Premiere: The Killers Open Up to Werner Herzog in Mini-Documentary

Coinciding with the release today of their fourth studio album, Battle Born, the Killers perform tonight at the Paradise Theater in the Bronx as part of the American Express “Unstaged” concert series. The show, which kicks off at 7 p.m. Eastern and will be livestreaming in its entirety on YouTube, is being shot by boundary-pushing film director Werner Herzog; previous “Unstaged” pairings have included Jack White and Gary Oldman, and Usher and Hamish Hamilton. As a teaser for tonight’s collaboration, you can now view a Herzog-directed short film on the Las Vegas rockers, which is streaming exclusively on RollingStone.com.

Billed as a mini-documentary, the film finds Herzog visiting the Killers in their native Sin City and questioning band members Brandon Flowers, Mark Stoerner and Ronnie Vannucci – guitarist Dave Keunig, we learn, was “not to be found” during filming – on their experience growing up in Vegas. The filmmaker joins the anthemic rockers for a cruise down the Vegas Strip while camped out in the backseat of a vintage Cadillac; later band and director head 20 minutes off the Strip to experience the serenity of the surrounding desert. Herzog, in a pivotal scene, argues that the band was raised in a “fake” city. “I had never looked at [Las Vegas] as being fake,”  Flowers contends. “We didn’t know that it was strange to other people until we went to other places.”