For Bono, music has always been an immersive art form. “When I was a teenager and stereo came, it was everything,” the rock legend tells Billboard. “U2 immersed ourselves in our audience — I jumped into the audience, and then our shows were always immersive in their instincts.”
So when he got an early look at the Apple Vision Pro, the mixed-reality headset that the company launched in the U.S. last year, Bono says that he “was honored to be a lab rat in in their unusual mix of art and science.” On Friday (May 30), Bono: Stories of Surrender, a new documentary that captures and expands upon his recent one-man stage show, will be released on Apple TV+ as both a standard 2D film and as an immersive experience on the Vision Pro — the first feature-length project to be released in the format.
U2 has a long history of partnering with Apple, and Bono says that he was happy to be the one to break new ground for the company. “A lot of companies, when they get to that scale, they stop innovating,” he says. “And here they are again, ready to do it.
“And for the first time, I got to see myself onstage, and realized, ‘What a big arse!’” Bono adds with a laugh. “That has gotta go! And by the way, are those nose hairs? I’m like, ‘Wow!’”
Indeed, Stories of Surrender offers plenty of extreme close-ups of the rock star, as the documentary (directed by Andrew Dominik) adds new dimension to a 2023 performance of Stories of Surrender: An Evening of Words, Music and Some Mischief… The stage show itself was an extension of Bono’s 2022 memoir Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, and mixed monologues detailing his upbringing, sparse visual props and stripped-down arrangements of some of U2’s biggest hits, all in a theater setting (the doc was filmed at the Beacon Theatre in New York City).
“I ended up in the stage play because I didn’t want to do a promotion tour for the book,” Bono notes, “and I thought I’d do something a bit more challenging and a bit more fun — for me, selfishly speaking, and perhaps for the audience.”
The 86-minute documentary flies by with heartfelt anecdotes about Bono’s relationship with his father, the earliest days of U2, run-ins with global celebrities and his legacy as an artist. Although the tasteful presentations of U2 songs like “Beautiful Day,” “Pride (In the Name of Love)” and “Vertigo” — by a trio of backing musicians, led by veteran producer Jacknife Lee — earn deservedly rousing reactions from the audience in the doc, Bono’s stories also received a reaction that startled him when the stage show launched.
“I went out onstage, and something happened to me that had never happened to me before onstage with U2, at least not in more than 30-seconds intervals: People started laughing!” Bono says. “And I started to [think], ‘Oh, is this funny? Wow, I like the sound of this.’
“And so I had the songs, and I’d found a different way of getting inside the songs to tell the story, and now I could be as silly and as serious as I wanted to be, and indeed, as I am,” he continues. “There’s a reason tragic comedy was a favorite of Shakespeare’s. People’s tears mean more after they’ve been laughing, or the other way around. And all our lives are these absurdities, aren’t they?”
Now that this extended look back — first with the memoir, then with the stage show, and now with the documentary — is wrapping up, Bono says that each project has made him feel closer to his father, Bob, who passed away in 2001. In the doc, Bono re-creates multiple conversations with his dad across time — playing both roles by turning his head from side to side, finding humor and heartache as the camera cuts between the sides of the discussion.
“It is a little opera that I was making, about … my father, and how his son had to go through various different stages before he’d fully appreciate his father,” says Bono. “And one of those stages was playing him onstage, with the turn of my head every night, and realizing that my father was funny. And not just that I loved him, but I started to like him, just by playing him.”
