The Riverside Press-Enterprise
Kurt Cobain finds his way into opera
A co-director of `Last Days' discusses tone, the lie we tell ourselves about lyrics and more
British visual artist Matt Copson and London-based composer Oliver Leith hit it off immediately.
“We both liked what one another does,” says Copson, referring to the sensibilities they share. “It definitely felt like there was something.”
Brought together by a mutual friend, they talked about their passions and the pieces of art that had thrilled them over the years. They discovered they both love director Gus Van Sant’s 2005 cult film, “Last Days,” the fictionalized story of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain at the end of his life.
“It wasn’t necessarily the Kurt Cobain aspect,” Copson says of their common interest. “We both like Nirvana, but that wasn’t where we were approaching this from. It was really the tone of that film that felt like a shared interest in what we both made.”
Copson, who divides his time between London and Los Angeles, describes their appreciation for the “banality and magic” of the film, which creates a transcendence through its artful shots of dirty coffee cups and the doomed central character.
“We just kept coming back to the idea, and after a while, we said, ‘Well, why would we not just take ‘Last Days’ itself and work
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with that?’ ” Was it always going to be an
So they did, adapting Van Sant’s opera or were there other film into an opera that earned rave ideas for the adaptation? reviews in its world premiere at the Royal Opera House in London before it comes to Walt Disney Concert Hall on Tuesday for its United States premiere.
The opera stars French actress Agathe Rousselle, best known for “Titane,” winner of the Palme d’or at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, as Blake, the Cobain-like rock star. Art rock singer-songwriter Caroline Polachek, for whom Copson has directed music videos, contributes an aria that Blake plays on a turntable in his home during the performance. Costumes are by the Balenciaga fashion house.
“Last Days” will only be performed once in the United States for now, though Copson, who is
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also adapting the opera as a feature You have three credits in the film, says it likely will return program: librettist, art director to Los Angeles and other cities in and co-director. How did that 2025. work? In an interview edited for
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length and clarity, Copson talks Firstly, it’s somewhat embarrassing about the decision to create an that it’s called librettist. opera; the challenges of doing so It’s also very unusual, obviously, as co-director, art director and librettist; to have someone who would the reaction of Van Sant be doing all three of those things. and more. Oliver and I naturally wanted to take a holistic approach to it, where things could shift and we could be more experimental. We
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Kurt Cobain’s death remains a significant moment in pop
culture and music history. Describe the transition from the film to the opera stage.
AFor me, the idea of adapting it became this interesting thing with the Blake/kurt figure, because of the way the film, and then (the opera) even more so, renders the character into this archetype for us to kind of grapple with as a total mystery. Like, “How do we know anyone, really?” becomes the ultimate question. It gives us the lie of psychologizing: “Oh, yes, we understand this person. We understand him through his lyrics.”
The real-life Kurt is fascinating on this level because he does appear to give us massive glimpses into that. This is somebody who was going to call (the album) “In Utero” “I Hate Myself and Want to Die,” which is the most on-thenose title imaginable for someone who’s suicidal. But he also appears to be mocking it at the same time, so the kind of unknowability of this seemed really interesting.
AIt was a more traditional understanding of that, that maybe I’d make a kind of visual work alongside Oliver’s music, probably like the laser pieces I’ve done, or something like that. The works I make have characters that move or sing or whatever. They exist across space and narratively. I also do lots of stuff working with musicians in the past, and so for me it all sort of started to make sense, the more ambitious idea of, like, well, we should commit to making an opera. Also, “What is an opera?” was more alluring. There was more to play with, the theater and the music of the piece.
could explore more territory, back and forth, with each other. Which
Q means there was a nice flexibility Gus Van Sant’s film doesn’t there. I wasn’t answering to anyone. have a lot of dialogue or even plot. Did you pull from his film or
But yeah, I hadn’t written anything are the lyrics and plot largely your quite like that, even though invention? a lot of my own work does often use writing. Writing and drawings tend to be the basis of it. But writing for people singing is quite specific and unusual. And that was a lot of fun for me, because it’s like poetry then.
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That collaboration, between you and Oliver, between both of you and the cast and crew, must have been difficult at times given how new this form was to you.
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We remained in the rehearsal room for the whole time, which is very unusual. So it meant we could have conversations about tempo or adding anything or taking away things. Or adding silences, which was something that I wanted to do. I found in the rehearsal room it needed these moments to kind of just sit there for a second. And so we were able to kind of shift things around a little bit. It’s chiseling away at a block of marble to create something else out of it.
The thing about opera compared to anything else — like an artwork is the loosest anything could be. There’s no kind of framework there. And when you’re editing a piece of video you can always shift things around. Opera is like a jigsaw puzzle because you’ve got these singers, you’ve got an orchestra, you’ve got the blocking onstage, you’ve got the lighting. It’s a mini-miracle when it comes
together.
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We had to get permission from Gus, and he said, “Yeah, great, do it.” He’s no stranger to adaptations as well. I think he loves the kind of conceptual approach to these things. I remember emailing him, saying, “Do you have a script? Could I take a look at it?” He said maybe, and he sent me a kind of 2005 Microsoft Word document I had to find a way of opening up. I think it was two pages, 10 sentences or phrases.
That was the approach for him. Like, there was a Yellow Pages salesman that comes through — it’s one of the best scenes in the film — and he was a guy who just turned up on set and tried to sell them Yellow Pages, and Gus said, “Can we film you doing this?” It was so freeing for me. The fact that this is very much a product of its improvisation gave me permission to do what he was doing on a tonal level and symbolic level.
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Did Gus see the opera when it played at the Royal Opera House last year?
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He did. He texted me something like, “It sounds really good.” When the first night was on, he said, “I’m coming over tomorrow; can I have a seat?” It was obviously quite nerve-wracking, because what have we done to your baby? And he actually loved it, which was really, really nice.