‘Would they fight or hug?’ The Oasis comeback film’s makers on shooting fans, vicars, police – and the Gallaghers

On 4 July last year, Oasis were all set to start the first gig of their hugely anticipated comeback, 16 years since the band imploded after Liam Gallagher swung a guitar in the direction of brother Noel’s head backstage in Paris. However, just 20 minutes before showtime, there was no sign of the singer. Some 74,500 fans in Cardiff’s Principality Stadium were going crazy, while Noel was left impatiently pacing around the venue’s loading bay, presumably wondering if everything was about to fall apart again.

“Then the monitor I was watching all this on suddenly cut out,” says Will Lovelace, the director who was filming the comeback. “When it came back to life, suddenly Liam and Noel were there chatting. Then they walked out to this eruption.” Later, Noel is filmed expressing incredulity that his long-estranged younger sibling could “skip the final rehearsal, then just rock up, grab my hand, and I’m like, ‘What the fuck?’ And off he goes, sounding like he’s 30 years younger. And I’m like, ‘You absolute mad cunt.’”

The Cardiff entrance is one of the more dramatic scenes in Lovelace and co-director Dylan Southern’s film Oasis: Don’t Look Back In Anger, which briefly dwells on how the fractious working-class Manchester tearaways became the biggest rock band in the world in the 1990s before concentrating on how, 30 years later, they did it all again.

The Oasis Live 25 tour consisted of 41 concerts across 14 countries and five continents, playing to more than two million people. Don’t Look Back In Anger captures the supersized raw power of those gigs but also packs an unexpectedly emotional wallop, showing how a bitter, long-fractured relationship between two feuding brothers was healed by the power of their own music – not just over themselves but over those millions of fans.

‘It seemed bigger than Oasis, something a lot of people needed’ … rapturous fans at one gig. Photograph: Courtesy of Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger

The cameras capture Noel’s stunned admission that he “wasn’t prepared for the intense outpouring, a sense of what it meant to people”. Lovelace insists it was the same for the directors. “We arrived in Cardiff unprepared for this tidal wave of emotion. It seemed bigger than Oasis, something a lot of people needed. I don’t think we understood the magnitude of it. I was overwhelmed.”

Southern and Lovelace’s previous music films include the New York indie scene rockumentary Meet Me in the Bathroom (2022) and LCD Soundsystem’s live farewell, Shut Up and Play the Hits (2012). Southern says it “never came up” that the pair also made No Distance Left to Run, the 2010 documentary about Oasis’s avowed rivals, Blur.

The directors have their own history with the Manchester band – as fans. Lovelace remembers, as a teenager growing up in the Fens, East Anglia, listening to Definitely Maybe on a Walkman and thinking: “This is the first music that feels like my own.” Southern saw them in 1994 at the 200-capacity Hull Adelphi, when the working-class northerners “felt like our band”. When tickets went on sale for Oasis Live 25, Lovelace was “in a car on my phone failing to get a ticket” while Southern “eventually gave up”.

They were later approached about “a big project”, but weren’t told what it was and were sworn to secrecy. Then they were put together with Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, as scriptwriter, and the project got under way. “Filming rehearsals in London took a lot of negotiating because they’ve never allowed that,” says Lovelace. “It was never going to work if we just went in there with our cameras,” adds Southern. “We had to come up with a way to be invisible.”

So they hid cameras in all the sound kit. “We had a grotty Portakabin outside in a heatwave so we could monitor everything,” says Southern. “It was completely unglamorous,” grins Lovelace. “But for six weeks, Oasis didn’t see us or our crew.”

The band reacquainted themselves with songs they hadn’t played for years, at this point with Noel singing, while the directors trained a camera on the door to catch Liam’s grand arrival. They waited and waited.

‘I wanted to be in there among the crowd’ … Dylan Southern, right, with Will Lovelace and at the UK premiere. Photograph: Jeff Spicer/Getty Images for The Walt Disney Company Limited

“Nobody knew exactly when he was coming,” says Southern. “There was a palpable tension. We knew we had these historically volatile characters, so you ask yourself, ‘Are they going to fight – or hug each other? And of course they do neither. They have a job to do. Apart from a very brief photoshoot, they hadn’t been in a room together for 16 years. Then Liam walks in, drops his bag and goes, ‘Are we ready then?’ Two hours later, while they’re playing the outro to Champagne Supernova, he picks up his bag and leaves. He did that every single day. And then suddenly they were playing the gigs – and the tension started melting. You could see Noel and Liam getting closer every night.”

Thirteen gigs were filmed, but the directors wanted more than a concert film so they recruited people with what Southern calls “a unique eye. We employed cinematographers to hold every camera, rather than someone who filmed Stereophonics last week.”

This meant the likes of Haris Zambarloukos (Belfast, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice), Lol Crawley (who won an Oscar for The Brutalist) and Moonlight Oscar-nominee James Laxton. Southern had observed that classic rockumentary films such as Monterey Pop and Gimme Shelter were made by “the greats of the period”. He even held a camera himself. “I wanted to be in there among the crowd,” he explains.

‘I’d forgotten how funny Liam was’ … the brothers backstage in Don’t Look Back in Anger. Photograph: Simon Emmett

The film includes unusually personal footage of fans of all ages. A South Korean free diver explains how the band’s lyrics helped her through depression; a teenager in floods of tears is comforted by a stranger; a guy sitting cross-legged on the floor prays while singing along to Slide Away; a young woman who survived the 2017 Manchester Arena bomb but was left with “survivor’s guilt” realises the meaning of it all is “to not look back in anger”. Southern sums it up: “The effect the music has on people is like magic. In the film, Liam says, ‘It’s like it comes from somewhere else.’”

The narrative was further helped by a series of “unexpected gifts”, as Southern calls them. “Before we filmed, we went to Burnage [where the Gallaghers grew up] and took everything in. We went in St Bernard’s Church, opposite their old primary school, and asked Father Luke if we could film. We had no idea that, on the only day we could shoot, he would read the passage from the Bible where St Peter asks Jesus, ‘How many times must I forgive my brother who sinned against me?’ And he is told, ‘Not seven times but 77 times.’ Then he built his whole sermon that morning around Noel and Liam.”

Another gift was unearthing archive footage of Noel revealing he has a “character flaw that means I can never forgive … anyone, ever”. This is then gradually demolished over the film. There’s also a comical police sergeant at one gig whose team briefing is formed from Oasis song titles. “We’re just going to have to Roll With It,” he says. “It’s The Masterplan.”

A sadder moment arrives in Sao Paulo, as the band hear that Stone Roses bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield has died aged 63. We see the musicians in shock, Liam dedicating Live Forever to “our dear friend, our hero”, and a visibly shaken Noel playing the guitar solo while staring up at Mounfield’s face on a screen above the stage. “There are probably versions of Live Forever that were technically better,” says Southern, “but that had to be in.”

With as many as 20 cameras on the go at once, the directors ended up with “hundreds and hundreds of hours” of footage. Among the more painful editing decisions was having to omit a three-minute close-up of a teenage girl in tears to Talk Tonight, because it just didn’t fit anywhere. And, while the film is low on gossip and revelations, there is power in what remains unsaid.

‘Caught beneath the landslide’ …Noel on stage. Photograph: Courtesy of Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger

“The reconciliation didn’t happen in rehearsals,” says Southern. “It started happening on stage and continued happening.” Lovelace adds: “They’re healing this enormous chasm not in private, but in public. And things were forgiven without saying a word. Maybe that’s part of what people are responding to.” Mostly, the Gallaghers are interviewed separately, but by the end they’re giving their first joint interview two decades – as reflective older men, praising each other’s contributions, laughing at each other’s humour and the “madhouse” of Oasis.

“We are in contact way more than we ever were before,” says Noel. “I’d forgotten how funny Liam was. All the little things that used to annoy us about each other have gone away.”