Recounting the Crows
Director Amy Scott on Her New HBO Music Box Documentary
Recounting the Crows: Director Amy Scott on Her New HBO Music Box Documentary
Director Amy Scott has wise words for folks looking to make documentaries about well-known subjects.
“You should not make a film about somebody that you are obsessed with or that you know their entire back catalog. You're not going to make an objective piece,” says Scott, commenting on her approach to making Music Box: Counting Crows: Have You Seen Me Lately?, which was released on HBO Max on December 18, 2025. “You have to step back, analyze things and look at stories.”
Scott, who hails from Lawton but now calls L.A. home, premiered the documentary at the Tribeca Festival in New York in June 2025, before landing at deadCenter Film Festival in downtown Oklahoma City June 11-15, where Scott was also named a 2025 deadCenter Oklahoma Film ICON Award winner. Largely, the documentary explores Counting Crows’ rise to stardom after their first album August and Everything After, and frontman Adam Duritz’s challenging relationship with fame and his own mental health struggles.
“There's sort of a rambling intimacy to Adam, where you feel like you're listening, you're watching somebody work something out,” says music historian Rob Harvilla in the documentary. “And there's like a journaling, [...] inner turmoil, therapeutic, sort of feeling you know that you can get from him and that you can share with him.”
In a similar vein, the film also takes a therapeutic approach, telling the band’s story through intimate interviews with Duritz and current bandmates David Bryson, Charlie Gillingham, Dan Vickrey, and David Immerglück, as well as former bandmate Matt Malley. A host of other notable creatives, including musicians Cyndi Lauper and Chris Martin of Coldplay, actress Mary-Louise Parker, and comedian Jeff Ross, add additional color.
Rounding out the film are plenty of archival film, photos and negatives, journal entries, and recreations shot on VHS. Duritz is at the heart of the story, which has presented challenges for the film’s team after picture lock.
“[Adam] has a complicated relationship with the movie, because he was really vulnerable with us,” says Scott. “I think it's hard for someone that's sensitive to look at yourself in a film made about you. I think it's got to be extremely challenging.”
But it’s Scott’s job to get to those often-uncomfortably vulnerable moments to share the truth about her subject’s story. Explaining her process, she notes it takes time for emotional walls to come down during interviews.
“It's like the first wall that you have to break through, trying to get a human, unscripted answer, something that hasn't been workshopped and repeated,” says Scott. “Probably we do it when we tell stories of our own lives, but it's a real thing, especially for media-trained celebrities, you have to be like, 'what really happened?’”
For Counting Crows: Have You Seen Me Lately? Scott succeeds in helping audiences (longtime fans or not) actually see Duritz and the impact Counting Crows has had not just on the lives of listeners, but also on its members – especially Duritz.
After this documentary, Scott is working on two more music documentaries with many other projects in the works; her skill of getting to the heart of “what really happened” keeps her busy documenting the lives of “underdogs, weirdos, [and] outsiders” for years to come.
Music Box: Counting Crows: Have You Seen Me Lately? is now streaming on HBO Max. To keep up with Amy Scott’s projects, follow her on Instagram at @amyelizscott. You can follow Counting Crows on Instagram at @countingcrows or at countingcrows.com.
