Evolving from best-selling book to live tribute show to documentary, Beastie Boys Story (available to stream at Apple TV+) allows group members Mike Diamond, a.k.a. "Mike D," and Adam Horovitz, a.k.a. "Ad-Rock," to personally tell the viewer the story of their band and their 40 years of friendship. Directed by longtime collaborator Spike Jonze, the story highlights their ups and downs and everything in between, including the passing of founder Adam Yauch, a.k.a. "MCA,"  who is also heard from in his own words through archive footage.

During a virtual press day for the film, Collider participated in a roundtable interview to chat with Diamond, Horovitz, and Jonze about how this project evolved, finding the best way to tell their story, how they approached collaborating together, editing this documentary down from a show that was almost twice as long, the ability to have Yauch speak for himself in the film, and the strangest place they’ve ever heard a Beastie Boys song.

How did you come up with the idea for the book and the show, which then lead to this documentary?

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Image via Apple TV+

HOROVITZ: Michael Diamond and myself wrote a book [2018's Beastie Boys Book]. It’s a good book. You get a lot of pages for the money. There are a lot of illustrations. It’s for children and grown-ups. So, we wrote this book and decided that, instead of promoting it, we were gonna put on a show. We wrote this show and told some stories and did some skits but we forgot to film it. So, we asked Spike to help us film it and direct it, and he made us rewrite it with him. Then, we filmed it and he fucking turned it into a documentary.

JONZE: Adam, were you mad that I made you rewrite it?

HOROVITZ: Yeah.

JONZE: Adam doesn’t like to work that much and that was like a lot of work.

HOROVITZ: It was a lot of work.

DIAMOND: Spike and I didn’t mind it as much as Adam did.

JONZE: But Adam showed up on time or early, every time.

DIAMOND: Spike’s nickname on the set was "The Taskmaster." He started a new app, called The Taskmaster after that.

How hard was it for you guys and Spike Jonze to find new ways to tell your story, in this documentary?

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Image via Apple TV+

DIAMOND: It evolved over time. First off, when Adam and I were spending a lot of time working on the book, I read a lot of music books and it seemed like they pretty much have this very similar formula of “I was walking down the street, one day, and I met this kid, and then this happened and that happened. Oh my god, everything was great. But now, we hate each other and fuck those guys.” So, with the book, we didn’t want to do something that everybody else had done. With [Adam] Yauch, and as a band, what we’ve always done is try to do something different. So then, when it came down to having the show, at first we were like, “Are we gonna go do readings from our book at bookstores, which is a normal thing?” But we wanted to do something that was different. Then we were talking with Spike about and we were like, “All right, let’s put together a show that works in two hours and has a little bit of a story.”

When you guys were talking about this, what was the process for figuring out how you wanted to collaborate together on this?

HOROVITZ: Our conversations are a lot like this one that we’re having right now, so it takes a long time to get anything done.

JONZE: Yeah, that’s true. We’re very meandering and somewhat random in our conversations.

HOROVITZ: Anytime we meet to work on something, we bullshit for a long time and then we order food and we’re too tired to do anything.

DIAMOND: Next time we get together, we’ll have some coffee and knock it out of the park.

Was there anything that you wanted to include in the film, but had you leave out, for whatever reason?

HOROVITZ: The show that we did that, the one Spike filmed and documented, was between three and four hours long. It was long, so things had to be edited out. Even in the original script that me and Mike and Spike wrote, there were some changes. Spike is the filmmaker. He wanted to change things up.

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Image via Apple TV+

JONZE: The play was three and a half hours long, but as we were writing it and putting it together, we put it together without really having enough time to rehearse it. So, the first show that we had in Philadelphia was really our second time running through the whole thing. We knew it was gonna be a little long and sloppy and messy, and that was gonna be part of the fun live. Then we thought we’d do the show differently, every night, because Adam and Mike are consummate professionals and would just give me magic, every night to work with, so every night was different and we just let it be different, knowing that we could just take the best stuff and cut it down. There’s a lot of stuff we cut out that was great. We did this incredible opening sequence where Adam tells a story about Yauch pulling this prank on him that took 15 years. It was a great example of Yauch’s dedication to an idea, that he set the prank up 15 years earlier, and it was this elaborate thing that we did. But when it came down to editing, we realized that we needed the best version of everything and it evolved from there.

HOROVITZ: Spike, are Mike and I the worst actors you’ve ever worked with, or are we just on the list of the worst?

JONZE: Actually, Adam, I think you’re a natural storyteller. Therefore, your style lends itself to the storytelling thing that we were doing. Mike’s natural style is more like a boat without an anchor, or a plane without wings. It’s a little more abstract. Just when you think Mike’s story should go left, it goes golden purple. Mike’s acting style is its own amorphous gas. It’s a gaseous form of acting.

How much do you feel being from New York was intertwined with who you were as a band?

HOROVITZ: We had wanted to write a book and make a documentary awhile ago, documenting our band, just because there are books about our band and it’s our story, so we wanted to tell our story. Part of it is we actually really love where we came from and love where we grew up in New York, and we are a part of that lineage, so we wanted to put ourselves in that New York.

DIAMOND: We could only be who we are by coming from that [version of] New York and all that was happening. It wasn’t about popularity — or, at least, I don’t link it to popularity. In terms of inspiration and just giving us the idea, we felt like we could make stuff because the culture that we were in in New York City. Everybody was making stuff and creating things, whether it was a fanzine or a poetry magazine or a new 12-inch you heard someplace, or whatever it was. That was just what you do.

One big difference between the live show, the documentary, and the book is your ability to have Adam Yauch speaking for himself, with old interview footage. What was your process for picking the moments and the times that you’d have him do that?

HOROVITZ: When we were writing the book, we were trying to figure out how Yauch could be in there. We didn’t wanna just use quotes because, for some reason, reading quotes just seemed weird. There’s something very different about actually seeing somebody talking.

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Image via Apple TV+

JONZE: Actually, our editors, Jeff [Buchanan] and Zoe [Schack], went through hundreds and hundreds of hours of footage. As we were editing, we just kept getting more and more footage. We got all of these raw, unedited tapes from MTV, of 20 years of Beastie Boys archive stuff. Most of the interviews were of the three of them together. A lot of times, it’s hard to get a straight answer from them. I find them very, very difficult. There was only one or two interviews where it was them separate, and it was very exciting when we found that footage because didn’t know it existed. And then, even before we got that footage, Mike and Adam and I talked about how we wanted Yauch to be on stage and we wanted you to feel him on stage, in the storytelling, and in the photos and videos.

The show is often very funny and almost plays like stand-up, but then it shifts in emotion when you talk about the loss of Adam Yauch and leaving Kate Schellenbach behind. How did you balance those tonal shifts?

HOROVITZ: We just went from the beginning to the end. The book was easier, just ‘cause if it made more sense to write from the beginning to the end. But the show picked what the good parts are, or the more cinematic parts. Really, there are certain details about our band that are important for us. If we’re telling our story, it’s important for us to go back and talk about those things and mention then. Talking about Kate Schellenbach was very important to us, and just different details of our band. If we’re gonna tell the story, you’ve gotta tell the story.

What is the strangest, funniest or most surprising place that you’ve ever heard a Beastie Boys song, which song was it, and what was that experience like?

DIAMOND: One time, when my kids were really little, I was in the pediatrician’s office and one of our instrumental songs came on. I felt that was very unlikely. I never really pictured myself being in a pediatrician’s office with one of my kids in the first place. But then, to be there, I never figured I’d hear one of our own songs, in that setting. It was inoffensive ‘cause it was an instrumental song, but it was a curious choice.

Beastie Boys Story is available to stream at Apple TV+.