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Nick Zinner and Johanna Schwartz Talk Music Documentary ‘They Will Have To Kill Us First’

The film focuses on a section of Malian musicians whose livelihoods—and lives—are threatened by the imposition of sharia law in the region.
Songhoy Blues' Streetshot © Andy Morgan

In early 2012, Tuareg separatists from the MNLA (National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad) joined forces with militant Islamist group Ansar Dine and successfully overthrew the government of Mali, creating a political tear that offered occupation of the country to the most powerful party. The al Qaeda-linked Ansar Dine group seized the opportunity, hijacking the MNLA’s aims of independence and imposing sharia law over their conquered Northern territories, which included Kidal, Gao, and Timbuktu.

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Anyone who opposed the new rule either fled their homes for safer pockets, like Mali’s capital Bamako or the country of Burkina Faso, or suffered extreme punishments and the threat of death by their occupiers. Director Johanna Schwartz’s new documentary, They Will Have To Kill Us First, which premiered at SXSW, won best documentary at CIMMFEST last Saturday, and comes out in theaters in the fall, focuses on a section of Malian musicians whose livelihoods—and lives—were threatened by the invasion: Khaira Arby, Fadimata “Disco” Walet Oumar, Moussa, and especially the four-piece, Songhoy Blues. As Andy Morgan—author of the book Music, Culture, and Conflict in Mali, and one of Schwartz’s collaborators—put it, “What’s been happening in Mali isn’t a war on terror, it’s a war on culture.”

Serving as an overview of the conflict tangled with the dangerous reality of creating art in the region, the film also utilizes an original score from guitarist Nick Zinner (who produced Songhoy Blues’ debut record, Music in Exile, out now on Transgressive Records), and new tracks from rapper Amkoullel, Tinariwen’s Abdallah Ag Alhousseini, and Afel Bocoum among many others. After three screenings of the film and three showcases for Songhoy Blues, I spoke with Schwartz and Zinner on the final day of SXSW about their project two years in the making.

The Creators Project: When did you first meet Songhoy Blues?

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Nick Zinner: The first time that I met them was during Africa Express. Around 20 bands played in this crazy audition process the first three nights we were there. Us being Westerners we'd watch and decide the bands that we liked and wanted to work with. Then Songhoy played, and Marc-Antoine [Moreau] found them through that. We actually did two tracks the next day, [the band’s first single] “Soubhor” being one of them. That started to get a lot of attention. At that point Marc and the band decided they wanted to work together, and they went back to do the record about eight months later.

It’s pretty striking in the documentary how quickly the personalities of each band member come across [The group is Aliou Toure, Oumar Toure, Garba Toure, and Nathanael Dembele].

Johanna Schwartz: Marc always makes fun of them because they're a bit like the Beatles with their own signatures. Aliou is the super-intense frontman, but extremely smart—he passed the bar and could practice law. Garba is this incredibly smiley person and one of the best guitar players you've ever seen, and Oumar is another extremely intelligent man. Then Nathaniel is the baby of the group, blinged out with his rhinestones and everything.

[To Zinner] When you returned to West Africa to work on Songhoy’s record, how did you collaborate with the band from a production sense?

Zinner: At that point they had like 20-25 demos that they had sent me, and I picked my favorite ones. Then it was just a matter of stripping them down and building them back up again, but trying to do it in a really natural way. I didn't want to impose too much of what I thought it should be, and instead have it be as honest to them as possible. Not just me going, "Oh, let's put beats on this,” or whatever. A lot of it was just seeing what the band was feeling.

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What is that specific style of Malian guitar music that you worked with called?

Zinner: I guess it falls under the umbrella of desert blues, but honestly I didn't know much about music from Mali before I went. I was only familiar with Amadou and Mariam, and then Tinariwen to a certain extent. This was a massive education for me. I think that as a guitar player I immediately related, because it really all comes from the same place—the history of blues coming from Africa and West Africa. I didn't find the music as a shock to my system as the culture was, so I thought, 'Great, I can completely relate to this instantaneously.'

Schwartz: There's a word, that sort of Northern, nostalgic desert blues-style song: It's called assouf. There is something really wistful and nostalgic about it, but really grounded, too. Music is basically the fifth character in the film. A lot of the songs, we put the translation up on screen, and it sort of helps to tell the story and it helps to give an insight into how the characters are feeling at that time, almost like a human voice.

[To Johanna] You were initially going for [annual Mali showcase] Festival in the Desert, but decided to do the documentary instead when it was canceled?

Schwartz: Correct. It was more of a gut feeling, though. I'm a massive fan of the music, I had been planning on going to the festival that year, cancelled my trip when the conflict hit, and just kind of rebooked my flight as a journalist rather than as a traveler. It wasn't really a decision; it was seeing this extraordinary story, and thinking I could do a good job in telling it.

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How did you handle that question of immediate immersion with the Malian communities in which you were filming?

I think that the people on the ground were really keen to interact with us, and shout about what was going on. It didn't hurt that we had some wonderful people with us that were really well respected, like Andy Morgan. Everyone in Mali knows Andy, and he agreed to work with me on the film. We could almost coast a little bit on the residual trust that Andy has in him, and it was sort of extended to me out of courtesy. Even if we didn't have him though, that issue of trust was never an issue.

What was the process of scoring the film? 

Schwartz: Once it was all agreed and we knew we were going to do it, I gave Nick a really difficult task. Since there are so many discordant themes in this film and the characters are so different, I basically said that the score needed to knit together the chaos of the film’s story, because the situation in Mali is chaos. A super-difficult brief, but Nick nailed it.

Zinner: Contextually it had to work. I live in LA now, I'm bi-coastal, so we did a week and a half in a studio I have in LA. Johanna had sent us an early rough cut, about three-quarters of the footage. So we just kind of bounced ideas off of Marc-Antoine, who came to LA, to see what worked and didn't. Then we did a week in Paris with Johanna and Sarah.

It's great having the actual filmmakers there, because I've kind of learned from doing some film work that you can make something that you think is perfect and amazing, and then the director is like, "Mm, I want it to be more celebratory." And you don't know what that means. Does that mean more drums? What? So it's great to just go through everything there and pinpoint every scene.

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This is a conflict that is still very much ongoing—how did you find a logical stopping point for the film?

Schwartz: It was another gut feeling. When Khaira told me more than a year ago that she planned on doing a concert in Timbuktu to bring music back to the city, I sort of knew in the back of my mind that that was a truly fantastic ending. We didn't know if it would happen. Until we were there, filming it, we didn't know if it ever was going to happen. So we shot three or four different endings to the film.

The process is aided now by the fact that you have so many vantage points from which to view the material, and many of them heavily covered by both amateur and professional media sources.

Schwartz: There are some stories out there where you can be one person with your camera and it’s just you and them. This was just not that kind of story. You had to have a team, because there was stuff going on in Gao, Timbuktu, Bamako. Some of the best scenes in the film were shot by our Malian guys, and we worked with Aris Roussinos and Tanya Bindra, who's an amazing photojournalist living out in Mali covering the conflict. We just had to put together an extraordinary village of filmmakers.

They Will Have To Kill Us First just won best documentary at CIMMFEST last Saturday. The film will be released theatrically this autumn. Go to theywillhavetokillusfirst.com for more information and updates, and click here to hear more from Songhoy Blues.

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