Originally published at RBMA.
This is the extended (VERY LONG) version.
Dave Meyers’ frenetic imagination has conjured some of this era’s most recognizable music videos. Active since the 90s, his resume consists of over 200 projects with a genre-spanning list of artists from Jay-Z to Mick Jagger.
A chance meeting with Good Will Hunting filmmaker Gus Van Sant inspired Meyers to pursue videos and he landed his first MTV slot in 1997 with underground Oakland duo The Whoridas.
The Californian director’s most iconic work includes eleven of Missy Elliot’s career defining videos as well as visuals for Outkast’s “Bombs Over Baghdad” and “So Fresh, So Clean.” He won a best video Grammy Award in 2005 for Elliot’s “Lose Control” and has also received eleven MTV Awards.
Meyers recently took a three-year sabbatical to pursue film and advertising, but is now diving back into capturing music. During more than an hour of conversation, we discussed a fraction of his filmography and thoughts on industry issues such as lower budgets and product placement. He discussed early interactions with Kanye West, shooting with Nas, making 44 videos in one year and a whole lot more.
Do you think music videos have worth in 2015 or are they in danger of becoming content for content’s sake?
They certainly have regained value for me. I took a three or four year break there and focused on commercials. What I’ve learned with the reach of a music video, especially to it’s fans, is there’s nothing quite like it other than maybe Jurassic Park [laughs]. It’s a very strong connection that artists still maintain with their fans, even more so than ever, because of the way the Internet is. To be part of that and to be a creative entity associated with that is kind of the purpose of filmmaking, or my particular passion. I’ve reached out to all of the folks you’d expect me to reach out to and we’re brewing some cool stuff that is coming our way. You’ll hopefully see some collaboration later this year with Missy [Elliot], Janet [Jackson] and there are a variety of things that might be coming. My passion for videos is alive and well and as I think the artists have sort of gotten used to the lower budgets, the resulting climate is a push for creativity.
Artists are more about what the creative experience is, what might be a viral contribution to the world, which was not the dialogue ten years ago when we had a million dollars for a video. I think the health of the creative community is in a progressive place, even though the economic health is always and continues to be in question. It can be kind of scary I think, particularly for anybody that’s been around for a while. I think with new people coming up that’s all they know, so it’s probably just a state of the union. For people coming up it’s the best time ever. Based on what I saw when I was coming up, there was like one video every once in a while that was cheap and you were lucky to be able to get it. Whereas now most of them are cheap, so if you’re coming out of film school with a very interesting edge or you’ve got an iPhone and editing equipment you can really create. It’s a world community of creativity, which I find to be inspiring as an artist despite it being challenging as a father [laughs].
Do you take the context of a song in consideration when creating the video? For example you shot the Nas’ song “You Owe Me” with Ginuwine, which many fans considered a sell out track.
It’s like some movies come out good, some come out bad and at the starting gate you always think you’re doing something good. In that case, Nas wanted to have a little bit of the crispy visuals that were associated my videos at the time. That was an ironic video because I would have far preferred to do the militant Nas record and probably would have won him all kinds of awards because that’s closer to who I am. The video we ended up doing together was almost like a video that Hype [Williams] might have done better with and may have gotten the same review, I don’t know. That particular experience, sometimes in the rush of it… all the thoughtfulness towards a brand is not as considered even by the artist themselves. It’s like “hey, we’re available on Tuesday, let’s shoot, here’s the budget, let’s go.” What did seem necessary at that time for a lot of rap videos was an interesting presentation of women, not necessary the booty shaking stuff that we’ve evolved into, but at that time just more high fashion with a street edge so there was lots of videos attempting that.
You’ve been shooting rap videos since the late 90s. Did you ever feel intimidated as a white guy working with these artists?
I never really felt a racial issue. It was more filmmaking and what I was highlighting. The urban community is not one broad stroke. It’s actually many different types of nuances. What Lil Wayne wanted was very different from what Jay-Z wanted, which was different from what Ice Cube wanted, which is the same for Dave Matthews, Aerosmith, Mick Jagger, all of people that I’ve worked with, all of the divas, Shakira is different from J-LO. Then there are different levels of communication. So really it was just navigating that, which it still is, whether it is urban or pop or whatever it is. The categories were never as much a conscious worry, I respond to that music that’s why I started there. That’s how I was raised, my experience growing up was closer to that and what was actually a little bit of a growing curve for me was the more typically stereotyped “white music.” I enjoyed that as well, but that was a learning curve. Whereas with urban music I’d seen every video since the dawn of videos and I knew all of the references. I’d made rap videos when I was in high school to Slick Rick. When I finally got a chance to be professional at videos, it was a natural next step and I think the artists recognize that there wasn’t a separation. Obviously there are cultural differences, but as far as depicting them on film they felt a sense of respect from me. So I don’t think there was really any issues other than - “am I making something hot or not?”
I’ve read commentary that interprets certain perspectives about race and sexuality in your videos.
Are those things you actively think about when creating?
What I can say is in music videos the script is somewhat dictated to me by the artist and the music they write and I come up with the visual ideas that accompany that. So yes, I’m a member of whatever historical analysis is reviewed, but it’s a community that was moving at the time. I think my influence if anything, was making urban music “accessible.” That’s what Jay-Z liked, that’s what Missy [Elliot] liked. I won lots of awards with those people and touched the world with the way that I was able to make them accessible. Other directors were not able to do that, even though they make great videos within their community. So that was what I saw from the outside looking in. That’s what I saw my imprint to be. When I was living it, it was just that I was having fun. Each video was like “oh Missy, let’s pull your head off, oh Missy let’s do this.” “Jay can we do something like this?” “Nah, Dave I want to do a party.” “Ok, we’ll do a party.” It was just sort of a riff session between artists, what they were about at that time and how I was able to respond to that and so it’s certainly not a conscious thing.
The book
Unruly Media
by Carol Vernallis said that your video for Outkast’s “Bombs Over Baghdad” incorporated stereotypical images of race like gospel singers in purple robes, dancing Blaxploitation heroines as well as orangutans and chimpanzees, possibly as a way of giving stereotypes new meaning.
That’s definitely over-analysing. I think with that, Outkast represents Atlanta. The premise was that Andre [3000] really wanted to highlight the hood. To me that sounds like a white perspective of what was going on. It doesn’t sound like a true cultural renaissance. That was actually considered the video of the decade in a poll that was done when the 90s ended. To quantify it like that is really… I mean everybody is open to whatever opinions they want, but the truth on the ground was Outkast wanted to present the culture in a very big and electric way. What we did was hardly stereotypical. We did body paint on women, the church were doing something associated with a rap video, which is not something you see a union of too often. The pulse of the piece was integrating certain staple urban cultural things like bouncing cars, things like that, people from the hood having a celebratory vibe, and then integrating it into an experience that anybody in the world could watch and feel was a movement. It felt like a movement to me and that’s what we were after, just this perpetual fluidity of excitement that was happening in the streets of Atlanta. I think we were one of the first to be able to capture the broad scope of what was going on there.
How do video cameos usually work? Missy Elliot’s videos in particular had so many. Timbaland, Ginuwine, Aaliyah, her friends always showed up.
That was a high priority of Missy’s at the time. I think that there’s a currency in showing support in that way, particularly in the urban community. I’ve always thought it would be nice if the rock community or some of the other communities stuck together in the same way cause I think as a fan it makes it so much more fun when you see everybody supporting each other like that. The image that you get is that it’s one large community of people creating versus islands fighting against each other for space. That’s what it felt like at the time. With certain videos Missy had a priority of wanting lots of cameos and seeing how many she could get. I just set up the infrastructure. Obviously there are certain ones that are musts when you hear any song with her, like her and Timbaland. Well obviously Timbaland is coming down, we need to give him a special cameo. I don’t know, the various cameos can just be part of it, part of the wave of whatever it is that you are doing.
Have you ever been told by the label to reshoot an entire video or certain scenes?
I don’t think I’ve ever done a reshoot. Except for Dave Matthews and it wasn’t a reshoot, it was an additional shoot, which was part of their process that they wanted to do something artistic and we did it. It doesn’t come up a lot. I’ve never really heard that too often with any videos. I mean the only person I’ve only heard about doing a reshoot was Kanye and I think that’s driven by his passion for creativity. He did a video [“
”]
that did not live up to his music so he reshot the video. I think that's kind of why I have adoration for Kanye and his creative contribution. He was on set a lot in the early days before he emerged as an artist. He was always a producer sitting by the director’s monitor with me and I really feel like he took what I was able to start and he took it to just another level. Not that he took it directly from me, but he was like the next generation of what we were in the middle of and what he's gone on to do with hip-hop and just the international interest that he has, the choice of directors, everything that he's done has been very interesting to me and I think that's a beautiful evolution of what I was trying to do.
Kanye has a brief cameo in Jay-Z’s “
” at the 3:22 point, which you shot.
Yeah, he had produced that track and asked if he got a tattoo, would I film it. So I went to Jay-Z and I said “who is this guy?” and he’s like “yeah, yeah, you can film him.” Obviously it was all history probably a year later and he emerged with his first single and became who he is. I think that he was very very focused on being the superstar that he became. He was able to say it before it happened. He’s a fascinating case study for anybody looking at a pioneer. I could go on and on about him. I saw him change public opinion in the room from the year after the Taylor Swift thing. He performed at the MTV Awards and everybody was booing him. By the end of the show everybody was cheering his name and I was like this is a room of peers doing that. This is not a room of fans. This is a room of peers literally booing him and he just killed it so hard with ballerinas and all that. I just think he is truly able to pioneer and I look to his movements and his gestures as the real thing to study in the evolution of urban music and the influence that it’s had. I was doing a Citibank ad and they wanted to get a Kanye song in there [laughs]. That’s pretty big. They’re not asking for Aerosmith, they’re asking for Kanye.
I get the feeling your relationship with Missy Elliot is very collaborative.
Yes, Missy has a lot of trust in my visual sense. She’s always brought me into the fold of what she likes and we play in the sandbox well together. It seems we’ve begun starting to talk again. I guess she’s in the studio and even as we’ve started to talk again, it seems the things she references I get excited by, the things I reference she gets excited by. We just have a sort of shorthand that works and Pink and I have had that and there’s been windows where I’ve had that with other artists. You know Jay-Z and I had that for a period of time. J-Lo and I had that.
With artists you’ve shot several videos for like Jay-Z, what’s the most common reason why the relationship ends after a few years?
It’s the same reason why I might switch a DOP [Director of photography]. It basically stems from, sort of like a growth if you will. I was part of Jay-Z’s life at a time where he was single and wanted to do a lot of party records and I was trying to get him to do some edgy stuff, but he wasn’t hearing it at the time. So I then get associated with the party part of his life and then he’s settled down and starts getting into what he’s doing now and he births sort of his artistic journey and unless I do something that catches his eye that fits that, he’s sort of after people that personify what it is he’s looking to do with his brand. There’s a familiarity of like “oh Dave was my guy who did that thing for me at that time.” There’s no bad blood, it’s just sort of the evolution of a creative and whatever extent I played in it. I certainly dived deep into commercials so my reference point for the artists became more obscure. It’s not like they watched commercials and were like “Dave did that.” For me and my journey, it detoured into movies and commercials and other things and it’s only now that I’m sort of like, you know, it would be worth while to do an occasional video that’s hot because I like it and it keeps the reference point for artists on what I’m up to and what I’m in to and then that might lead to some of those collaborations continuing. I have gone on my creative journey, he’s gone on his creative journey and J-Lo on hers and Pink on hers, actually in the last couple of records. It’s the norm, the fact that I got so many from one artist is a compliment to me or a badge of success.
What do you think has been your most underappreciated video?
My Limp Bizkit “
” video. I think that was probably one of my favourite videos that I have ever done. I completely wrote that concept with no feedback from Fred [Durst] or anything so it’s like it was my tribute to Pink Floyd, but with modern twists. It came out one week before 9/11 so it just got pulled right off the air.
What are the logistics involved in shooting dance scenes?
Well I work very closely with a choreographer. In that case HiHat, who is a dear friend and we’ve had such fun and success together with Missy. So internally when we speak about the Missy collaboration, it’s the Missy, HiHat, Dave collaboration because dance has been such an integral part of her priority. As far as the movement, I’m a part of the conversations on the email chains, but that usually comes from HiHat and then I sort of understand or try to influence it when I have an idea, it’s sort of collaborative on that level, but ultimately it’s just part of the spectacle of it all. You go to the rehearsals and you see what they are going to do then you figure out what angles will capture that and you work with the choreographer on explaining the angles and you figure it out and make history.
During the “
” video, were those bees on Missy Elliot’s face? How was shooting that?
Yes, we had bees on the set for the rest of the day and it was the first time I’ve worked with a beekeeper. I was told it was all humane and all that kind of stuff, but I didn’t quite understand what I was getting into until the guy showed up and created the bee beard and that was an interesting process [laughs].
You have a cameo in the “
” video [1.20 second mark].
Yeah, Missy insisted on that. I was just going about shooting it and I had an extra grabbing her and pulling her into the thing and she didn’t want anybody touching her, so she told me I had to. She trusted me, and had me do it. It was the first time I had ever been asked to be in a video and I sort of got very nervous and I couldn’t focus on anything but that, for the next twenty minutes. At the same time, I thought that’s a pretty honourable offer from her that she recognized I was a collaborator and I didn’t want to say no. I don’t really get off on being in front of the camera, but there was definitely that making of the video thing going on behind the scenes that relied on me giving them camera time and it was an interesting period of time. I much more enjoy where I’m at now where people don’t come up with video cameras too often [laughs].
When you shot Outkast’s “
,” it was sent to India so each frame could be painted to create the bright colouring?
It was important to me to colour each frame because the budget was very high. It was the highest budget I had at the time, which was an ironic result of another director going to do it then backing out at the last minute. So the budget was already approved and I got slotted in there and the treatment 100% changed when I got to Atlanta. Andre sat down and threw out what the other director had done and explained what he wanted to do and with that budget range and the idea of just running through the hood and driving the bouncing cars and going to a club, although it ended up being great because we had four days to shoot, I was worried when I was making it that the money being spent wasn’t going to be reflected in the overall vision. I kind of held up the process for six weeks to get the colouring done but in the end Big Boi and Dre were like “this is beautiful, thank you.” They were very earnestly appreciative of how far I’d tried to push it and then the video ended up looking like what it cost and it became very meaningful for my journey forward.
That kind of vivid colouring was one of your calling cards at the time.
Yeah it was, but then everybody started doing it and I've evolved more into what my
looks like, which is a little more moody, but even that is pretty status quo these days. So I'm wondering if the colourful thing might come back but edgier. It's weird because having lived through enough of the business you start to see how society affects things. The 80s had idealistic movies and the 90s had different. The actual things that you're drawn to as a culture change and so that was definitely a colourful time.
Do you think part of society is being reflected in music videos now?
Of course, always. What people are interested in, depending on what kind of video. If it's an indie group, you'll see what indie cultures have going on. If it's a fashion artist, you'll see what kind of hot fashions are being explored. If it's sensual, you'll see what the latest ideas of sensuality are. If it’s dance, you’ll see the latest sense of what movement is. Music itself has evolved, everything is always evolving and I think that expression is what keeps everything exciting.
During the early 2000s, you were doing dozens of videos year after year. How was that?
I did 44 in one year. It was the time of my life. That year was one of my most amazing years. I would say, that as an evolved artist, I don’t know that I would want to do that now. I didn’t feel it at the time, but in looking back quality affected quantity. Now, I think at least 9/10 if not 10/10 will be an interesting contribution from what I’m about. I say 9/10 because sometimes videos go in a different direction when you get from what you wrote to set, that does happen. You end up shooting something completely different than the idea. That actually happened to me recently. Nevertheless, at that time I did 40 in one year, I think that was the time when I did some of my best work. I think that’s the year that I won 7 VMAs. There was a year when literally every artist won, No Doubt won, Pink won, I think there was a Missy video that won. Everybody that went up on stage kept thanking me. How do you ever regret that? That’s a life memory that I cherish, but I’m into different things now so I don’t know if I’d want to repeat that.
What I think also happens is that you grow as an artist so you become more critical, which is sometimes self consuming. That’s why you see older artists go crazy. I'm trying to keep myself from going crazy, but there is a self-consumption thing that happens. I see that with the musicians that get older, they're trying to carry the burden of staying relevant while at the same time staying relevant creatively and sometimes you evolve creatively into a place that's more mature and if you do that you've suddenly lost your 20 year old audience or the next generation's 20 year old audience, so it's a weird see-saw. I thought
was kind of an interesting sign of the times - that relevance is talked about. I think relevance is even on the burden of a new artist.
Were there any directors during the years when you were making your name that inspired or pushed you?
My biggest inspiration during that period was
. I think that what he provided was that nice balance between an artistic video and relevance to the audience. What I felt, a lot of times, is that directors were too heavy on the arty side. Therefore it lost its pop appeal or they were too pop, too glossy without any substance and they lost their individual identity or artistic contribution. That was primarily what I felt Mark just did in spades, almost every video was a contribution of really provocative takes on visuals, branding and at the same time satisfying as a fan of that music. He was always the generation ahead, but of the peers that were doing work that I was paying attention to, it would be
. There were like six or seven of us, but Paul I felt we overlapped the most. He was the only other director that was jumping genres. Hype [Williams] was focusing on hip-hop, some other people were doing just beauty, but Paul and I would be like Jay-Z one week, him Marilyn Manson, then I’d be doing Dave Matthews. I don’t think I ever felt threatened by anybody but I definitely felt inspired and I definitely felt like there’s a healthy climate when you’re working with great minds, competitors alongside you. It sort of creates a climate where everybody has to be on their game and that’s not necessarily true these days because as the budgets drop sometimes that’s the leading decision on who they use for directors like “oh, who can do it for this money?” Sometimes what you get is not well delivered ideas.
Because the budget is often limited in modern music videos sometimes they rely on product placement for extra money. How have you found that?
I’ve always struggled with product placement in videos because it’s never well placed.
It’s so obvious.
Well, that’s a result of the artist being in whatever bind that they’re in and I’ve become downwind of it. In other words, an artist comes with the package already saying “hey, I need to highlight this car or these headphones or whatever and you’ve got to do three seconds on the headphones in order to get the money and blah blah, you won’t get your budget approved for the video you want to do if you don’t do that.” It’s like alright, so why fight something that you can’t win. If the artist wants to fight it, I’ll fight along with them and occasionally an artist will push back. Certainly, back in the day, they’d push back and say “there’s no way, it’s awful.” As you said, sometimes with an artist it’s ultimately a climate where the association is needed now. If it were done where the brand approached me and I approached the artist, then I think it could done where the placement would not be so offensive. An example of that would be the Katy Perry “Firework” video where that was fully funded by Deutsche Telekom and you have no three seconds of a cell phone on there. So it was very smart brand integration, where you wouldn’t even know it unless you really looked at the big picture. The only requirement was that Katy have a collective non-pedestaled experience with 200 people that were being selected by Deutsche Telekom through a campaign that they were starting. My only requirement was to shoot it in Eastern Europe somewhere, so I choose Budapest. It was different for me to be challenged to not be obvious with the product placement. I think I did six or seven drafts before Deutsche Telekom signed it off. Katy was fine with that stuff and Katy’s also very precious with her videos, so I don’t think you’ll ever see her holding a cell phone for three seconds and I think there are artists that won’t cave to that. But I also think the artists that do cave might be stuck in a situation where that’s the nature of their deal, like it’s easy to be the queen and say “I won’t do that.” It’s harder to be a hustler trying to come up and have that be your only invitation.
How was working on Outkast’s “
”?
Andre and Big Boi, as does a lot of Atlanta culture, have a very strong tie to the church and the church impact on the community. What I think Big Boi told me at the time was that church is like a fashion show and when they go to church, that’s where everybody brings out the hottest fashions. That’s where everybody goes to be seen and I thought that was a really fresh, interesting idea. You get ready for the day and you get all done up so you can meet at church instead of the club. I thought that was essentially what we were depicting and the rest was just nuances that were a part of that. Andre in a beauty salon was just the beginnings of his eccentric personality coming out and I think Big Boi is very part of the sort of smooth, playa kind of persona, so his little shoes and jacket, his suaveness was his contribution. They wanted to have thought bubbles. That was the second video that I had done for them after “B.O.B” so the culture was really excited and we were having a blast.
Is listening to songs on repeat so you can learn what lyrics to interpret visually part of your process?
It is. Sometimes I question whether I should be ignoring the song and just come up with a vision that the song adapts to. I’ve thought about it, but I do seem to be beholden to the spirit of the song and I feel perhaps that’s associated with why I’ve had success with bands.
I thought that was the characteristic of a lot of your videos. If Missy said something outlandish you’d represent that visually.
Yeah I definitely do think that way. There is a part of me that tries to avoid “see say,” but there’s another part of me that’s like “well, it’s in their script.” In a way, I’m trying to create the house for those lyrics. So if I want to see Missy doing something crazy, sometimes if it’s in the lyrics its permission for me to do something crazy. So the artist might shoot it down if it’s just an abstract thought, like, “oh what if we did this really crazy thing?” They might be like “man, what you talkin bout?” But if it’s in their lyrics and I can kind of tie it to their lyrics, it kind of helps me sell a great visual experience to an artist that might otherwise not be that into it. What you don’t see is the treatments that I’ve written that are way in left field for all them from Jay-Z to Missy. I’ve written some way left centre stuff and what I get is silence. They don’t call back. I almost think I’m going to lose the video and then I try to reach out, talk to them and they kind of, not just those two artists, but artists in general usually when they’re creating the music have an impression of what they’d like to see. Rarely and there are a few and I won’t name names, but there is a few that really like the adventure of what I come up with. Although I will tell you that Limp Bizkit were like that with me, which is why I have a fond place for that video. I wrote what I thought he wanted from the song that he had sent me and Fred [Durst] called me back and was like “this is fucking shit, where’s the Dave Meyers that I want? Write your shit, don’t write some shit you’ve seen me do.” And they told it to me in such a blunt way that I was like “Oh my god, did I compromise without knowing it?” So I stayed up all night and wrote. Pink Floyd’s
The Wall
was one of my favourite films and I was like “well, maybe he’ll let me do it?” Maybe he’ll let me do aliens on the wall and shit coming out of girl’s mouths and buildings exploding and all that kind of stuff and worms and weird, just demented shit and animation in the middle. I sent him that treatment and he was like “Yeah, this is it. What’s it cost? Let’s do it.” So once in a while an artist allows me that privilege and I love that. It is usually a balance of that, that’s an extreme, or it’s some kind of collaboration. Or in the worst-case scenario, it’s something that’s dictated to me at the point at which I can’t get out of the video and I just have to shoot what they want me to shoot. That has happened a couple of times.