ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN
September 1, 2007

Daniel Lanois lounged on an ivory leather sofa in his loft studio in Toronto, dressed all in black, with eight silk-covered buttons marching up his sleeve. A few feet away, in a soft pool of light, stood an enormous mixing board, just arrived from England. Lanois, who has often manned such a board for Bob Dylan, U2 and many others, spoke of his new acquisition with pleasure, but also with a sense that anything he could tell me about it would be beside the point. He can talk audio gear with more authority than most, but in the end the circuits that really matter to him are the balky, surprising conduits that lead to the heart.

"The application is just the vehicle for dragging something out of somebody," he said. "What you want is the heart and soul of the people in the room. The sounds and how you build the thing are only ever a canvas, or an invitation for the soul to jump out."

Invite the soul to jump out. That's a pretty concise description of what a good music producer does, but how does it happen in the real world, with actual musicians trying to find the right shape for something that maybe didn't exist before they entered the room?

The short answer is that it probably happens in a different way every time, depending on the personalities and the moment and a million other variables. The 90-minute answer is Here Is What Is, Lanois's debut film about music and the art of making records, coming soon to the Toronto International Film Festival.

It's a highly personal film, focused on Lanois and people he has worked with ever since he began trying to coax interesting sounds from cheap equipment in his mother's basement in Hamilton. Brian Eno, Garth Hudson, U2 and Sinead O'Connor all appear, speaking or performing or just groping their way toward that soul-jumping moment.

Lanois appears in every scene, as the poser of questions and the person who enables partial answers. Sitting in a medina in Morocco, he tells Eno he's making a film "about the source of the art, instead of everything that surrounds the art."

That means no concert footage, no shots of screaming crowds, no clips from million-dollar music videos. Lanois's subjects sit in functional rooms, strum guitars with headphones clamped to their ears, or try to figure out how to enlarge what has already been recorded.

The constant theme is that these denuded spaces contain everything that's needed, as a matter of principle. You never see more players being called in, or extra filters and gizmos being ordered, because Lanois doesn't work that way and never has.

"My heroes were always the people in the room," he told me after we'd watched the film together. "Maybe that's why I managed to pull it off on records. At the moment, I believe in the magic of the people around me. I never doubt them, and that's maybe where the power of belief becomes contagious, because people feel that."

In one vivid scene, Lanois asks Brian Blade, a gifted jazz drummer with whom he has worked on several projects, to play on top of a track by New Orleans drummer Willie Green. Lanois explains that doubling the drums will help him take the song to a different place harmonically. You can see Blade trying to absorb the concept and get past the audacity of the request, and then he dives in, laughing. It's a touching display of trust, and of a willingness to follow the power of belief in a totally unexpected direction.

Later in the film, Lanois gives Blade a verbal sketch of a new song, acting out with his voice and body the way he wants the arrangement to feel. The scene is intercut with bits of the song as it eventually came out in the studio. For another song, Lanois sits at a board doing a live mix, telling us what he's doing with those faders and why. His torso bends and weaves as he makes subtle but telling changes, riding the board as if it were a wave on a sea of sound.

The opening of the film gets close to the source in another way, through a long keyboard-level shot of Garth Hudson's hands, as the Band's pianist plays an improvised introduction to Lanois's song Lovechild. The camera gets even closer to Lanois's hands as they glide over the pedal steel guitar a few minutes later.

These sequences are shot in beautiful black and white by the young Ontario photographer Adam Vollick, whose portrait orientation, vivid angles and rich textures feel analogous to the way Lanois approaches music. The graphic style of Vollick's video processing gives the impression we're seeing an X-ray of the performers and their music, and when he uses colour it feels like flares of emotional energy.

These effects don't ultimately tell us much about what Lanois says he's up to, just as a musician's hands moving in close-up are not "the source of the art," however engrossing they may be to watch. But like most serious investigations into mysterious subjects, Here Is What Is succeeds mainly by raising the questions in a compelling way. The mystery remains, powerfully resisting a solution. It's no digression when Blade, a preacher's son, says that everything he plays is a form of praise, or when Lanois refers to his pedal steel as a "church in a suitcase."

Blade also says he can't separate the sacred from the secular, and that comment seems doubly apt in a film whose unstated second theme is seduction. The gorgeous sound and imagery are custom-made to win you over, as Lanois muses on the details that make a listener revisit a song. A few red-hot sequences with salsa dancer Carolina Cerisola state the theme loud and clear.

Here Is What Is will be useful as a promotional vehicle for Lanois's next solo album, due next spring, which he coyly says "might" have the same title. By then he'll have done a fourth session with Eno on the next U2 album, which he said is turning out to be "very exotic" and eastern-sounding, though not derivative of any particular tradition.