This song, “Call Out My Name,” was the first song he played me.
And it immediately affected me in a visceral way.
I started to sort of like envision certain moments.
I really wanted to make something that didn't feel made in 2017 or 2018.
I really wanted to make something that felt like it could have taken place in 1947 or
10 years in the future.
With a lot of the videos that Abel and I have done together, people have come to
their own interpretations as to what things mean.
That's when videos are very strong, when they are left ambiguous in terms of why certain
creative decisions were made.
It was a two day shoot.
So it was very quick.
We shot all the street stuff, all the theater stuff and that control room in one day.
So there was no time to reflect.
You just had to like go, go, go and hope that you’re making the right decisions as you’re
doing that.
The first location where the film opens is in Taft, California, which is like two or
three hours north of LA.
I picked Taft because it looked like anywhere.
It could be somewhere in Texas, Ohio, the Northeast, or California.
I like the fact that it felt placeless.
We don't know where we are.
We're sort of booming down.
We pass a streetlamp that turns on perfectly on the opening beat.
When I first heard the song, I knew that that drop that happened about like, I don’t know,
45, 55 seconds into the song…
It was this big moment.
I don’t even know how I thought of it but I just wanted this moment of like bats flying
out of his mouth.
In music videos, we're so used to seeing them cut so frequently, and it's like everything
is at this really rapid pace, essentially to hide either the poor filmmaking or the
lack of coverage.
And I just felt like his performance was so captivating, and his passion was so apparent
that it would be a disservice to his performance to cut.
We spent weeks in post building these bats in 3D trying to make them look as real as
possible and get the speed right so that they matched with the song.
I wanted to introduce this theater.
You'll see the edges are completely perfect.
That was done by my obsession and The Mills' great work, because there was maybe a little
bit of spill, but I wanted it to be perfect, so we spent some time cleaning that up.
The beat is so strong and he lands on the beat.
I immediately was like, “Okay, we have to like whip and then sharp land on the beat.”
Well you notice that the image of the screen is kind of like wobbling.
Because the stabilization is working counter-intuitively to the movement of the shot, it creates a
sort of wobble.
The second my editor did that, it was almost an accident, I said, “No no no."
"Keep that."
"We have to do that.”
Sharp landing and then sort of back and forth wobble that I think makes the shot even more powerful.
Right when you feel like you think you know what you’re seeing, you’re surprised again.
The sequence before that, it’s all these whip/pans.
The camera’s never handheld.
This is now we;re like loose and handheld, and dreamlike.
I want these worlds to feel like dioramas but real life whereas dioramas are real dioramas,
this is like dioramas but in the real world.
A blink over here. He tilts his head.
There's a 2D artist that works at The Mill, Jason Bergman, who's amazing.
It's so unsettling because it's such an innocent looking animal, and the blink is also innocent,
but in conjunction with the sort of like beautiful and haunting light, I think make the video
pretty singular.
It's a real burnt forest that I think was burned in the fires from a year or two ago
and I was just stuck by how beautiful and terrifying it looked.
This felt very symbolic and perfectly aligned with what we were trying to do visually and
atmospherically.
I wanted to make a room that felt new, that felt like it wasn’t a reference to something.
It just feels like this control room crawl space.
And Paige, my production designer, built something that just feels very fresh.
It’s not tall enough to have anyone stand in.
I think it’s 3 feet high.
We have a crane going in one constant speed moving forward perfectly to this light.
The camera’s rotating so it just becomes very mechanical, very precise.
Weightless move.
As we travel through the light in the control room, we pass these clouds.
And by passing the clouds, it almost like…
I think they smooth out that transition because it just feels so real.
These buildings were all made in 3D so none of this was real.
So this bird creature is obviously very haunting and mysterious, and also undefinable.
It’s sort of thematically in line with a lot of these other set ups that we’ve introduced
previously.
You’ll notice the wearing of the paint, the imperfections of the wires, how just sort
of loosely placed the clothing on the railings.
Stuff like that.
I think it makes the world feel more real as opposed to artificial so this was certainly
a challenge as well.
One of the things that also sells this shot are the reflections of other skyscrapers within
the windows.
As we're traveling near it, those reflections change in scale.
All the VFX artists we collaborate with did a fantastic job selling that.
I was inspired to start directing music videos because I wanted to become a director, and
I felt like it was a great way to define and discover my aesthetic without having to make
a feature film.
When you create imagery that people can interpret in many different ways, I think is when the
video is a success.
Abel’s like a true artist in every sense of the word so collaborating with him is great
because I feel like he always wants to push things artistically and visually.
He keeps me on my toes.