mick jagger

“Everyone’s vain,” he continues. “It just depends on how vain you are on the day. Everyone’s vain when they have their photo taken.” He is right: everyone is vain. Everyone wants to look good in a picture. Few, though, can muster Jagger’s steely commitment to achieving that end. More, perhaps, than any other rock star of his generation, Jagger has made it his business to understand and control the mechanics of his own stardom. He manifests no tempery neurosis; he pulls no celebrity sulks. He just insists, calmly, on getting things done as he wants them. “I think of him as coming from the English tradition of the actor-manager,” says Lorne Michaels, the executive producer of “Saturday Night Live.” “If you watch him get ready to put on a show, you’ll see that there is nothing that he is not aware of, that he is not intimately involved with, from lighting and design to how the curtain is going to hit the floor. There are very few people whose production skills impress me, but he’s one of them. He’s as good a showman and a producer as there is.”

“I got a powerful sense of his mastery of every detail of every aspect of the production,” says Martin Scorsese, who collaborated with Jagger on the Stones concert documentary “Shine a Light.” “And by that, I don’t just mean the music; he also has a sharp sense of cinema.” (As the documentary attests, Jagger even gave Scorsese his thoughts on where to place the cameras.) “You can delegate things to other people,” Jagger observes, “and you have to, to a certain extent, but if you’re not behind it and getting your knowledge and input into it, it’s not going to turn out as interestingly and probably it won’t be what you would like. It’ll be disappointing.”

via The New York Times.