Paranoid Android

The music documentary has become formulaic: Faded star finds new fame on the comeback trail. But while Gary Numan: Android in La La Land charts the electronic pioneer’s return to relevance, it’s definitely not the standard music biopic. It’s a rock & roll love story, of how Numan’s wife Gemma saved him, and how together they reignited his career. Director Steve Read said, “Gemma has completely helped re-invent him, brought him back from the dead, and certainly a few years ago people didn’t know how important she was in that process.”

It’s a story Read stumbled upon by accident. Growing up in Britain in the Eighties, he knew Numan’s work, but wasn’t the fan in his family (that was his sister). So when Numan played the UK’s Hop Farm Music Festival in 2012, Read decided to check out his set. “I thought he could be good. I’d not heard his stuff in a long time, and I was blown away by the way he’d restructured those old classic songs, ‘Are “Friends” Electric?’ and ‘Cars’ and so on, for that heavier sound.”

When Read started researching, he knew that he wanted to avoid the Behind the Music cliches. He said, “I found out just how interesting a character he was, and how engaging, and this amazing story he’s had, this riches-to-rags story and all the struggles he’s had, and Asperger’s, and depression.” As he got to know Gary and Gemma, it became increasingly clear that his film had to be about the pair of them: However, Gemma was initially resistant. Read said, “When I first went to meet them properly and talk them through what we wanted to do, she burst into tears. She was so nervous; she didn’t want to be in front of the camera.”

Luckily, the filmmakers bonded with their subjects on a personal level, on simple things like being parents. They followed them for a year, even joining them on vacation with an increasingly exasperated Numan driving his family and the crew around the California desert on the eve of his album’s release. Read said, “We ended up getting this unbelievable access to Gary and Gemma. The honesty and candor they gave us was just unbelievable.”

The marriage is the bedrock upon which Numan’s comeback was built, and Read’s film catches his evolution as a songwriter. Privy to the recording of what became 2013’s critical and commercial resurrection, Splinter (Songs From a Broken Mind), Read felt Numan was writing his most intimate album to date. “He was just getting his head around what he’d been through in those last seven years, and at the same time writing the songs that would go on the album.” In turn, Read started to feel like the lengthy interviews with Numan became their own form of therapy. “There was one time I asked him, ‘Are you aware that that song’s about depression and being in a dark room at night and not being able to sleep?’ He said to me, ‘Yeah, I’m kinda getting my head around that myself.'”

24 Beats Per Second, World Premiere

This article appears in March 18 • 2016.