Soderbergh on Miller, and the role of music video directors
Music videos are great and bad for directors. I found The Outline’s newsletter (whole thing here) this week pretty stellar. For me that typically means at least three pieces I enjoyed. This piece I’m sharing continues in my ongoing fascination with niche creative fields and what they’re like from the inside. It sheds light on how music videos are highly creatively satisfying for early-career directors, highly important for music sales in their own way still, and (also) deeply problematic in how they treat directors in general. It’s a fascinating example where the quality of ideas and creativity is highly valued, but it is highly valued within a construct that tries to be super super efficient cost-wise. This works great for the music artist, but feels exploitative for the director.
I had a hard time deciding what to excerpt here. How about this - an overview of the tension:
“For most label-produced videos, at least 10 directors write treatments, which lay out both their vision and their budget for the project. In a competitive field, bidding low increases one’s chances of landing a gig. When a director is eventually chosen, they must make a video that the artist and label approve, while also fighting to hold onto their own style. To realize their vision, some of their pay — the director’s rate is almost always 10 percent of the video’s total budget — will have to go back into the production.
“On almost every job, a director is kicking in a portion of their rate, if not all of it, to make a video happen. Regardless of the budget,” Klinger said. “There are directors who are wealthy off of music videos. But like, a few. Like five.”
According to Spierer, the music video still functions as a brand-building exercise too, but it’s just one piece in a larger promotional strategy and must be budgeted accordingly. “There's more of an onus than ever on making responsible financial decisions when it comes to content creation, and making sure that the content that you do create can be used in a variety of ways,” he said.”
It’s worth clicking in. You get to hear from and about Emma Westenberg, the director who is the main focus, and the bit about how little the directors of the incredible video “Turn Down For What” made compared to how much money was made by the video in general.
Amazing things are truly amazing: Mad Max Fury Road edition. There’s a video that has gone around for a while that shows what this incredible movie looks like if you strip away the computer generated effects. It’s an example where the director George Miller perfectly married the unheard-of heights of what you can do with practical effects with highly effective digital creations that only make it all that much better. But the extent to which he makes things happen mostly in the real world is just breathtaking.
But that’s not what this banana is shouting out. The next tweet down in the sequence shouts out fellow great director Steven Soderbergh’s honest reaction to all of that (link to primary source on that, in Hollywood Reporter). An amazing director in his own right, Soderbergh nevertheless looks with awe at Miller’s work and admits he wouldn’t have the first idea how to do it. There’s something in this for all of us to remember in our more envious or impostery moments. Even two people who are masters at the same broad craft don’t necessarily share the same specific skills.
“The ability to stage well is a skill and a talent that I value above almost everything else. And I say that because there are people who do it better than I'll ever be able to do it after 40 years of active study. I just watched Mad Max: Fury Road again last week, and I tell you I couldn't direct 30 seconds of that. I'd put a gun in my mouth. I don't understand how [George Miller] does that, I really don't, and it's my job to understand it. I don't understand two things: I don't understand how they're not still shooting that film and I don't understand how hundreds of people aren't dead.
I could almost see that's kind of possible until the polecat sequence, and then I give up. We are talking about the ability in three dimensions to break a sequence into a series of shots in which no matter how fast you're cutting, you know where you are geographically. And each one is a real shot where a lot of things had to go right. I'm going to keep trying; I'm not going to keep trying in the sense that I'm going to volunteer to direct the next Mad Max movie. I'm going to keep trying in the sense that when I have sequences that demand a certain level of sophistication in terms of their visual staging, I'm going to try and watch the people who do it really well and see if I can climb inside their heads enough to think like that.
Go upstream. There’s no link with this banana, just something I’ve been thinking about more often lately. In earlier web days, there was a value ascribed to getting things directly from the original source, and going out of your way to try to find the origin or provenance of something before you shared it. The web world was a lot smaller then and it was mostly composed of people.
Sure, the practice of looking for the source and sharing a more canonical version/link is prone to mistakes and incompleteness, but that’s not really the point. As a practice, it’s a good thing to do. And if you can make your sharing 40% cleaner, that itself is a win. I still think this is worth the extra effort, and can tell you a lot of things:
How recently this story, photo, joke, or observation was first the subject of discussion - that way you know if it’s likely to be new to your circle
What the intentions or motivation might have been for sharing it
Whether it was originally original, or found/curated from somewhere before it made its rounds
Who the sharer is, so that if you found it to be great, you can follow them knowing you share their sensibility
Who you should continue to give credit to as you pass it along
When you stop short of all this, and just share things indiscriminately without paying attention to where you grabbed it from, you are further separating the original creator from their work and participating in the stripping of the effort from the outcome. There are exploitative aggregators now too, that solely exist to steal things and then make money off of them. Brands are doing some of this too, whether deliberately or inadvertently.
It can also inadvertently propagate all kinds of bad things. Sometimes by blindly sharing, you’re actually propagating things that weren’t brought about in good faith and are intended to harm. It’s like participating in black market trade and being completely disconnected from how the middleman got the stuff. And it gives more power to the lazy aggregator accounts that are just straight-up attention thieves. Practically speaking, it’s also highly likely that if you share something from lazy big aggregators, you are sharing it a good while after it has already made the rounds in the niche where it was originally born.
If I can pass a long a wish, it’s to take this seriously. Poke around. Do some searches. Explore the context around things you gravitate towards. Your goal should be to go upstream as much and as often as possible. Disintermediate the aggregators. Use it as a signal that may lead to more great stuff, right from the tap. Form direct relationships with the things you like. Over time, both the things you see and the reactions you get downstream of you will be better for it.
Those are the three bananas I have for you today. You can hit “reply” and it will go only to me. Thank you.