U2's Sphere concert film is staggeringly lifelike. We talk to the Edge about its creation

LAS VEGAS – Only the Sphere could make it feel like U2 is in the building when they’re not.

The band opened the revolutionary venue in September 2023, playing 40 sold-out shows through March and establishing the colossal orb as a game-changer for live events.

Last month, the soaring beauty of the band’s U2:UV live production was unveiled as a cinematic experience, “V-U2,” an immersive concert film playing several times per week in rotation with the Darren Aronofsky film “Postcard from Earth” and current musical residents, the Eagles.

As video of the show unfurls inside the Sphere, the lifelike effect is stunning. Bono’s banter, the cheers from a crowd that is also represented on the “floor” of the venue, the rollout of “Zoo Station” and “Even Better Than the Real Thing” with the Edge’s razor riffs blasting with clarity – it all congeals into a feeling so visceral that you’re compelled to clap as if at a concert.

The 82-minute film is the first to be shot entirely with the ultra-high-resolution Big Sky camera system and is displayed on the world’s highest-resolution LED screen – 16k x 16k. As well, haptics are enhanced, such as seats vibrating from the thunderous intro to “Until the End of the World” and lights pulsing around the seats in unison with “Vertigo.”

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Tickets are pricey – from $99 to more than $200 – but Sphere brass view the cost as a worth it for the matchless experience.  

With so many pioneering elements, we talked with film co-directors – the Edge and his wife, Morleigh Steinberg – as well as Andrew Shulkind, director of photography on "V-U2" and Sphere’s head of capture who helped develop Big Sky, about the creation of the concert movie.

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How did U2 decide which songs to cut from the film?

While the live U2 show ran around two hours and spotlighted the entirety of the band’s 1991 album, “Achtung Baby,” the film is streamlined. Album cuts including “So Cruel,” “Wild Horses” and “Ultra Violet” were nixed, but mega hits “Where the Streets Have No Name” and “Mysterious Ways” remain.

The Edge, in an email interview with USA TODAY, said that “Bono was adamant about the need to balance spectacle and digital art with the simple communication between band and audience. It’s still four guys at the heart of this spectacular event and that fragility was a necessary counterbalance to the epic visuals.”

Edge and Steinberg worked to establish a “flow and rhythm” to the film, with Steinberg stressing the equal importance of the venue as the backdrop.

“I wanted people, if they didn’t know U2, to experience the Sphere and U2 in a very balanced way and I think we achieved that,” she said. “The first four songs are so spectacular and then we ease them into, OK, let’s make this a much more human experience, so we take them to the section where (songs) are pared down and they can experience the Sphere from the audio perspective.”

Which U2 shows were filmed for the concert movie?

Three shows – Feb. 23-24 and March 1 – were filmed in their entirety and the band was adamant that the shows be shown untouched, even if little flubs or close conversations between members onstage were part of the final cut.

Shulkind confirmed that even the crowds are “exactly what you would have heard on the day of the show. The band wanted the call and response moments, the little glances they give to each other, all of those things to be in there.”

The awe-inspiring visuals that U2 helped create for the show – the Elvis homage that gives the room a feeling of movement in “Even Better Than the Real Thing,” the dynamic panorama of the Las Vegas Strip reduced to dust during “Atomic City” – are intact.

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What is different about the U2 film from the live show?

The version of “One” in “V-U2” begins with a behind-the-stage shot in a reverse angle, which the Edge said was done “to support Bono’s onstage storytelling” and to best capture the scene when he asked the crowd to “show us your light” using their phones.

But the camera shifts to an immense close-up of Bono that is so clear you can practically see his tonsils.

Shulkind says that video actually came from rehearsal, with Bono suggesting the tight framing that slowly pulls out to a wide shot. It’s “the biggest close-up in history,” according to Shulkind, and a moving moment for Steinberg as well.

“When the camera starts pulling back and it starts to reveal the band, you’re back to that moment of, now I know I’m in my seat again,” she said.

Would U2 do another Sphere residency?

Given the immense success of U2:UV, which created the blueprint for the bands that have followed – Phish, Dead & Co. and the Eagles – an encore would certainly be welcomed by fans.

The Edge said he’s “intrigued” by the idea of another Sphere production, but acknowledges it’s “not a small undertaking.”

“If we do something else for the Sphere, it will have to go further in bringing this technology to life,” he said. “Digital rendering is about to undergo a revolution courtesy of AI. If ‘image creation’ for the Sphere screen can be made less expensive and less time consuming, it opens the Sphere up to all kinds of new creative applications. And that’s a very enticing proposition.”

While the Edge says he and the band wouldn’t do anything differently about the show in hindsight, he knows they could be more “efficient” in the future.

“We now know what works and what doesn’t.”