Meet Me in the Bathroom is a return to 2000s New York

The new documentary Meet Me in the Bathroom is an immersive journey through the cool, scuzzy New York music scene of the early 21st century. We talk to filmmakers Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern

Feature by Josh Slater-Williams | 08 Mar 2023
  • Meet Me in the Bathroom: The Strokes

Published in 2017, Lizzy Goodman’s Meet Me in the Bathroom earned acclaim as an oral history of the NYC rock and indie scene of 2001 to 2011, exploring how Brooklyn became a capital of ‘scuzzy cool’ in the wake of 9/11 and the meteoric rise (and occasional fall) of acts like The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, LCD Soundsystem, Interpol, TV on the Radio, and more.

Several years on, a condensed documentary adaptation now arrives from British directors Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern. They use Goodman’s interview recordings for audio narration, while the visuals are pulled from both official media like music videos and thousands of clips filmed by friends and fans.

Aside from directing music videos, Southern and Lovelace are perhaps best known for making the LCD Soundsystem ‘farewell’ concert doc Shut Up and Play the Hits, as well as Blur reunion portrait No Distance Left to Run.

The Skinny: What were the trickiest aspects of approaching this era and book in documentary form?

Dylan Southern: It’s a period of music we really loved, that we were in our early twenties for. And it was so specifically located in a city at a very specific time that it felt different to films we'd done before. We wanted to avoid talking heads. We wanted to immerse people in the time as much as possible. Being 100 per cent archive brought a lot of challenges.

We had to take a 650-page book and turn it into a 105-minute film. We excised a lot and really narrowed the focus. We’d written a plan for what the story would be, but when you're reliant on this seemingly endless search for archive, that plan becomes quite precarious.

Something cool is that it’s almost as much a celebration of the videographers who shot the footage as it is the rock stars.

Southern: We were shooting bands in 2000 when DV cameras were first accessible. We hated the look. We thought it was ugly and were very romantic about 16mm and 8mm film, but we could only afford these crappy DV cameras. But looking at that footage 20 years on, it almost has the same romantic, nostalgic quality that film did back then.

Will Lovelace: What’s lovely about lots of that footage is they're filming people who aren't famous at that point and therefore, it's like they're filming their mates or people who happened to be performing. That footage becomes more powerful looking back on it now.

Southern: It is a celebration of those people, because if you think of someone in 20 years’ time going to make a film about an artist today, they’d have the opposite problem in that they’d have thousands of phone videos. But back then, we found certain types of people were just videoing everything in New York, almost like they were predicting YouTube. Some people had apartments full of tapes where they'd just filmed this or that gig, not necessarily because they were into the scene.

Lovelace: The city, as well. People filming stuff that wouldn't necessarily feel like it needs filming at that point. But then it becomes very handy when you're trying to tell a story about that time.

Southern: There was that type of archivist, and then every band had the equivalent of us: a friend with a video camera. We would use the Wayback Machine to access Web 1.0 websites, go on forums, find a person who was going to a show and then find their current online presence. It was really laborious detective work; we could probably get jobs for Bellingcat now. But we'd find these people and then suddenly an amazing find. There was a girl who was a scenester, who was a photographer, had a video camera and she'd had a lockup in LA. In there was a suitcase full of unprocessed 35mm film and DV tapes, which is where we got footage of The Strokes on the subway, where they went in the very early days where they're just hanging out, being friends.

It made me really nostalgic for Web 1.0, when the internet was more utopian and had more possibility than just selling you stuff.

This was quite a white male-heavy music scene, but you crucially do spend a lot of time on artists who don’t fit that demographic, including women of colour.

Southern: Viewed through the lens of today, you can really see how it must have been an alienating, lonely experience. One key thing in [Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontwoman] Karen O's story was that she talks about being mixed race and not fitting in with either community. She’s a character with duality to her, in that she's one person off stage and somebody completely different on stage. And that side of her story wasn't present in [coverage]. We were thorough and rigorous in terms of finding every bit of print journalism, and she was sexualised and sensationalised in a way that the male artists weren't. It was important to get that across.

Kimya Dawson is such an amazing character. We wanted to start the film with The Moldy Peaches because it was just the most accessible way into the story with their spirit of fun.

Lovelace: And it felt like they were genuinely coming to New York trying to discover like-minded people.

Southern: As a character, Kimya's perspective on it all is much more sensitive and attuned to feelings than a lot of others. It was always useful to be able to revisit their interview to contextualise other people, because [Kimya] was sober through it all, was present at the moments The Strokes were in ascendance and could look at it from a very different point of view to everybody else.

Having those voices was really important; having a wider sense of people's experiences in that scene, rather than just cool white guys, skinny jeans and Converse.


Meet Me in the Bathroom is released in UK cinemas 10 Mar by Universal and Dogwoof