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“American Valhalla” explores the personalities, anxieties and music of Iggy Pop and Josh Homme

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More2Screen/Eagle Rock FilmsAmerican Valhalla, the documentary about Iggy Pop‘s collaborative album with Queens of the Stone Age‘s Josh Homme, Post Pop Depression, will be screened in U.S. theaters today. As director Andreas Neumann explains, the film was made in the same manner as the album: with no concrete idea how it would wind up.

“The album was made in secret and without any pressure, really, and if it [hadn’t] turned out the way they wanted it to turn out, they would’ve just buried it the sand, as Josh says,” Neumann tells ABC Radio. “I guess we took the same approach with the film, as well.”

Neumann co-directed American Valhalla with Homme, a first-time filmmaker.

“[Homme] always had a clear vision of what he wanted to do,” says Neumann. “And I [would] take that and make it translate into reality, basically.”

American Valhalla shows contrasting personalities of Pop and Homme, exemplified in a scene where Homme is shown wracked with anxiety and sleeplessness over coming up with music, and then Iggy is shown practicing tai chi in his Miami backyard…shirtless, of course.

“Josh’s creative fountain kind of can’t sleep and [is] nervous, and Iggy is already wise,” says Neumann. “[He] does his tai chi…and thinks how he can crawl under Josh’s skin and get him to make this album…with him.”

The movie also tackles Pop’s own anxieties, which he expresses through the metaphor of the “American Valhalla,” which is also the name of a song off of Post Pop Depression.  In Norse mythology, Valhalla is where Vikings who die in battle go in the afterlife.

“It doesn’t actually come from the song. It’s more like when [Iggy] talks about it,” Neumann says. “It’s kind of ‘Where do you go when you don’t work anymore in America?'”

For screening info, visit AmericanVallahaMovie.com.

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