The Pretty Reckless “Make Me Wanna Die”.
March 13th 2010. Brooklyn, NY.
CONCEPT
Another last minute phone call.
The warning signs were there from the start, but I was too flattered to see them. The label’s treatment process had fallen apart and Taylor has asked to bring me in.
I am old enough to be her father, or maybe her grandfather, doing the math, but then the bands Reckless love to are mostly geriatric or. deceased
Taylor Momsen’s basic concept: “I want to walk through the NY streets, thowing away everything I own, including my clothing, and then throw myself in a grave”.
On the conference call, this seemed like a cool and artistically valid way to visualize the self-destructive emotions behind the lyrics. Ben Phillips, the bands eminence grise, stellar guitar player and writer, reassures me that she can deliver.
The label don’t raise concerns other than having no actual nudity.
A year later we were all a little wiser.
Looking back I don’t think anyone understood just how powerful Taylor’s presence would be on camera.
SHOOT
It started out well enough, in a studio in Brooklyn. A storm is raging outside, and there is a great deal of tension in the air. This is the first video from the first album, and its clearly not going to be a pop video.
Band performance is green screen, with Trapcode particles. It kind of works, given the context of the narrative. A more realistic performance would have been better for Pretty Reckless, but there were valid, conceptual, weather, and logistical reasons to chose green screen. I love shooting musicians. Mark Damon and Jamie Perkins are powerful players and great to shoot. Ben prefers to hide his light, so we give him one to move in and out of. Taylor has been working with camera since she was three, and there’s not much I can teach her other than how and when to make eye contact with the lens. It’s soon clear to everyone that she has total conviction and passion.
As conceived the performance was only going to be used for the instrumental intro and outro. By the time the edit was approved a year later, we had been made to cut away from Taylor to the band performance though out the narrative, and the video is not better for this.
There are two schools of thought on coverage. “Don’t shoot it if you don’t want them to use it”, and, “If you shoot any performance, cover the whole song”. I started out as an editor so I always go with the second option. You never know what issues you will run into in post.
DP Charles Papert used my old HVX for the greenscreen, as its compression gives slightly cleaner keys than the h.264 from the Canon we were shooting the narrative with. Old as it is, the HVX produces perfect luminous images, it’s tiny chip is a magical imaging device, perfectly matched to its’ Leica lens.
Once the performance is done, Taylor and I go outside for a smoke and find the storm is still raging. The rest of the night is meant to be steadicam shots leading Taylor through the streets to the graveyard, but there is no way in this wind and rain.
Naturally we had anticipated this and had prepared for Plan B: shoot Taylor walking on a treadmill against green screen and comp it all together later.
Very little of this narrative greenscreen footage made the final video, but it was vital as a wardrobe, choreography and timing rehearsal.
EXTERIORS
A couple of hours later the storm blows though revealing a wet foggy night and acres of perfectly wet down streets. We had about three hours left till dawn. We quickly wrap the camera and electronics in cling film and set off into the Brooklyn night.
Nobody but ourselves about, the paparazzi all gone to bed.
Charles Papert, our DP, was also doing steadicam, and between his skills and Taylor’s experience and technical accuracy it all flew together without many problems. The freezing fog helps focus the mind. Two or three takes of each section of the song, a couple of different lens sizes to cut with, and we are moving on. It looks deceptively simple to walk and sing and take your clothing off, but its not. Just the continuity is a challenge, and then the performance itself has to be 100%. Then there’s the focus pull challenge of shooting wide open while the camera & crew is moving backwards in the dark trying to keep ahead of this crazy girl on a mission.
For me the key to this kind of steadicam sequence is to reduce the walking crew to the absolute minimum necessary. Four people max. Otherwise its a moving train wreck and the performance suffers. A ring light on the camera. Everything else is available light. Sound playback just a hand held boom box or blue tooth to headphones from an Ipod . The support crew are hiding around the corner. This way you can often shoot both directions, coming and going, without a major reset.
The shots looked incredible, wet black tarmac reflecting the street lights, natural mist, a few drops of rain on the lens smearing the colors together, hair wind-blown, a soft ring light on this stunning, angry creature. Amazing stuff, so powerful that it had to be watered down with performance and lens flares to be acceptable.
GRAVEYARD
We do a company move to the graveyard and the beauty and madness escalates to a whole new level.
As often happens these days, the budget had been inexplicably slashed in half a day or two before the shoot, leaving us with no money left for lights and generator to shoot the climax of the video, in a graveyard at night. Without these scene the video would be meaningless lame and exploitative. So you eat it.
On the tech scout even the 5D had come up with nothing but noise. Some places are just too dark, even for the Canon CMOS
.Lighting exterior locations at night is expensive, especially in NY.
Brainwave. Marine flares.
A hellish flickering red light, and you get clouds of spooky brimstone smoke for free. Appropriate. Motivated. Cheap. Quick.
They don’t last long, so one minute you are standing in a fantastic crimson hellfire landscape, next minute shivering in the pitch blackness with tombs all around you.
Taylor continues to peel off her clothing, and now its getting really heartrending. The image has a mind bending contradiction, flawless beauty and desperate emotional suffering, with death all around. Its the distillation of gothic. All that missing is absinthe and a sugar cube.
Out — out are the lights — out all!
And, over each dying form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
E.A.Poe
Directing Taylor is as close as I will ever get to flying an F.16. She is a 100 % committed artist, with an instinctive talent for nuance with the lens, and a fearless human being to boot.
At 4 am Taylor is standing in the flickering darkness at the lip of an open grave :
“Action”…. She just jumps right in.
One of the stranger graveyard scenes I have shot. The angles that survived the edit don’t nearly capture the true weirdness and beauty of the experience. The baleful red light. The sensation of thousands of souls buried all around you. Dark crevasses everywhere. The immense Mausoleums, all vanity now. Families moved on, or scattered to the wind. The New York skyline partying away in the distance, full of future ghosts. The muddy ground, rotting hands reaching up to pull you down into the jaws of death.
The crew were troopers all, but this is getting a bit weird by now, even for these hipsters.
It’s actually very liberating to thow yourself into a grave. Jumping in is fine, we had an air mattress to land on. Clawing your way up the muddy walls to get out is not so pleasant at my age, and just as messy as it looks in zombie movies. This was a very old graveyard and who knows quite what that thing is sticking out of the slime.
Then all of a sudden its dawn, all the ghosts and gothic magic fade to grey.
It’s done. Whatever it is.
We drive straight to La Guardia and fly to coastal Texas for another shoot, still covered in mud.
POST PRODUCTION
Post-Production was hell for everyone involved. There turned out to be all kinds of previously undisclosed legal obstacles implicit in the concept. Almost every shot became an effects shot. The video was banned and canned several times. Getting it approved and finished became an act of will.
Sometimes making a video involves conflict. The various parties have their responsibilities and interests to champion. The director’s responsibility is to fight for the video itself. It’s sometimes not worth the career cost. No good deed goes unpunished, but you can hold onto the rags of your self-respect.
This video took a year of fighting and my total demoralization. Good friendships were lost, and found, in the process.
“Some day we will look back on this and it will all seem silly.”
Rosalita
TECH
Steady-cam, Panasonic HVX, Canon 5D, Zeiss Optics, Ring Light.
CREDITS
Director: Meiert Avis.
Director & VFX: Chris LeDoux
Producers: Jeremy Alter & Meiert Avis
DP: Charles Papert
Production Designer: Philip Duffin
©2012 Meiert Avis, Pushermedia