Fans of music documentaries like Some Kind of Monster and Anvil: The Story of Anvil will not want to miss Julian Boshier’s Swagger of Thieves when it screens at the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival on Saturday the 14^th of July.

Swagger of Thieves follows the much-loved 90’s New Zealand band Head Like A Hole as they dust off their gear and head out on a reunion tour after a long hiatus. Focused most particularly on band members Nigel Regan and Nigel “Booga” Beazley, this is an uncensored and unvarnished look at the band members’ highs and lows as they deal with life on the road, personal conflict, and drug addiction.

Squeamish viewers will find it hard to sit through some of the more controversial moments, in which Boshier refuses to shy away from the reality and decidedly unglamorous horrors of substance abuse. But these scenes are also entirely free of exploitation, and are part of the film’s almost epic mission to capture these warm, loveable, but entirely unmanageable human beings in all their glory. This isn’t so much about Head Like A Hole as it is about capturing the essence of what it means to be in a rock band.

I recently caught up with Julian Boshier to talk about Swagger of Thieves.

Can you tell us how you came to work in film, and how you ultimately came to make a film about Head Like A Hole?

In my late teens, early 20s I had a couple of one-man photographic exhibitions in Wellington. I thought I was going to become a photographer but it never really happened. I ended up living in London and Vancouver for a few years, and when I came back my sister was doing this one-week introductory course film course here in Auckland. So I tagged along with her and was eventually accepted into a full term course.

When I finished it, I thought I’d go and do music videos. Even when I was trying to become a world famous photographer, I did tend to concentrate on bands. And I got this semi-informal position at the Wellington town hall as their official band photographer. So a lot of the internationals that went through the Wellington town hall I photographed.

After doing a lot of music videos over several years based in Auckland, I got a bit tired of it because the budgets were starting to go backwards. And there was new young blood coming through and a lot of my favourite bands had moved on. Shihad had moved on and Head Like a Hole had split up. So that’s when I started thinking that I’d like to do a full-length documentary.

I thought the best thing for me would be to do a documentary about a band. And Head Like a Hole were always my favourites when I was doing music videos for them. They were always really interesting because they had that sense of danger about them. You don’t know what’s going to happen with them. It’s volatile characters, drugs of course, big personalities, conflicts. When I was doing music videos for them, I experienced all of that.

For those who don’t know, who are Head Like a Hole?

After I had been living in London and Vancouver, I came back to New Zealand spent a few weeks in Wellington before returning to live in Auckland. Everybody in Wellington was talking about these two bands, Shihad and Head Like a Hole. I’d never heard of them, but it was kind of like Wellington had changed into something cool.

This was around 1990. So they have been on New Zealand’s musical landscape for 25 odd years now and they were really unlike anything New Zealand had seen before. The only way I can describe them is as a more exciting, more alternative, more wild version of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers with incredibly theatrical live shows and of course, half of them playing naked. Head Like a Hole are a really revered band in this country.

So when it came to filming a band in this country, for me it had to be Head Like a Hole. And I was fortunate to be in a position where I could do that because I had a good long-term relationship with them.

You can see that relationship coming through in just how frank and how uncensored the band members are in the film. Probably the most striking example is around the rather bleak depiction of drug abuse and it’s consequences. How did you get them to be that open?

I’d always hung out with these guys… we weren’t best friends or anything like that. It was more that we just had a good professional relationship. I respected them and they kind of respected me. But on the other hand, I was using them and they were using me. You could basically say they’ve used me to get a film and I’ve used them to make a film. And we sort of don’t really discuss that, but it’s quite true. We probably both know it. But it doesn’t matter because it’s to our mutual advantage.

They’re pretty chilled out, those two guys. And when it comes to the whole “bad boy” band reputation and the drugs, they almost love the notoriety of it. I think it helps the brand of their band if their reputation precedes them, and it’s pretty common knowledge in this country that this is a band in which some members take drugs. And I guess they’ve just got the mindset of, “Well, everyone knows, so why are we gonna hide it?” I think it’s simple as that. I didn’t get in the way. I know when to back off. I know when to turn the camera off. And I know when I can push it, and I do push it with those guys.

And what did they think after seeing all this on the screen? Have they seen Swagger of Thieves?

They’ve seen the movie several times. Whenever they would come up to Auckland for rehearsal or a show or something, they would often come over to my editing space and I’d show them progress. The editor and I cut the film part-time for about two years. When it was accepted into the New Zealand Film Festival, we rushed to complete. They saw that version before they saw it on the big screen.

When they see themselves on screen doing this stuff, I think they are actually as shocked as anybody else. That scene with the shooting up happened about 16 years ago. They’re really different people now. Booga is in his early forties, and he’s married with ten-year-old twins. He’s still a wild-man and he’s still got the same personality, but when he looks back to his younger self from 16 years ago, he could be looking at a different person. But in saying that, I can’t quite say that about Nigel Regan. Nigel’s life hasn’t morphed into something dramatically different to what he was like back then. But he’s trying.

I’ve seen that the film has got some amazing press in New Zealand. Some were calling it one of the year’s best films.

When we were editing for those two years, we didn’t really show anybody what we were doing. Nobody. We always had the intention of bringing a couple of editors in to get some advice, but I never got around to it. It was just Eddie Larsen and I. Eddie collaborated on most of my music videos back in the day – he was my editor. When the film was finally finished, the only person that had seen it was Graeme Tuckett, who is a freelance journalist in New Zealand. He does film reviews on national radio, and he’s really insightful and really intelligent and he just has a really good handle on the form.

So I sent him a link, and I didn’t hear from him for a couple of days. And then one morning my phone started going crazy at five in the morning, and all these people were messaging me saying that I had to go on Facebook and see what Graeme Tuckett had written about Swagger of Thieves. This is the first time I’ve read anything about the film that I’ve just spent my life doing. And hundreds of thousands of dollars. I was pretty nervous. But what he had written was incredible. It really validated in my mind that I hadn’t just wasted several years of my life. He was blown away by the film and his informal write-up, really just to his friends on Facebook, was one of the most incredible things I’ve ever read. And it was about me and my film!

But generally the media has been incredible in this country. All the top-tier journalists and all the big publications have just given this film the most incredible reviews. The film has resonated so deeply with the average journalist, I think because the film is quite unique to this country.

You mentioned the film costing you several hundred thousand dollars. Does that mean Swagger of Thieves was entirely self-funded?

Yes. When I decided to go for it, I momentarily thought about who could pay for it. I didn’t have much experience with the New Zealand Film Commission, but I knew they had just put a million dollars into the Shihad film. It only returned 26,000 dollars at the box office.

So I didn’t think they were going to give me any money because of that. I also didn’t think they’d give me money because I was making a film about drug addicts. And I really didn’t want to write a treatment, because I didn’t even know what my film was going to be about. So I never went for funding.

I just started shooting. I bought my own plane tickets, rented my own cabs, got my own hotels, and hired a sound operator. I did that for many years, and I slowly amassed my footage.

But if you’re going to make a film about Head Like a Hole, I think that’s the only way it could work. They can’t be censored. They can’t be impeded by the wants of the financier. So in retrospect, even though it hurt a lot, I think the end result is better because it wasn’t funded. That’s a crazy thing to say, but I honestly think that it is true. In a self-financed project you can basically do what you want.

I think that makes a lot of sense. It’s probably a lot scarier and a lot harder work, but you can see the result.

It was sort of scary, but in some ways that was also a good thing. It got to a point where I was invested financially, emotionally. I was ignoring my business. I was traipsing around the country with these crazy guys. I was spending my own money, and I was making something that I didn’t even know I was going to complete.

There was no way I could give up. I was in too deep. I just had to go for it. And I had to really be on form in the edit suite and really push my editor along for him to remain on form, because it was such a long term project. It was really hard sometimes. We were just so over it. I’ve been working on this for 10 years. One project. 10 years. Part-time. And I’m still working on it! Talking to you, trying to get people excited about it in Australia. Just last night, we were in here last night cutting a trailer for Australia.

The rock documentary is a genre unto itself, and there are some pretty classic films in this space. Are there any documentaries or filmmakers that you were particularly influenced by?

Well, believe it or not, I’m pretty useless when it comes to seeing other films. But obviously I’ve seen quite a few rock documentaries. One that comes to mind is Anvil: The Story of Anvil. I love that film and it has similarities to mine. Two best friends, they’re getting older. There’s not much going on in their lives apart from the music. They don’t want to give their friendship away and they don’t want to give their music away.

That’s how Booga and Nigel are. That really sums them up. Booga’s married with kids but he still wants to run away with his best friend, drive around the country in a tour van, have fun and play music. Even more so for Nigel Regan. Music is why he is on this earth. The music is the thing that connects those two guys. It wouldn’t surprise me if they’re still doing music in 20 years.

But when I set out to make Swagger of Thieves, I didn’t want to copy any other style. I didn’t want it to be a band profile documentary. I didn’t want it to be just about Head Like a Hole. I wanted it to be a bit broader than that, and I wanted to attract people to the film that weren’t necessarily knowledgeable about this band or didn’t even like their music.

And I think we’ve achieved that. A lot of people have contacted me after they’ve seen the film and told me, “I was dragged along to this film…” or “I didn’t know if I was buying a ticket to a piece of shit, but you know what? I really loved your film. I don’t know anything about Head Like a Hole. I don’t like their music, but man what a fantastic film.” So that to me is very satisfying, because that was my intention. I wanted to make a film that was very broad, and that could appeal to a wider audience than fans of Head Like a Hole.

Tickets to see Swagger of Thieves at the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival are now available.