They’re a punk rock band from the late 80s named after their great love of sweet Mary Jane, but during their 25-year history Green Day developed much loftier ambitions for their music. After releasing American Idiot back in 2004 (which spawned a Broadway musical and now has a film adaptation in the works) and 21st Century Breakdown in 2009, the band is now planning to release three new albums between September 2012 and January 2013. The film-related news accompanying those three albums — titled ¡Uno!, ¡Dos! and ¡Tre! — is that two documentaries will be made to go alongside their release.
Filmmakers Tim Lynch (the producer of the band’s Live DVD “Green Day: Bullet in a Bible”) and Tim Wheeler (who worked on “The White Stripes Under Great White Northern Lights”) are creating one documentary on the making of the trio of albums, and a second which will be made up from archive footage from their pre-Dookie (1994) days. Frontman Bille Joe Armstrong had this to say about the former of the two docs: “It's not going to be the sitting down, head shot of me going 'we started out blah blah blah’. We wanted to get into lifestyles of rock'n'roll and playing rock n roll and letting the story kind of tell itself rather than create revisionist (history)."
Over the last 18 months Lynch and Wheeler have shot the band in rehearsals, performing and recording, and they will continue to capture the band before they head to Japan and Europe for a series of festivals. Billboard reports that their record label, Warner Bros. Records, hopes to have the making-of doc ready in time for next year’s Sundance. There’s less being said about the doc being put together from archive footage, but for some that may sound like the more interesting of the two, and should at least make for a fascinating comparison piece. It will be interesting to see whether these prove to be anything more than promotional pieces for Billie Joe’s brand, but we imagine the band's fans won’t mind either way.