director's cut
by michelle golden

09.05 - 10.05




remember videos? those little movie-like things that used to air on mtv wedged in between episodes of remote control and house of style?

palm pictures is reliving the old glory days of the video age with its latest director’s label dvd series. in 2003 they launched the line with a three-part set featuring the works of spoke jonze, michel gondry, and chris cunningham. come september they’ll release the latest serues, this time with mark romanek, anton corbijn, jonathan glazer, and stephane sednaoui.

if the names sound familiar, they should. corbijn is the dutchman revered for his moody black-and-white work with depeche mode, new order and joy division (their influence on him so profound he is currently working on control, a biopic of ian curtis), mark romanek’s name us attached to dozens of blockbuster clips starring the likes of lenny kravitz and no doubt, which were slick and smart and catchy, even when the music wasn’t. glazer authored a handful of enigmatic videos for radiohead and blur and then charged into the film business with sexy beast. sednaoui, also a photographer, is best known for playful , kinetic videos like the red hot chili peppers “give it away now” and has also collaborated with bjork and madonna.

if the dvd tends towards hyperbole with commentaries punctuated by unintentionally funny, grandiose observations by bono), the directors themselves were more modest when discussing their own video work. as he slouched in his blue pleather chair, the nearly 7-foot tall corbijn put it best: “how often can you get excited about yourself, really? maybe once a week at most.” perhaps he just didn’t want to take about that roxette video lurking in his past.

mark romanek

mean: your videos often reference other visual artists like joel-peter witkins for nine inch nails’ “closer,” or nan goldin for fiona apple’s “criminal.” is researching photography part of your videomaking process?

mr: in the past i used to recontextualize a lot of stuff because as a young filmmaker you try on different things to see what suits you. lately, i’ve been trying not to do that. with the jay-z video for “99 problems” jay just said, “i just want to do something about where i grew up, but don’t want it to look like other rap videos. i just want it to look like art.”

i didn’t know what that meant, but immediately, that whole new york school of photojournalism came to mind. we decided to make it like a photo essay on brooklyn. i just thought, let’s try to get some transgressive imagery in there…

mean: and vincent gallo.

mr: he’s transgressive! [laughs] he came by looking to hang out and i thought, let’s just shoot him. and we cut him in and it seemed kind of cool even though i didn’t know what it meant.

mean: what else have you done since jay-z?

mr: i did the coldplay video for “speed of sound”, but i don’t do videos very often. i’m concentrating mostly on making and developing feature films.

mean: how did you hook up with sonic youth [for “little trouble girl”]?

mr: i was doing big-budget videos for artists like madonna and janet jackson, and even though those are very good jobs, that wasn’t the music i was listening to. so i reached out to sonic youth and said, “i just shot this $7 million michael jackson video, now i want to show that i can do a $75,000 sonic youth video too.”

mean: what are the more outrageous effects you’ve staged in your videos?

mr: i would say the whole audioslave video was an outrageous stunt. i got this idea that, wouldn’t it be cool if this band were playing in fron of the climax of a huge fireworks display for the whole four minutes? easy to say, but the logistics of doing that were pretty grueling.

we had all sorts of problems. we did a test of the show the day before to see what it looked like, but it didn’t occur to us how loud it would be – that it would sound like wwiii. they got 500 calls of complaints to local police stations and there was a news article with a headline like “video shoot enrages community”.

mean: is there anything you’ve wanted to do visually that you’ve never been able to do?

mr: i wanted to do a video for johnny cash for the song “delia’s gone,’ which actually anton ended up doing. my idea was to use the turn-of-the-century crime photographs – bird’s-eye-view cameras – which actually ended up getting used extensively in the film road to perdition. i was really upset when i didn’t get to do it. that was the biggest regret i ever had about not getting a job.

mean: speaking of regret, when you’ve been going back through your videos for the dvd, do you see anything that makes you cringe?

mr: oh yeah, most of it. i put en vogue’s “free your mind” in there just because several people told me to, but to me, it just seemed so dated.

mean: what about video clichés from the 80s, like breaking glass.

mr: oh yeah, i’ve done that. for de la soul.

mean: what about today’s cliché’s?

mr: well, “montage” is the biggest cliché. and using the medium as a dating service for the band by casting lots of women in them.

visit the official directors label website


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