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The Upsetter (film)
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Wikipedia article
'The Upsetter: The Life and Music of Lee Scratch Perry' is a documentary film about the Grammy Award-winning Jamaican music icon Lee "Scratch" Perry. The film is narrated by Academy Award winner Benicio Del Toro and directed by American Filmmakers Ethan Higbee and Adam Bhala Lough. The film premiered at the SXSW Film Festival in March 2008 and had its theatrical release in March 2011, going on to screen at more than 80 theatres world wide. The Upsetter: The Life and Music of Lee Scratch Perry was entered into the Criterion Collection in February 2022.
Production
The filmmakers got Lee Perry's approval to begin making the documentary in early 2004 when they brought him $5,000 in a paper bag, per his request, to a dinner with Perry's ex-wives and all his children in London. The film was financed by an Argentinian trucking company. Higbee and Lough flew to Switzerland where Perry was living in a small town called Einsiedeln and interviewed Perry for eight days, getting him to recount his life story.
Style
The documentary relies singularly on the interviews with Perry and eschews the normal talking-head interviews to tell the story. Lough has stated this was a specific choice he and Higbee made.
"'We only wanted Lee's voice in the film; we wanted Lee to tell his story. We really felt like the history of reggae has been, in a way, hijacked by a white perspective. It comes from such a painfully colonialist perspective. We actually went and interviewed tons of these people from Adrian Sherwood to Chris Blackwell as research in a way. But we just had no interest in trotting out the white man to tell the story or even comment on Lee. I think that the Caribbean voice, the Afro-Caribbean voice, is often kind of forgotten in the story of Black history. So to have an opportunity to have a Jamaican man tell his story, the way that he lived it whether it's correct or incorrect, or, you know, revisionist, or whatever is, I think, a duty of a filmmaker.' - Adam Bhala Lough in Grammy.com interview.'"
Higbee and Lough crafted the film much like a collage, taking turns editing small pieces and improving on top of each other's work over the course of many years.
References
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