Voice over: Now on location for his latest Hollywood movie, Lasse Hallstrom's career was given a boost when he was chosen to direct.

Lasse: ABBA The Movie started out as me being hired making a documentary on their tour, and that's how it expanded. We had all this money and we got all the technical toys we could imagine. Looking back on it, it was really like film school to me; to play around with all the equipment we had. We did this strange documentary feature. I had this thin storyline that we invented on the plane going down their (laughs), and we kept rewriting it and readjusting it as we went along. I wanted acess to them all the time. I wanted to be in their faces as they were, you know, waking up, going to bed...A couple of doors were shut in front of us so... (laughs)

Voice over: The group resolved to take the whole of 1978 off from touring, but they had always recognized the need to keep up their public profile and pioneered the use of pop videos.

Lasse: They were the first ot actually do this, to hire someone to direct a video, you know, and because they didn't really wanna travel, didn't wanna do concerts, so videos was sort of their way of showing the world their music.



Thanks to Sarah!