Behind the scenes of Oasis: Don't Look Back In Anger - when the cameras rolled with it

“Mate, did I see Oasis?” Matt Smith was saying, animatedly, in answer to my question. “F***ing hell, loads, mate! I saw them six times!” I talked to the actor early last autumn, as Oasis’s Live ’25 tour, having dominated — encapsulated — the British summer, wound its way round Asia, Australia and South America. I was aware he was a big music fan, but I hadn’t fathomed just how deep the 43-year-old’s love for the band of his youth went. “I love Oasis. I feel like [those concerts] did something. There was a sort of collective consciousness in those gigs. Something simple and brilliant happening between artist and audience — and within the audiences. When Liam said to turn round and do the Poznań? Come on man!” Smith exclaimed, beaming. “It felt euphoric, it totally marked my summer out.”Liam and Noel GallagherSimon EmmettNow comes the concert film of the comeback tour. And equally against the odds, Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger does a toweringly impressive job of bottling and memorialising the multi-generational, globe-gripping excitement of Live ’25. If you were there, you might find yourself with something in your eye all over again. If you weren’t, you’ll be crying at having missed it. As the documentary’s creator/writer Steven Knight puts it: “We were [capturing] a very emotional story, about family, about two brothers. But also the effect their music is having on generations coming together in the stadium.“And then the effect the songs have had on people outside the stadium,” he continues, referring to both the film’s footage of fans thronging the venues and of individual disciples — in South Korea, Japan, Argentina and Brazil — who ascribe (literally) life-saving qualities to the band. “These people who have a very strong relationship with Oasis.” Then, finally, “you’ve got this perfect, beautifully made score: these songs”.Liam GallagherOasis: Don't Look Back In AngerThe film-makers were blessed with fly-on-the-wall, fully immersive access to six weeks of pre-tour rehearsals last spring at the cavernous Mill studios in Wimbledon. Then they shot 13 shows around the world. But ensuring that Don’t Look Back in Anger wasn’t a traditional, top-down concert film — a band’s-eye view, from high on the stage — directors Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern immersed themselves and their cameras in the audiences, as they did with their LCD Soundsystem film Shut Up and Play the Hits.“The fans are almost the most important band member of Oasis in a way”Dylan Southern“That was fundamental,” says Southern. “That approach was vindicated in Cardiff on the first night. We wanted to experience the show on camera in the way that fans were experiencing it. With Oasis, there’s something incredibly remarkable about their fans. They’re almost the most important member of the band in a way.“The whole ethos was to create an authentic impression of being at those shows,” he goes on. That meant hiring local camera crew at each international show. “We were very clear with every cinematographer: make your own film. Film your experience. And if there’s something happening in and among the crowd that’s more interesting than what’s going on up onstage, go with it.”Nowhere is that more powerful than in the footage of a soon-to-be-viral, stunned and tearful fan at Cardiff — let’s call him Adidas/Stone Island Lad — as he’s comforted by a random fellow concertgoer (“Carhartt Dad”). Says Knight, creator of Peaky Blinders and House of Guinness, and scriptwriter of the next James Bond film: “As soon as I saw that scene, the lesson that I learned from it, as somebody who writes fiction, was: let that stay. Doesn’t need dialogue. Doesn’t need anything. It’s just beautiful. That was the first concert. That was proof that this is something that we weren’t expecting.”Oasis on stage at the Principality Stadium, Cardiff, for the band’s long-awaited reunion tourPA WireAs the chronicler of the battling Brummies of the Shelby clan, Knight of course knows a thing or two about warring families. So his eyes and ears were attuned for a particular kind of drama.Read More“What I wanted this to be was a story of reconciliation, forgiveness, redemption. Now, it might not have been, because the reality might have been the opposite to that,” he says when we meet two days after the documentary premiered at the Venice Film Festival. There, on the Lido, the brothers Gallagher were all smiles. But last spring, and even as the tour got underway, that was far from a sure thing. “They might have fallen out. One of them might have flown home.”Lovelace, bunkered in a Portakabin outside the Mill for a month-and-a-half last May and June, can attest to that sense of incipient jeopardy.“Watching the rehearsals, we knew pretty early on that, musically, they’re on it. But you didn’t know how Liam and Noel’s relationship was going to go. You see it in the film. The first day, Liam walks in [late], drops his bag, and says: ‘Are we going to do this?’ They run through the set for two hours. Then as they play the instrumental outro to Champagne Supernova, he picks up his bag and leaves without saying a word. And we’re like, was that it?”It was it, and it was the same for the duration. “By the end of rehearsals, it was still in the balance,” says Southern. “Obviously they were never going to walk in, hug each other and sit down and talk about their emotions or apologise for anything they’d said in the past.“But eventually we realised: this really matters to them. Liam was hyper-focused. He was training the way that a boxer would train for a fight. He wasn’t drinking, wasn’t smoking, was going to bed early. It genuinely was that [feeling] that the eyes of the world were going to be on them, and they wanted this to be the best version of Oasis that people could see.” Noel, for his part, admits on camera to being “knocked back” by the “gravity” of the shows, being wholly unprepared for the “intense outpouring of joy and tears… and the sense of what it meant to people”. Noel Gallagher and Liam Gallagher attend the UK Premiere of 'Oasis: Don't Look Back In Anger' at Cineworld Leicester SquareGettyThat’s apparent at myriad emotive moments in the two-hour film, not least in the Poznań that so moved Matt Smith — when Liam, trying to recreate the terraces at Manchester City, instructs everyone to turn around, put their arms around each other and jump. “Even you in the cheap seats. Oh, there’s no cheap seats, sorry ’bout that,” he adds from the stage, referring sarkily and larkily to the now-forgotten furore about the prices of tickets.Equally funny: one of the few editing requests from the brothers, who had, in cinema terms, final cut on the film. “Mainly their notes were about the music and the [sound] mixes,” says Southern. “There were no ‘you can’t show that’. But hilariously, Liam had a couple of hat-based notes. He wore different hats in different geographical locations: the cork hat in Australia and a big sombrero in Mexico. These are the kind of notes that we love to get — ‘can you put those hats in?’” he says, laughing through the hangover he’s enduring in the aftermath of the film’s London premiere on Monday night.That star-studded screening was attended by a full complement of British-based Gallagher offspring — something else that was inconceivable before this tour. As is revealed in the film, Noel’s kids and Liam’s kids had barely met prior to Live ’25 “That’s extraordinary,” says Lovelace. “That shows how far apart they were throughout those 16 years. And there’s that lovely moment in the film when the kids are all singing along together.” (left to right) Lennon Gallagher, Donovan Gallagher, Anais Gallagher, Molly Gallagher, Sonny Gallagher and Gene GallagherPA WireThat rapprochement of the new-gen Gallaghers also helped catalyse the film-makers’ money shot: a sitdown with Liam and Noel in a north London pub two-thirds into the tour. “Once that happened,” says Knight, “the kids who’d [hardly] met becoming mates, becoming a gang, that was the home straight. Now [there’s the feeling of]: we’re a family again.” Then, with Lovelace and Southern editing their footage as they went along, their sense of “how the narrative was shaping” helped them giving talking points to Knight, who conducted the interview.“Noel and Liam wanted me to do that because they have a mistrust, I think, that a journalist will try and find something or trip them up. This was genuinely a conversation. You see immediately here are two people who are brothers, who are completely at ease with each other, who are having a laugh. They’re all funny as hell.”Little wonder, then, that everyone wants to get the show back on the road again, with rumours rampant of another set of shows in 2027. Knight will likely be wrapped up in all things 007 by next summer. But if the call came to film a record-breaking residency at Knebworth: are Southern and Lovelace up for that?“If it happens, yeah,” says Southern. “Who knows?” says Lovelace, professing lack of surety, although that’s surely the hangover talking.Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger is in cinemas now