Questlove on Parsing 50 Years of Music for His ‘S.N.L.’ Documentary

Did anything come out of nowhere and surprise you?

The Fear story was one that I wanted to know about forever. When I first got to 30 Rock in 2009 [when the Roots became the house band of “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon”], I purposely waited six months to figure out how I was going to infiltrate the “S.N.L.” ecosystem. Who am I going to be friends with so I can see how it works? And one of the first people that took to me was Hal Willner [the longtime “S.N.L.” sketch music coordinator], I couldn’t have chosen more wisely and all the stories he shared with me about Fear, Miles Davis, Captain Beefheart — before I was even a filmmaker, everything that he told me in the hallways of 30 Rock all those years, I definitely wanted to explore all those things.

Getting inside the Fear story, probably the most interesting was Eddie Murphy’s take. I wasn’t even going to ask him about Fear. We were going to wrap, and I was like, “Wait, were you there for that Fear performance?” He’s like, “Hell, yeah, I was there — I was onstage with them!” and with a fine-toothed comb, we found him.

You unspool the show’s hip-hop history backwards, back to the Funky 4 + 1 in 1980.

I knew that “S.N.L.” was the first vehicle that showed what rap music was — the very first rap act on television was the Funky 4 + 1, five months before Kurtis Blow comes on “Soul Train.” Now, hip-hop’s a part of us, whether we admit it or not, be it our sneaker choices, wearing T-shirts to a meeting, certain slang. There’s no denying hip-hop’s effect on our everyday fiber. I wanted to figure out a way to tell that story without just starting with, “The very first time that America heard or saw hip-hop was on this show.” Telling it backwards was a way to creatively add a layer, and there was so much history to pack in.

We have to talk about the film’s cold open — a high-speed, six-minute D.J. mix of “S.N.L.” music highlights.

It’s impossible for me to phone anything in, even if I wanted to. I just wanted to throw the ultimate D.J. gig and hook you in from the gate. It started off small, and it couldn’t stop.

In the beginning, I was just going in five-year intervals — what’s the three strongest moments between ’75 and ’80? — and do it that way. But I’m so programmed as a D.J. it’s physically impossible for me to gather a group of songs together and not start — that’s my version of improvisation. And once you put, like, 17 songs together, you have a conversation with yourself: “OK, are we really doing this?”