What's up with you and music? You've made documentaries on the blues, the Band, Bob Dylan and soon Bob Marley. Now you've caught the Rolling Stones onstage in Shine a Light. Isn't singing in the shower enough for you?
No, I don't think so [laughs]. I wish I could create music, but I can't. What I can do is put images and music together.

What's the first memory you have of hearing the Rolling Stones?
It was 1965. I was driving on the Long Island Expressway in a Volkswagen, and suddenly out of this mono speaker came the opening guitar licks of Keith Richards and "Satisfaction." And the impression of Mick Jagger's voice, then the lyrics and the driving, relentless nature of the song. It's like a motor. I had to go back and find their other music.

What about the Stones stuck with you? I hadn't yet seen them live, so it had to do with the energy of the music, the guitars, the percussion. From "The Spider and the Fly" all the way up to the album Let It Bleed, each song is like a narrative, and the band together is like a single character in these narratives. Jagger's voice sounds like a musical instrument. In my head, I'd imagine camera moves or editing patterns, and it freed my mind creatively. A lot of that relentless energy went into Mean Streets, into Taxi Driver. The Stones made the music I listened to.

Who had the idea for the movie?
Jagger was talking about doing a film of the show, A Bigger Bang. It would be an event — over a million people and fifty cameras, on the beach in Rio — so I was thinking about doing it in IMAX 3-D.

So how did it go from Rio to squeezing into Manhattan's Beacon Theatre?
I found I do better in smaller venues, where you can really see them perform.

But there's so little history in the movie, as opposed to No Direction Home and The Last Waltz. The Stones are the most documented band in history — what more do we need to know about them? I had to keep telling everybody, "The history of the Rolling Stones is right there onstage in their faces, in the way Mick is moving and the way Keith is handling that guitar and the way Charlie Watts plays the drums and the way Ronnie Wood is working. So why don't we see how they work with each other onstage? Maybe we get caught up in that very primal euphoria."

The Beacon is a small stage, but you have cameras swooping all over it.
Yeah, yeah, that was the key. I added the extra element of chance by having the cameras move, constantly tracking and zooming in at the same time. In rehearsals, we made sure that the Stones wouldn't run into a dolly or a camera crane and get hurt. The rehearsals were really about placement, not the music — that's why the joke with Mick comes in, about what music they're going to play.