When Cole first showed me the album artwork, I got really excited because what it said
to me was this is the direction you want to go with?
That's exciting.
It was so graphic that I thought we should take those same characters and essentially
bring them to life.
A lot of what was fun about this video was that it's such a left turn from everything
Cole has done for the last three years.
With ‘Forest Hills Drive,’ the documentary series that I did with him, the music videos
I did with that, he was very much playing himself.
With ‘4 Your Eyez Only,’ the documentary film that we did with that too, again, he
was very much playing himself and we were in this hyper-real world that had moments
of surrealism peppered throughout it with our color treatments.
With “ATM,” it was all about creating something that was not realistic at all.
In this frame you see King Overdose and the kids on drugs.
The scepter and the kids are all real.
The dollar and the string were done in post.
He's kind of just this money hungry hustler, kind of in the vein of Johnny Depp's character
in ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.’
And then also, “Gimme Some More” was definitely an inspiration for this video.
Cole and I watched that video and were looking at ways that we could adopt some of the things
that Hype Williams did so brilliantly.
I think what people are reacting to is the type of lenses that we use which are wide lenses.
I think the longest lens we use was a 14 or 16 millimeter lens.
Everything was shot on this very distorted, this very distorted type of photography.
The whole idea with this was to put him in a straight jacket surrounded by money that
he can't grab.
It was a performance set up that I wanted to shoot to have to come back to throughout
the video.
We only had two of those.
One was this set up and the other was the ATM performance.
We didn't really use much of the ATM performance because we had so much story that we wanted
to get to.
In this scene Cole is in his bag and then if you notice there are smaller
bags inside the bag, theoretically with even smaller Cole's inside of them, which I thought
was a nice touch from our production designer Myles.
We always had this idea of creating a canvas and making a larger than life replica of the
bag so that Cole could fit in it.
But then before we shot this our gaffer said, "What if we create a dollar silhouette and
blast it with light from the outside?"
There's actually, you can't see it but we had a big piece of foam right about here that
someone was holding so that when he stabs it, it kind of recoiled a little bit because
otherwise it just wouldn't have felt quite as realistic.
This is Cole as a used car salesman at Ed's Used Cars, which if you listen to the album
you'll notice that there's a feature on this album called kiLL edward and so when we were
coming up with names for what we should call the car dealership, Cole was like, "Let's
call it Ed's Used Cars."
So, he's presumably Ed or maybe works for Ed.
Raeana our stylist put this outfit together and from the moment he put it on we were just
like that's perfect.
Then I asked him to tie his hair back which I thought looked great.
Just like in ‘The Room’ when he's like, "I did not hit her.
"I did not."
"Oh hi Mark."
He's having this really intense thing happen to him where he pulled his arm off and he's
like, "Here it is."
Of course the dealer accepts it.
"Yeah, I'll take that.
I'll take that arm and a leg."
At the end, once he's failed to reach the dollar that he's been chasing falls on his
chest, but he's no longer alive to spend it.
This was derived from what Cole says in the song,
"Can't take it when you die 'cause you can't live without it."
Basically the actual set is only this right here.
Then an actual crane that starts right here.
So once we're here we're on an actual crane on the actual set.
Even in this set, you've got things that are not, that were not shot in camera.
For instance, all this debris is in post.
These pills and the pill bottle there are post.
This tire was added in post.
This car seat was added in post.
The combination of in camera production design and visual effects was what made this shot.
The song is all about being on a paper chase.
So we wanted to visualize that through the paper chase.
We wanted to visualize that with Cole's main character, the hustler that he plays throughout
the video and then create antagonists that he also plays who are trying to cross him
and keep him from getting that dollar.
We're constantly introducing new worlds, new set ups, new characters and telling a story
that makes people want to see what's going to happen next all the way up until the very
last shot of the video.
This is a body double.
I knew it was going to work when I went into the dressing room
and I said, "Hey Cole I got a question for you" and he turned around and
it was not Cole. It was Kai.
I was like, “Oh. It works."