Director Spike Jonze: ‘Beastie Boys and I wrote a film script together’

Rap trio's 'Sabotage' video inspired unmade movie We Can Do This

Film director Spike Jonze has revealed he wrote a film script with Beastie Boys, inspired by the video ‘Sabotage’, reports Spin.

After making the promotional video for ‘Sabotage’ together, the rap trio and Jonze relocated to Hollywood to write a film script, which was titled We Can Do This. The movie was to feature the band playing several different characters.

Jonze explained: “The four of us wrote a script together. It was called We Can Do This because it had… it was so surreal and out there and [Adam “MCA” Yauch’s filmmaker alter-ego] Nathanial Hornblower was a character as the director. One of the characters from ‘Sabotage,’ Sir Stuart Wallace, was a character. Both played by Yauch and it just would’ve been ridiculous and fun … There were no 1970s cops in it, but it was definitely in the same spirit.”

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Elsewhere in the film, Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz was due to play a character called Nino Vincenzi whilst Michael “Mike D” Diamond took the role of a cowboy called Country Mike, which spawned the music for the Beastie Boys’ unreleased ‘Country Mike’s Greatest Hits’ album.

“It was about Hornblower,” continued Jonze when asked for more details. “Mike played a country star — those songs we wrote for the movie, actually. Adam Horovitz played this kid, Nino Vincenzi, who lived on Roosevelt Island with his dad who was a mechanic, and [he] was a little bit [like] John Travolta [in] Saturday Night Fever … He had all these dreams and aspirations, but he was awkward and couldn’t dance. So he didn’t even have that going for him. But yeah, I forget all the different characters but … it would have been funny.”

Meanwhile, Spike Jonze’s latest film Her boasts contributions to the soundtrack from Karen O and Arcade Fire, who, the director claims, originally wrote their song ‘Supersymmetry’ for the movie.

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