(33.594 points | 7 votes)
Director: Walter A. Stern
Release: 1997
Biggest Fan: mileswide (#8)
Walter A. Stern videos (main rollout and nominations)
Massive Attack - Risingson
The Prodigy - Firestarter
The Verve - Bitter Sweet Symphony
Michael Jackson - Billie Jean
Michael Jackson: I saw kids watching and accepting boring videos because they had no alternatives. My goal is to do the best I can in every area, so why work hard on an album and then produce a terrible video? I wanted something that would glue you to the set, something you'd want to watch over and over ... [Barron] had very imaginative ideas, although he didn't agree at first that there should be dancing in it ... That freeze-frame where I go on my toes was spontaneous; so were many of the other moves.
Director Steve Barron: I met [Michael] in his manager's office, really after he had seen the Human League on MTV -- the "Don't You Want Me" video that I had made ... That kind of magic of filmmaking [like Billie Jean's trick lamppost] he was really fascinated with; and us painting the set as well in front of the camera, so we had three feet in front of the camera, we had the whole second story of the set of the street, which was another filmmaking technique – that he was really excited about.
There was a real sort of charm around him, and absolute stunning brilliance came out when he performed ... I never found anybody [else] that extraordinary.
David Bowie - Lazarus
"I wanted a hero of mine to write the music for The Last Panthers,” explains [Johan] Renck when asked how he and the singer started working together ... the two quickly found “weird common creative ground.”
He insists the common interpretation of the video – that the singer was hinting that he was on his deathbed – is wrong, because he came up with the concept a week before Bowie received his final diagnosis. “I immediately said ‘the song is called Lazarus, you should be in the bed’,” says Renck. “To me it had to do with the biblical aspect of it ... it had nothing to do with him being ill."
"He is very much an explorer of ideas and a collaborative person by nature" ... "Somebody on set said, 'You should end the video by disappearing into the closet.' "I saw David sort of think about that for a second. Then a big smile came up on his face. And he said something like, ‘Yeah, that will keep them all guessing, won’t it?’"
R.E.M. - Imitation of Life
The colorful four-minute clip — which finds Michael Stipe (that’s him in the corner) and the band at a crowded poolside bash — cleverly manipulates a mere 20 seconds of footage. The action-packed scene (a barbecue chef catches fire, a woman has a drink thrown in her face, Stipe dances) was selectively sped up and rewound as editors zoomed in on tiny portions of the frame. Director Garth Jennings rehearsed for a day and a half with the cast — several had to lip-synch backward so their singing would seem normal when reversed. How does Jennings describe his process? "I call it the ‘What the hell were we thinking?’ technique." (Entertainment Weekly)
Director Garth Jennings: It was an insane thing to do because it was so complicated. I love and worship R.E.M. They always made fabulous videos and so when they asked us to come with an idea for that song, you can’t say no. When it was finished, it was one of the most rewarding final results that I’ve had for a music video.
Johnny Cash - Hurt
Director Mark Romanek: "So we cut together the video using the performances of Johnny, and the stuff in the House of Cash [museum] -- and it was good, it was pretty good, and we said well maybe we should look at this archival stuff ... and we pulled out something and loaded it up into the computer and I think it happened to be that image of Johnny riding the train ... dropped it into the cut, and we got--chills went up our spine."
"As excited as I was to meet him, he was not in great shape. As a filmmaker, I was presented with this challenge: Do I prettify the situation, or do I take a cue from Johnny's legacy and just be honest? The latter was the only choice. So the piece started to become about a man in the twilight of a great life, and that's not the kind of thing most music videos have to deal with."
Trent Reznor: What I wasn't prepared for was what I saw. And it really then wasn't my song anymore.
Björk - Bachelorette
Director Michel Gondry: What I find out more and more is that my videos, they’re very visual but there’s always a narrative. Even if the narration is not necessarily like a story, there’s always a shape. For example, in this video I did for Björk called ‘Bachelorette’, it’s a spiral. It’s a reality, then there’s a reproduction of the reality, then a reproduction of the reproduction, etc.
Nine Inch Nails - Closer
Trent Reznor: Mark [Romanek]'s name came up, and I remember at the time I was very impressed with the Madonna "Rain" video. Not appropriate for me, necessarily, but if someone could do that with that track, what could they do in my track?
Director Mark Romanek: We made it with an old camera from 1919, and the whole thing was hand-cranked. We made prints, and I personally spent a couple of days dragging them around the parking lot and spraying aerosol shellac and holding lighters under them. We were just making it for art's sake, and YouTube didn't exist then, so it was a pretty ballsy and extravagant thing for Trent to do.
Trent Reznor: [The video] took it from one place in my head to a place setting that didn't literally define anything, but set a tone that made the song sound better to me, and I think that's an achievement. It's one that I've yet to recreate again.
Aphex Twin - Windowlicker
Director Chris Cunningham: I love hip-hop videos. It was not meant as disrespect. I used to watch those videos and think, "Are these guys kidding? They've got to be kidding!" But they're not and that in itself is what makes them good.
"Come to Daddy" was played quite a lot late at night in England on MTV ... I saw the "Come to Daddy" video amongst all these hip-hop videos and I thought, "That's ridiculous." It looks so out of place and it looks so wrong. So I wanted to make an Aphex video that fit amongst the hip-hop videos. That's not the primary reason but it had a big bearing on it. When Richard did this track that sounded summery and sunny, I thought, "Fuck. We should do it in L.A. in that style." I still don't think it looks like a hip-hop video-- I tried but I fucked it up. I knew if I used wide-angle lenses it would look like Hype Williams right away. It's kind of a cheap hip-hop video [laughs] ... It was fun though because it was just done in the spirit of trying to have a crack, I'm too much of a hip-hop fan to want to take the piss out of hip-hop.
Radiohead - Just
Guitarist Ed O'Brien: It's brilliant. It's funny when you look back and we realized the ones we really, really loved, and "Just" was one of them.
Director Jamie Thraves: "When that bit happened at the end of the song and the music goes all kind of mental, I just got this chill down my spine. And that's what I wanted to try and get across on film."
"The look was largely inspired by Hitchcock movies and Bertolucci’s movie The Conformist ... I had no idea the video was going to cause so many people to ask what the man said ... Sometimes I’m very tempted to go online under a pseudonym on YouTube and plant the exact truth amongst all the conjecture. Perhaps I’ve done that already ... I do actually want to reveal the answer, you see, that’s why it’s been a strange burden and yet also wonderful to be the only person who knows. It’s like I stumbled upon the answer to the universe, perhaps I did. Please don’t make me tell you. You don’t want to know."
Madonna - Like a Prayer
Madonna: She goes in [the church] and sees a saint in a cage who looks very much like the black man on the street, and says a prayer to help her make the right decision ... She lies down on a pew and falls into a dream in which she begins to tumble in space with no one to break her fall. Suddenly she is caught by a woman who represents earth and emotional strength and who tosses her back up and tells her to do the right thing. Still dreaming, she returns to the saint, and her religious and erotic feelings begin to stir. The saint becomes a man. She picks up a knife and cuts her hands. That's the guilt in Catholicism that if you do something that feels good you will be punished.
As the choir sings, she reaches an orgasmic crescendo of sexual fulfillment intertwined with her love of God. She knows that nothing's going to happen to her if she does what she believes is right. She wakes up, goes to the jail, tells the police the man is innocent, and he is freed. Then everybody takes a bow as if to say we all play a part in this little scenario.
Director Mary Lambert: Why couldn’t Jesus be black? Why can’t sexual ecstasy be equated with religious ecstasy? Is it wrong to enjoy sex? Is it wrong to enjoy prayer, for that matter? Why does it have to be a dull or confining thing?
A-ha - Take On Me
Animators Michael Patterson and Candace Reckinger:
(Patterson) [O]riginally they thought that we were gonna just animate everything in London (in unison) "in a couple weeks" ... I think it ended up taking 16 weeks ... (Reckinger) It's just like a classic Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella kind of story. It just works.
Magne Furuholmen, keyboardist: It's like more than 10,000 drawings for the animated parts ... I think the video, what it did, apart from it being great on its own and being so iconic as a piece, it gave the song enough rotation to really put hooks in people.
Warner Bros executive Jeff Ayeroff: It had been released twice in England [including an earlier recorded version and earlier video version] and wasn't a hit ... [W]hen I looked at [their old videos] I thought, this is too clean-cut. It was too pat, it wasn't unique enough ... The best videos of all time, [the animated "Take on Me"] shows up in the top five of every list, every era.
Michael Jackson - Thriller
Michael Jackson: Well, we're trying to bring back the motion picture shorts. And I wanted Thriller and Beat It to be a stimulant for people to make better videos or short films. I saw [Jon Landis'] American Werewolf in London. We really, really liked it, because it was a different type of horror movie, it was comedy *and* horror, that's the way I see it. (The Making of 'Thriller')
John Landis: The problem was Michael’s record company had no interest in another video from the Thriller album … Michael put me on the phone to the president of CBS Records, Walter Yetnikoff [who had fought MTV to get "Billie Jean" aired], and I had never heard such profanity at such volume ... [N]o television network wanted [the hour-long video-and-making-of special]. To them, Thriller was last year’s news ... But Showtime, then a new pay cable channel, agreed to pay half the budget, and MTV suddenly changed its mind, justifying the expenditure as a 'motion picture', not a video. [Note: Thriller became the best-selling album of 1983 *and* 1984.]
Peter Gabriel - Sledgehammer
Peter Gabriel: "I had a place at film school at one point before I thought I could make my living making noises" ... "Stephen and I had a couple of weeks just bashing through ideas, and then we brought in the others. And it was a really exciting, creative brainstorming. And I mean, that's always been one of the things I most enjoy about what I do, is working with people from different backgrounds, often smarter than I am, and just cooking something up."
"I think it took us about 100 hours, over 7 days" ... "I was lying under glass for some of it, and the most painful bit was actually having the sky painted frame by frame on my face… The clouds would be moved across, and my skin got very sore ... The fruit was ok, you know, on the second day; but, the fish after two days under the lights was getting very unpleasant indeed (laughs)."
"I think it had a sense of both humor and fun, neither of which were particularly associated with me. I mean – wrongly in my way of looking at it – I think I was seen as a fairly intense, eccentric Englishman."
Well and thank you too, jamieW, for the tabulations! Not saying I'd ever do this again, but it would be interesting to see what the results would be for a 2nd round of this, because it's never the same once people presumably get more on the same page. I think back to the attempted Greatest Video Games of All Time Poll that broke everything into different eras... I think it'd be interesting to spotlight '60s and '70s videos, even if it required creating a mini-poll for them. Maybe I should stop now...