In an interview with Eric Skelton for Complex, Lyrical Lemonade founder Cole Bennett broke down how he directed his first music video for Drake after tweeting it into existence years ago.
"The Drake thing was interesting because there's been so many points where we got so close," he recalled. When he tweeted, "I want to direct a Drake video someday," in 2020, he got a DM from the 6 God shortly after. "We talked about doing something then. So that was step one of like, 'Oh wow, we might do a video.' Then a year or two later, he mentioned he had a song for us. But the song never came in."
At one point, Bennett was slated to shoot a video for Drake's song "Search & Rescue," but it never came together for whatever reason. They finally linked up with the video for the For All the Dogs track "Another Late Night," which features Bennett's frequent collaborator Lil Yachty.
"It was a crazy feeling. I mean, he's the biggest artist in the world, and he is also an incredible human being," said Bennett. "He's a joy to work with. He feels like he's your friend. I think everyone feels like that. Even on the internet, they feel like they can relate to Drake in some sense—like, he just feels like that guy they can hang out with. And that's how he is. He's super personable and it was an honor to work with him. I hope that we can do more."
The wild part about the "Another Late Night" video is that it all came together last minute because of Drake's hectic schedule. "That whole video was interesting how it came about because there were so many different songs we were supposed to shoot off the album," he said. "It was really this moving target because he was trying to shoot videos while he was on tour... We were picking the song like an hour before we shot it in his hotel room. We were just going through songs, but a lot of them were like, 'OK, let's shoot half of this and then finish it here.'"
Yachty happened to be in town the day Bennett and Drake were shooting together, so it made a lot of sense to settle on "Another Late Night," especially thanks to their mutual friendship in Yachty. "It was like, OK, we have to shoot this video in like two and a half hours," he added. "We're gonna have to find a random spot to shoot it tonight, still sourcing all of that as we go. It felt like the good run-and-gun option to go with. So we shot it."
The car featured in the video, covered in Christmas lights, was flown out in a cargo plane to Vancouver because Drake wanted that specific car. "There are certain moments in that video that are very captivating and pull you in. There's the intro, all of the car scenes are really fun, the Christmas lights, and then people's favorite is that Yachty chain animation," he said. "As soon as I saw the chain on set, I knew we needed to turn it into something."
Read the full interview with Bennett, in which he also talked about getting Kid Cudi and Lil Durk to link in the studio, here.
