places or people
Location scouting. Nothing but. Today was a good day to get lost. I never got lost enough, though.
San Diego is a character in this video. The label told me I could shoot LA or San Diego. Knowing the band was from San Diego I wrote the treatment specifically referencing its Casbah Club right at the start. It's how the idea came to me, really. After days of listening to the song (iTunes tells me, iPod not withstanding, that I listened to it 274 times), on the night before it was due it suddenly came to me.
I think hometowns are always important to musicians because they spend so much time away from them. Bands are more hardcore than a lobot.
Star Wars character or sales rep?
The name I've heard used to describe those ubiquitous wide collared pinstripe shirt wearing, bluetooth headpiece in the ear, attache case, Dell laptop owning, wedding ring hiding business traveller propping up the airport bar. Those guys go to the convention for a week but they don't show up in a different city every day year in year out. Touring travel is both exhilerating and wildly disorienting. The gravitational pull of home is so much more servere when there's no permanence.
I tried to fixate on a personal window to climb into San Diego (and Comic Con wasn't going to cut it) - and the first instant memory of the city was of being outside the Casbah Club, when I was on tour once a long time ago, and watching planes flying in really low right over the club. Roof scrapingly close. Like, see the faces on passengers close.
one of our locations
I had scribbled down something in an email to myself, just this: "it's about the feeling that something is over and has reached its inevitable finality and yet you can't help but try and transform the landscape around you with all of your memories." My initial reductive take on the song. And I tried to figure out the drum part in my head and there was something reminiscient of a clock in there. And that combined with low flying aircraft gave me my video idea. And I knew straight away that San Diego would be a character.
Wong Kar Wai once said his goal was to film the way a city smells, or something like that. I can only aspire to that. But I think I know what he means. The city in this video must be present as atmosphere. If I've said casting is like searching for true love, a city is like your family. It's ever present, and it's both good and bad - there are parts you accept about it and parts you hate about it in equal measure, but there's nothing you can do to change it and accepting that you have love. Our background has to resonate as a constant mood. So location scouting has been difficult. Because I'm not really looking for specific locations. I'm looking for a configuration of telephone wires that hangs low somehow, a concrete flyover that looks hideous and monumental at the same time, a deep orange that actually buzzes underneath a sodium lamp at night.
We charge everything in our lives with memories of the people we shared them with. Music attaches itself to a kiss or a breakup. Smells remind you of someone who's gone. A photograph features silver halide crystals that contain the wealth of a novel. And so we do with our cities, coat their surfaces with a fragment of conversation here, a glance there.
The strange thing is that I find so much American filmmaking absolutely loses the texture of the reality most of us live in. I thought it was revelatory in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind when it turned out the girl worked in a Border's or Barnes and Noble. It was so shocking - it wasn't product placement, it was a reflection of how real couples I've known actually work in places like that. We all pass by strip malls or ugly facades every day. Entire epics are playing out in Target parking lots across the country. We paint over, transform in our memory, so that asphalt lot becomes something best remembered in a hazy dream. This video is about two people missing one another. What I'm hoping I can impart is that their city transforms in that reverie.
On the subject of asphalt: I believe that Pacific Coast Highway is the single greatest strip of asphalt that exists. Being out there today - the highway i was born closest to, I finally for a moment stopped missing New York. But I do miss some people badly, already. I ended the night looking at waves coming in the dark, just a thin band of blue on the horizon. Something primeval in me always stirs when I see that, and then stars like you can't see anywhere else. I drove back to San Diego, sand in my feet, exhausted but feeling that a curtain separates me from this piece and it's starting to open.
San Diego is a character in this video. The label told me I could shoot LA or San Diego. Knowing the band was from San Diego I wrote the treatment specifically referencing its Casbah Club right at the start. It's how the idea came to me, really. After days of listening to the song (iTunes tells me, iPod not withstanding, that I listened to it 274 times), on the night before it was due it suddenly came to me.
I think hometowns are always important to musicians because they spend so much time away from them. Bands are more hardcore than a lobot.
Star Wars character or sales rep?
The name I've heard used to describe those ubiquitous wide collared pinstripe shirt wearing, bluetooth headpiece in the ear, attache case, Dell laptop owning, wedding ring hiding business traveller propping up the airport bar. Those guys go to the convention for a week but they don't show up in a different city every day year in year out. Touring travel is both exhilerating and wildly disorienting. The gravitational pull of home is so much more servere when there's no permanence.
I tried to fixate on a personal window to climb into San Diego (and Comic Con wasn't going to cut it) - and the first instant memory of the city was of being outside the Casbah Club, when I was on tour once a long time ago, and watching planes flying in really low right over the club. Roof scrapingly close. Like, see the faces on passengers close.
one of our locations
I had scribbled down something in an email to myself, just this: "it's about the feeling that something is over and has reached its inevitable finality and yet you can't help but try and transform the landscape around you with all of your memories." My initial reductive take on the song. And I tried to figure out the drum part in my head and there was something reminiscient of a clock in there. And that combined with low flying aircraft gave me my video idea. And I knew straight away that San Diego would be a character.
Wong Kar Wai once said his goal was to film the way a city smells, or something like that. I can only aspire to that. But I think I know what he means. The city in this video must be present as atmosphere. If I've said casting is like searching for true love, a city is like your family. It's ever present, and it's both good and bad - there are parts you accept about it and parts you hate about it in equal measure, but there's nothing you can do to change it and accepting that you have love. Our background has to resonate as a constant mood. So location scouting has been difficult. Because I'm not really looking for specific locations. I'm looking for a configuration of telephone wires that hangs low somehow, a concrete flyover that looks hideous and monumental at the same time, a deep orange that actually buzzes underneath a sodium lamp at night.
We charge everything in our lives with memories of the people we shared them with. Music attaches itself to a kiss or a breakup. Smells remind you of someone who's gone. A photograph features silver halide crystals that contain the wealth of a novel. And so we do with our cities, coat their surfaces with a fragment of conversation here, a glance there.
The strange thing is that I find so much American filmmaking absolutely loses the texture of the reality most of us live in. I thought it was revelatory in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind when it turned out the girl worked in a Border's or Barnes and Noble. It was so shocking - it wasn't product placement, it was a reflection of how real couples I've known actually work in places like that. We all pass by strip malls or ugly facades every day. Entire epics are playing out in Target parking lots across the country. We paint over, transform in our memory, so that asphalt lot becomes something best remembered in a hazy dream. This video is about two people missing one another. What I'm hoping I can impart is that their city transforms in that reverie.
On the subject of asphalt: I believe that Pacific Coast Highway is the single greatest strip of asphalt that exists. Being out there today - the highway i was born closest to, I finally for a moment stopped missing New York. But I do miss some people badly, already. I ended the night looking at waves coming in the dark, just a thin band of blue on the horizon. Something primeval in me always stirs when I see that, and then stars like you can't see anywhere else. I drove back to San Diego, sand in my feet, exhausted but feeling that a curtain separates me from this piece and it's starting to open.
2 Comments:
I shot a video at the Turf Club! Thats a great location. Lobot hahahahaha!!!
Just saw 'Play Misty' last night and there's alot to be said for the coast by Carmel...
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