Video Directors

« Directors are my really good friends anyway because we spend a lot of time together. We sit and bullshit and talk about a lot of things. Like this whole “Stronger” thing has been such a journey, but luckily we’ve had the time to really hash it out and try to think of something really great.
Videos are such a different thing than a movie or a short: to tell a full story in that four minutes and not make it jumpy or cheesy, just to make you invested in whatever that person is going through. A lot of times we go through that with narrative—how much narrative are you going to give? Do you extend the music to tell the story? I’ve had a few narrative videos, and it’s like, how do you infuse the performance and make that make sense? Do you make it all narrative? I definitely study video like that.
All directors have their little idiosyncrasies and stuff, but me and Chris Milk, and me and Hype Williams, have delivered a lot of impactful pieces, I think. Both of them can deliver a video that impacts the world, but each of them have their strong points. Hype’s strong points are really performance, and there are times when I think Chris’s strong points are concept. Now not that Hype doesn’t have good concepts and Chris doesn’t have good performance, but sometimes people have certain magic in certain elements. Just like with any artist.»