Christina Aguilera and Mick Jagger performing live in Shine A Light Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

Shine A Light finds fertile ground in its combination of Scorsese's legendary precision with the Stones' spur-of-the-moment approach to their craft. The film's first few minutes depict preparations for the concert and shoot in cinéma vérité-style, with Scorsese agonizing over the absence of a final set list in the days leading up to the show. Scorsese reflects: "The idea is to capture something of the spontaneity of the group, and the word capture means to control. But you can't control the spontaneity. Therefore the camera's gotta be in the right position." With an all-star camera department headed by Academy Award-winning DP Robert Richardson, Scorsese was able to ensure that at least one of the 16 cameras was in the right place throughout to record the nuances of the performance — Jagger's dashes up the thrust stage into the audience, the fretboards of the vintage guitars, Richards insouciantly spitting out a cigarette end in a spray of ash and smoke. With such comprehensive coverage, editor Tedeschi was able to cut rhythmic, dazzling sequences that amplify the energy onstage.

That the film was recorded in such an intimate setting makes for an onscreen experience that has more immediacy than most live concerts. Scorsese insisted on the smaller venue, perhaps because of his own memories of concert experiences: "The first time I saw the Stones was at Madison Square Garden — or at least a semblance of them because I was up so high in the bad seats — I was creating scenarios in my head as I listened to their music." In planning Shine A Light, the director was able to convince the band: "We discussed doing it in a bigger arena, and looked into that, and actually while I was doing it, I began to realize — I think I'm better suited to try to capture the group on a smaller stage. More for the intimacy of the group, and the way they play together, the way you see the band work together, and work each song."

In the size of the venue the film departs from concert films like Woodstock, on which Scorsese was an editor, and the Maysles Brothers' Gimme Shelter, which captured the murder of an audience member by Hells Angels during the disastrous Stones show at Altamont in 1969. The debauched, insensate violence at that massive free concert signaled for many the end of 1960s idealism. Scorsese acknowledges the influence of these films; indeed Albert Maysles was on the camera crew of Shine A Light, and the final shot of the film is both an homage to Maysles' groundbreaking tracking shot in 1960's Primary and an echo of Scorsese's own masterful following shot of Ray Liotta's backdoor entrance to the Copacabana in Goodfellas. Scorsese reflects, "Al Maysles is the line of continuity to a number of wonderful films made with the Rolling Stones, going back of course to Gimme Shelter, Hal Ashby's Let's Spend the Night Together, (Robert Frank's) Cocksucker Blues and the Godard film (Sympathy for the Devil/One Plus One) where you actually see the song 'Sympathy for the Devil' come together in the recording studio, which was fascinating. So this is a direct reference to the past films."

The Rolling Stones in concert Photo © Ethan Russell. Click here to read PopPhoto's exclusive interview with Russell about his work photographing the Stones on their 1968 tour.

In a way, the film is also a return to Scorsese's own past. His bravura shoot of The Band's The Last Waltz in 1978 set the pace for the whole genre. And the director has long been acclaimed for his innovative use of music, which was inspired both by his lifelong fascination with opera and musicals and by legendary independent director Kenneth Anger, whose musical sensibility Scorsese has analyzed in depth in the liner notes of the DVD collection The Films of Kenneth Anger. He writes: "I was entranced by Scorpio Rising when I saw it for the first time, and it's had a powerful effect on me and my own films over the years. The way Anger used music in that film, in such perfectly magical harmony with the images, opened my thinking about the role music could play in movies. It could become as important to the characters and the world of the film as it was to all of us at the time. The extraordinary link between movement and music that Anger found in Scorpio Rising, and then in Invocation of My Demon Brother and its wild atonal drone (composed by Mick Jagger), allowed me, and all of us, to see and feel the devotional, ritualistic side of listening to music."