whynow spoke with Jake Scott, the director of the eagerly anticipated ‘Oasis Knebworth 1996’ documentary, which is in cinemas from today.
The director of the ‘Oasis Knebworth 1996’ documentary, which charts the two legendary Oasis super-gigs at a park in Hertfordshire 25 years ago, has revealed he had a ticket to the event and was unable to attend.
Jake Scott, the Grammy Award-winning director, was speaking to whynow ahead of the release of the documentary.
‘It was a mate who had the tickets,’ he explained, ‘and we were stuck doing work out of the country, so I couldn’t make it back.’
His documentary, which tells the stories through the perspective of the fans who attended the event, includes never-before-seen archive footage from across the two days of the festival.
Scott also revealed he had to search through 80 hours of footage in the making of the documentary, ‘all unlabelled – some of which was clear, some of it wasn’t,’ aided by ‘a lot of tea and a lot of takeaways, but it was brilliant.’
The director, who is the son of Ridley Scott, also explained that the work ‘was always going to be about the fans. And that’s how I pitched it as a commission – to really tell the story through the eyes of the fans.
Credit: Mirrorpix
‘They’ve always been very connected to the fans. If you just go on their Instagram site, you can see it’s still a constant dialogue between them and the fans. The fans are very important to them as a band. And it just seemed like the right way to tell the story. So that’s exactly what we did.
Oasis’ performance across the two days is regarded by many as one of the era-defining gigs in recent times, encapsulating the band’s charisma at the height of the Britpop era. Some 250,000 fans were in attendance.
To accrue the stories of fans who were there, Scott worked through the band’s fan club and conducted interviews across the country with his team, whittling the long-list of people’s responses down to the 20 ‘most emotional’ stories.
‘It was interesting to find the balance,’ he reflected, ‘because I really want to give the viewer the sense you were there: you have two tickets, one to each night, you’re in the front row, and you are part of it.
‘That’s why we never see anybody who was there, talking now; that’s where we don’t see Noel, you hear his voice. I wanted just to tell the story with voices and the music.’
Scott, who had previously worked with the band on the music video for Morning Glory, believes the release of the documentary is ‘perfectly-timed’ because of ‘the fascination of that [90s] period for kids now.
‘There’s a resurgence of that; you just have to look at the band T-shirts they’re selling in shops now and see kids walking around win Nirvana T-shirts now, it’s really funny.’
