Making a documentary film of a concert honoring the music used in another director’s film seems a bit Fellini. But at this point, D.A. Pennebaker, who directed the new Down from the Mountain (which opens at the Coolidge Corner this Friday) with collaborators Chris Hegedus and Nick Doob, isn’t ruffled by much.

" Making a film becomes like taking a leak, " he says. " You just get on with it. " If that’s so, Pennebaker has written his name in the snow a few times with surprising beauty. His résumé includes the still-striking classic concert/counterculture movies Monterey Pop (filmed at the historic 1967 rock festival), the essential Dylan chronicle Don’t Look Back, and Bowie: Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. And there are a few dozen other long and short films and music videos, many co-directed with Hegedus, whose subjects range from fallen money man John DeLorean to African-American dance trailblazer Katherine Dunham to Depeche Mode.

" The first couple of films I made had music in them, " Pennebaker explains. Indeed, Duke Ellington provided the director with the score for his first film, the 1953 short " Daybreak Express, " about New York City’s Third Avenue El train. " But I never set out to make films about music. Even now it’s not really about the music. Don’t Look Back took a lot of heat because there were no complete performances of songs in the film. To me, what it’s about is drawing you into these characters. "

Indeed, many of the characters in the sharply shot Down from the Mountain — most of whom contributed music to the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou — are extraordinary. There’s matriarch songbird Emmylou Harris, underground country sensation Gillian Welch, platinum bluegrass star Alison Krauss, stone gospel group the Fairfield Four, and the last original patron saint of old-time American mountain music, Ralph Stanley, whose age-chiseled face looks like something off the side of Mount Rushmore.

Pennebaker and company captured them all in rehearsals and then in a one-night concert at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, the original home of country music’s mecca, the Grand Ole Opry. The concert was a benefit for the new Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. The old-timy bluegrass soundtrack album for the Coens’ film — a resetting of Homer’s Odyssey in Depression-era Mississippi — has been the music biz’s surprise hit of the year, selling more than a million copies in a darkhorse genre where sales in the tens of thousands are usually considered a whopping success. So Down from the Mountain may also reach more than the roots-music converted.

" These movies are like your children, " Pennebaker says, turning to a comfortably worn metaphor. " You send them off into the world and think, ‘Well, good luck.’ They either make it or they don’t. And then it’s on to the next film. "

That would be Only the Strong Survive, a film Pennebaker and Hegedus are making about the Memphis soul artists of the ’50s and ’60s that Miramax will distribute. " I think it’s more about history than anything else, " he says of his movies. " You get into it and start to learn about these people and where they come from, and it’s pretty amazing stuff. "

Down from the Mountain begins a week-long run at the Coolidge Corner Theatre this Friday, August 17. Call (617) 734-2500.

Issue Date: August 16-23, 2001