre-prepared some other footage which varied between sort of hand puppets and aero-planes and clocks and machinery and this footage just sort of literally was superimposed over us playing ... and I think the results are really pretty unusual."
In other Duran Duran news, the band recently revealed that they've been in the studio working with Nile Rodgers and Mark Ronson on new material. The album is set to be mixed next month and is expected to be released in the first half of 2015.
