Highlights: PBS PJ20 Press Conference

Cameron did a Q & A today as part of the Television Critics Association Press Event in Hollywood, CA. If you don’t mind spoilers, then you can find transcripts around the net. We are going to stay pretty spoiler free here, but I will share a few choice quotes from the event:

• On the band’s reaction: “We showed [the film] to them in October and you could more than hear a pin drop,” laughed Crowe. “It was like all the oxygen disappeared from the room.”
• Finally, said Crowe, one of the band members’ wives broke the silence: “It’s f—ing great! I wouldn’t touch a frame!” We went back to Kelly Curtis’ house and had a group discussion about the film and about their entire history. Amazing. Wish we’d filmed that too . . . they thanked us for holding a mirror up to their band. It was an emotional night.”
• On PJ20: “It get’s under their skin a little bit. But if everything was perfect it would be like an EPK [electronic press kit]. If you rip the scab off a little bit and make people a little uncomfortable, you’re going to get something unique. I want to ask the stuff that a fan given a front row seat would ask, but be tough when I need to be tough.”
•  “Nobody dies. Nobody O.D.’s.,” Crowe said of Pearl Jam’s evolution. That was a challenge in telling the band’s story. “How do you get from that early angst to this state of grace?”
•  “We have a lot of extra pieces on the DVD. Some of it is about the band’s political history.”
• Favorite Songs?: “I love Release,” “Rearviewmirror” and acoustic stuff like “Thumbing My Way.”  “If you’re a fan you know that your favorite song one year is then a different song in another year. That’s the great thing about a band with a lot of songs.”
•  “They never stopped caring, even if you weren’t there,” Crowe says of the band’s efforts during their less commercially-successful periods.
• Does he feel the band is still making significant music? “I do. You listen to a song like ‘The End’… and you can feel it. It’s real and it’s passionate.” “They continue to be worthy of our attention in a very rare and wonderful way.”
• His goal with the film: “I wanted the whole movie to be like a box of collectibles you open years later.”