Originally posted by ehonauer
Discs: 1

Originally posted by evenswr
I wouldn't get too glum about it. One dual-layer disc could fit a lot of videos...

Originally posted by jekyll
In the most recent issue of Blender (the one with Thom Yorke on the cover), they mention this release, saying "This first in a series of director-compiled DVDs has 17 videos, including the 70s cop show montage of the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage" and Fatboy Slim's "Praise You", in which mail-order-catalog-fortune heir Adam Spiegel, a.k.a. Spike Jonze, leads an incompetent interpretive-dance troupe."
So, not too much info, but 17 videos does cover a fair amount of time. Definitely not 400 minutes of videos, though - too bad!

In addition to directing the Oscar-nominated films Adaptation and Being John Malkovich, Spike Jonze has an impressive career as a groundbreaking music video director. This double-sided DVD is the first collection of his non-theatrical work, including videos for Beastie Boys, Bjork, Fatboy Slim, Daft Punk, Weezer, The Pharcyde, The Breeders, The Notorious B.I.G., The Chemical Brothers, MC 900 Ft. Jesus, Wax, Dinosaur Jr. and Fatlip, and the short films, How They Get There, Mark Paints, The Woods, The Oasis Video That Never Happened, Rockafella Skank, What's Up Fatlip?, Amarillo By Morning, and Torrance Rises. Also includes commentaries by the bands, behind-the-scenes features, interviews, and a 52-page color book.

In addition to directing the Oscar-nominated films Adaptation and Being John Malkovich, Spike Jonze has an impressive career as a groundbreaking music video director. This double-sided DVD is the first collection of his non-theatrical work, including videos for Beastie Boys, Bjork, Fatboy Slim, Daft Punk, Weezer, The Pharcyde, The Breeders, The Notorious B.I.G., The Chemical Brothers, MC 900 Ft. Jesus, Wax, Dinosaur Jr. and Fatlip, and the short films, How They Get There, Mark Paints, The Woods, The Oasis Video That Never Happened, Rockafella Skank, What's Up Fatlip?, Amarillo By Morning, and Torrance Rises. Also includes commentaries by the bands, behind-the-scenes features, interviews, and a 52-page color book.

Music Videos That Show Everything but Performance
By KELEFA SANNEH


EVER since the early 1980's, music videos have existed in a kind of limbo: they often reach more people than the albums they're meant to promote, but there's no easy way to buy them or collect them. A viewer might stumble upon something great on MTV in the middle of the night, then not see it again for years. In October, three of the best (and, not coincidentally, weirdest) music-video directors are to issue DVD retrospectives through Palm Pictures.

Spike Jonze has made classic videos for the Beastie Boys and Fatboy Slim, among others — that was Mr. Jonze who got Christopher Walken to dance through a hotel in Fatboy Slim's "Weapon of Choice." The French director Michel Gondry, perhaps best known for his work with Bjork, likes to turn every video into a dazzling game: once you figure out the trick, it all makes sense, sort of. And the British director (and electronic musician) Chris Cunningham uses music videos as an excuse to create self-contained worlds; his creations for Aphex Twin and Squarepusher are even grander and creepier than Michael Jackson's "Thriller."

None of the three works exclusively in music videos: Mr. Jonze is now being known as the director of "Being John Malkovich" and "Adaptation"; Mr. Gondry is completing his second feature film, "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," starring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, and Mr. Cunningham has made a number of short films, including "Flex," which was shown at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

On an afternoon a few months ago, the directors sat down with Kelefa Sanneh, a pop music critic of The New York Times, to discuss what they do, and why. Here are excerpts.

KELEFA SANNEH How did all of you get started making music videos?

SPIKE JONZE I was always interested. In high school I would make videos on my video camera — you know, really bad ones. Eventually I got this call out of the blue: Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth asked me if I wanted to shoot some skateboarding for a video they were doing. The woman who was directing it was named Tamra Davis. So I got to kind of tag along with her as she was directing it and watch how it was done.

MICHEL GONDRY I was the drummer in a band, in Paris, and I was also in art school. I was interested in animation, so I went to the flea market and bought a Bolex camera, and started to do videos for my band, using stop animation, just trying out techniques.

CHRIS CUNNINGHAM I used to do sculpture and drawings and stuff, and then I completely lost interest and started getting interested in film. I spent about three or four months harassing this English techno band, Autechre, to let me do a video for them. It's humiliating: the first chance you ever get to make something, and it's for a proper video.

JONZE How did it turn out?

CUNNINGHAM Terrible.

SANNEH Did the band like it?

CUNNINGHAM No, they hated it.

GONDRY It's good to start with a failure!

CUNNINGHAM It was pretty heartbreaking for me. I still haven't got over it.

JONZE When I met Michel, maybe seven years ago, we made each other copies of all our videos, and I was amazed — his were all so good, and so original. But he said, "I didn't send you the other ones." So the next time, we made a tape of the worst ones. I wrote a note saying, "Please, don't show this to anybody." But even his bad ones had all these original things.

SANNEH Is it usually pretty obvious when an artist doesn't like your video?

JONZE You can tell. Even if they don't tell you, you know.

GONDRY I did a video for Bjork, "Human Behavior," and she didn't talk to me for a while. I didn't know if she liked it. The record company asked me to do her next video, but they didn't ask her, and then she called me to say she didn't want to do it with me, which was kind of heartbreaking — although it was nice that she was frank about it. But then, she asked me to do a lot more videos.

SANNEH Bjork is the only artist all three of you have worked with, right? Chris, you made that video for "All Is Full of Love," with two Bjork-like robots having sex.

CUNNINGHAM Yeah. For a year and a half, I had been turning her down. It was only when "All Is Full of Love" came along, I loved the song so much that it gave me confidence to have a crack at it. I wanted to do a video with industrial robotics, but she had these Kama Sutra dolls — it was like two completely different angles at once.


GONDRY Sometimes I compare Bjork to Duke Ellington, or somebody like that. She's a great composer, but she can also find qualities in people that they don't even know they have. I remember I was in Bjork's house in Iceland, and she told me about a video Chris had done. But I think I misunderstood what she said. I thought you had written a dialogue where all the bad words created a pattern, then replaced the bad words with beeps. I was so jealous — that was the best idea!

CUNNINGHAM That was one of the things I wanted to do with "Windowlicker," by Aphex Twin [the electronic composer Richard D. James]. I told Richard he could bleep the dialogue in tempo — it would be a good way to bring the track in. He was up for it, in theory, but when it came time to actually do the work, he couldn't be bothered. So I took the beeps out, in the end.

SANNEH Do all of you consciously avoid shooting videos centered around a band playing music?

GONDRY Yeah, I try to avoid that. It's a way to resist the record company agenda — they just want to use videos for promotion, not as any form of art or any extension of the musicians' creativity. It's very disappointing when there is the idea of the story and then you cut away to the performance of the band, like the typical Aerosmith video. I mean, I think if you commit to do a video for a band, you have to center the video around them. And if there is somebody playing a part in the video, it should be someone in the band.

CUNNINGHAM Whenever I hear rock tracks, all I can picture is the band playing instruments. So when I started working with electronic music, I didn't have that obstacle.

SANNEH How important is the song to all of you? Is it possible to shoot a great video for a song you hate?

GONDRY I guess so.

JONZE Really? I don't think it is.

GONDRY Well, no, not that you hate. But I did videos for songs I hated when I started — I had no choice. For me, it was still better than working in a grocery store.

JONZE I think it's hard to make a good video for a song you don't like. It's easy to make a bad video for a song you like, and that's a bummer. But when I've tried to make a video for a band that I didn't really get, it could be a fine video but it doesn't feel satisfying. When I'm making a video, I think, if you already had the image, and you needed to find a song to go with it, and you found this song — what would that image be?

GONDRY I work differently, especially because I don't understand fully the English language. I take words, key words in a song that I understand, and create bridges between them.

CUNNINGHAM That's exactly what I do. You find little spots where the sound makes you think of an image. With "Come to Daddy," by Aphex Twin, when I first heard that screaming noise, I imagined an old lady being screamed at. And then there was a voice saying, "Come to Daddy," so it makes you think of like a parent and child. And then I tried to join the dots up.

GONDRY Sometimes I wish there could be more back and forth — I have an idea, then the musician would create the music, and then from the music I would have more ideas, and so on. But you have to be careful. I did a video for Wyclef Jean, "Another One Bites the Dust." I really liked the song, but I found it awkward that there's this guy who is dead — Freddie Mercury — and they're looping his voice, and you don't attribute it to him, in a way. So I decided that in the video, they would steal a statue of Freddie Mercury. I wrote a story that was completely absurd. But then, in the middle of shooting the video, they replaced one of the rappers, and the new guy rewrote the lyrics. He wrote about him stealing the statue! In a way, that's cool, because the video influenced the music. But he made the concept sound very flat.

JONZE Because it made it look like just a literal interpretation of the song?

GONDRY Yeah. I was very proud of my concept, but because he rewrote the lyrics, it looked like I was not that smart. [He laughs.]

SANNNEH That's the odd thing about music videos — the image and the sounds become joined in people's minds.

CUNNINGHAM Well, you hope it won't detract from the original music or feeling that someone might get when they listen to that music. But I suppose if you're successful, you make a video that people can't separate from the music. In a way, it's a horrible thing to do to someone. Because they'll never listen to that music the same way again.

GONDRY I remember I used to really like the Police. When their second album came out, the cover was blue and silver, and whenever I heard "Walking on the Moon," I would picture somebody walking on the moon, all blue and silvery. Now, in the age of videos, it's impossible — you always have the image of the video. Spike had a great project, where he asked people on the street to listen to a track and give ideas for a video. Then he selected the six best, and he shot them.

JONZE Except we didn't shoot them. But the interviews will be on the DVD. This was Oasis, about six years ago, when they were the biggest thing in London. I got the song from the manager and got into a cab, and I asked the cab driver if he could play it for me. He got super excited that I had the new Oasis single, and he had this whole idea for a video. I met with Noel Gallagher, from Oasis, and I told him about the cab driver, and I told him I wanted to do a video like that, and he said, "Cool, let's do it." I shot all this stuff around London for three or four days, then I went back to meet with the whole band, and it was really intense. It was me and these five guys, and four of them hated me. It was really bad. [He laughs.]

CUNNINGHAM I had a bad experience when I did "Frozen," for Madonna. I was so excited to finally have some money to do a video, then I ended up out in the desert and there was a monsoon: the equipment got rained on, the cameras broke down and I ended up having to just shoot her running around with a cloak andhope for the best in the edit room.

JONZE Did you cry?

CUNNINGHAM I couldn't get out of bed for about a month afterward.

SANNEH As you went through old videos to put these DVD's together, were there certain things you were proud of or embarrassed about?

JONZE Well, shooting the Pharcyde video, "Drop," part of the fun was how seriously they took it. We reversed the song and shot the video backward, so we transcribed this abstract gibberish, and they had to learn it. I loved that band, and we'd just spend days hanging out, rehearsing. And then there's some stuff that just looks really amateur, though I kind of like it. I did a video for MC 900 Foot Jesus where he's in a box. I really thought I was doing the Coen brothers, I thought I was like it was going to be this amazing production. But it wasn't — it was, like, super-amateur.

SANNEH Are any of you working on music videos now?
CUNNINGHAM I'm making a bunch of short videos for my own music. I got to the point where most of the ideas I had were so specific that I couldn't use any of them. It's quite frightening, really. I've become so intolerant that I'm almost unable to collaborate.

GONDRY What if your idea is bad?

CUNNINGHAM Well, more than likely I've done loads of bad ideas already.

GONDRY And what's worse? Getting influenced to do something that you end up not liking? Or refusing to collaborate, and still ending up with something you don't like? I guess I'd prefer the second one, because at least you blame yourself.

JONZE Me too. I'd rather blame myself for having a bad idea than blame myself for doubting my own ideas.

Originally posted by bigbro79
For all those interested, I'm expecting my pre-release copy very soon in the mail. I'll have a complete review of the disc up in the next few days.

Randy

Originally posted by bigbro79
For all those interested, I'm expecting my pre-release copy very soon in the mail. I'll have a complete review of the disc up in the next few days.

Randy

Originally posted by no pants
it says that windowlicker - bleeped version
and that doesn't sound good, for the video to pack it's punch it need to be untouched.

Originally posted by PortlandFilmGuy
preorder from where? I thought this wasn't coming out for a month. Did you get a shipping confirmation?

Originally posted by RichDB10
Damn!!

Hope this isn't the case but if it is then it's going to be almost a constant barrage of bleeps at the start as anyone who has seen the video will know.