Natasha Pincus Pt 2: ‘The Video Should Make The Song Better’

In the final installment of a two-part interview, director Natasha Pincus talks to DOUG WALLEN about navigating deadlines, shooting in Thailand with Powderfinger and imitation being the highest form of flattery, especially when it’s by Muse.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

End Of Fashion ‘Kamikaze’/‘Fussy’

What’s your collaboration process like with Warwick? Besides being your partner, how does your working relationship work?
It’s extremely important to achieving what we achieve. I’ve obviously got the benefit of having him in the house with me, but having really close contact with your DP [Director of Photography], especially in the music video medium, is crucial. Because he’s very involved in the achievement of the look, but also knocks down ideas I have along the way that aren’t achievable. He shapes so much of the visual world. Everyone’s like, “Oh, you have a very consistent look. I can see it’s your work.” Well, most of that’s him, because he’s always the DP. So we work very closely together, not conceptually but very much visually.

At the same time, we’re careful to keep it apart. I don’t talk to him about concept until I have a concept. Because otherwise I feel like it doesn’t have time to germinate and form properly in my mind. I’ve learned to keep it to myself until it’s developed enough to talk about it. But then he’s uniquely available to me during that next part of the process, and that detail can come across on the screen. And he’s the best. At the end of the day, it’s a DP’s medium and you’ve got to have the best DP. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

You talked about shooting the Paul Kelly clip on 35mm, and I know you shot a Pete Murray clip on 16mm. But what do you usually shoot on?
It depends on the project. I’m a massive film buff: I’d love to film on film. But my career has come right on that hinge between things being shot on film and film being a really dying medium. It’s almost obsolete, actually. As of a few months’ time, we won’t even be able to develop film stock in Melbourne anymore. Ever. Anywhere. It’s just closing down. If it was up to me, everything would be on film. That being said, certain projects like the two related End of Fashion videos [for ‘Kamikaze’ and ‘Fussy’]: that was all achievable because it was a digital medium. We purposely shot four or five hours’ worth of footage, to get the ratio to one-hour-per-minute.

My approach was what you call “spray and pray”, where you work with the actor and talk to him the whole time and you’re filming everything. You go through for weeks and find those beautiful moments in performance and lift them out. You can never do that in film: it’s too expensive and just a waste of resources. That was one of the most complex videos I’ve done. It just depends on the look and the performance/production strategy of each concept. You match the film stock or video and beyond that the camera: how big the camera is, how big the lenses are, how much budget you’ve got. With Powderfinger [for ‘Burn Your Name’], what camera you could smuggle into Thailand. [Laughs] Almost every video’s been shot on a different camera.

Have you only worked with Australian artists?
[Thinks about it] Yeah.

I meant that in a good way…
No, no, I just had to think. Yeah, it’s funny. See, the thing is, I only do a few videos a year. I do a lot of feature-film writing and screenwriting. Feature film is a very big goal of mine. So I always try to make sure I’ve got balance. Because music videos absorb you so much, I’ve just never wanted to go off and be a career music-video maker and churn out videos for the sake of it. Until July last year, I didn’t even have a show reel. I’ve never actually sent a reel to a label. I’ve never done any of those promotion things, so I’ve never even thought about potentially looking overseas.

It’s just coming up to me now, because I’m hearing of all the success of the Gotye video overseas. It’s now making its way into the US I have to ask myself, “What do I want from this?” And I haven’t got an answer yet, to be honest. I’d love to continue working with great artists everywhere. I just don’t know what that means in terms of time and what to give up to chase it. But ultimately, yeah, of course we’ve all got our private dreams of which artist we’d love to collaborate with. At the moment, actually, I’m working with another one of my heroes on a new video. It’s fantastic. Every day I pinch myself that I get these opportunities.

Can you tell me who it is?
I suppose. Missy Higgins.

Lior ‘I’ll Forget You’/‘Heal Me’

You mentioned only making a few videos a year, and I saw that pre-production for the shadow-puppet clip took two months. Is there ever a typical amount of time for pre-production?
It really depends on the concept. Sometimes it’s the [reason for] saying no to something. Because when a label comes to you, they generally give you a “video treatment outline” [VTO]. It goes out to maybe 20 directors. Literally it’ll be the budget and the delivery date. And often the delivery date is three weeks from when you’ve received it. So you have to come up with the idea, pitch it, get approval, pre-production, production, post-production and delivery in three weeks. Now, if I was going to shoot some guy running down the street on my phone, I could do that. [But even] if some concepts are super, super simple and you happen to have the stars aligned to get the people you want also available at the same time, you’re gonna need at least a couple weeks pre-[production].

I’m very detailed, so I like to take my time and do it properly. The same goes with post-[production]. I always say to them, “Time, money and quality: pick two.” They never have money and they always want high quality, so they’ve just gotta give you more time. So yeah, as long as possible in pre-[production] shortens the production period and makes everything much more focused. But minimum is a few weeks.

It’s interesting that after you did the shadow-puppet video for Lior’s ‘I’ll Forget You’, you did one for his song ‘Heal Me’ that’s much more traditional.
I actually did ‘Heal Me’ first. Well, sort of at the same time. ‘Heal Me’ came out in November [2007], and we were already starting to play with ‘I’ll Forget You’, which we didn’t film until March the following year. Again it’s the song: if a song’s music and lyric is so big and so epic and you have big, epic visuals, it can look too melodramatic. When a song is being so exposing like that and so orchestral, you just want to find one emotional note to tell the story. In that case, it was just the visual of him constantly journeying through his different states of frustration and grief and anxiety about this relationship and who he was. Just expressing that in that movement across different landscapes. But ‘I’ll Forget You’? Totally different. Lior actually came to me, having seen a shadow-puppetry performance. I wouldn’t have had an awareness of that at all if it hadn’t been for Lior’s find. That was great, having that entree onto those guys, who are brilliant. Collaborating like that was fun.

Kasey Chambers & Shane Nicholson ‘Monkey On A Wire’/Vusta ‘Buried Alive’

You’ve used animation in clips for Kasey Chambers and Shane Nicholson and Vusta. You have an animation director [Nicholas Kallincos], but what are the logistics like?
They’re almost the most fun you can making a video. Because your imagination is mostly the only limit you have. All the limitations you’re given just force your creativity, so it has its own velocity and trajectory, which are interesting. But with animation, Nick can pretty much do everything. So I just sit there and have my cup of tea and look out the window. It’s an extremely fertile world, and he has my complete trust in terms of the aesthetic, which I don’t find with many people. So the combination’s awesome.

The thing that’s happened in music videos in the last few years since we did those, obviously, is that animations have turned up everywhere. As budgets have come down so severely for music videos – and it has extremely dropped in the last three years – the only thing a lot of artists can afford to do is pick an animator out of a short film festival somewhere and, to be honest, grossly underpay them and make a $3000 or $4000 video instead of a live action one. So now they’re flooded, and the opportunities to really stand out among them is more difficult. The medium’s changed, and I don’t know if it’s possible to do them again in the same way we attacked those two.

But certainly I had an absolute ball doing them. And I brought Nick on as art director for the Sarah Blasko video. He designed the idea of the big painting [behind her]. So we all work together in different ways.

Declan And The Antics ‘Born For The Nightlife’

I’ve never seen something shot in thermal like your Declan and the Antics clip. Had that been done before?
No, except three months later Muse did one exactly the same and there was a bit of a question among the people behind the scenes if they had copied it. Because his publisher or someone is in common. I don’t really know: I stay away from all those issues. It was amazing to me that at the time it hadn’t been done.

Again, it was an idea I had from the song that I didn’t know if we could achieve. We went off and did all the scientific testing of this camera to see. It was perfect for the song: I wasn’t just doing it for the sake of doing it. It was so much fun. Again, there was no budget: indie guy who was a friend of a friend. Having no money helped us narrow the field in the thought process. We only really had budget for the camera, and his dad was making the sausages for everyone’s lunch. That was it. Then I did the editing over a long, long time, because I shot so much stuff. I really enjoyed making that. That was a lot of laughs that day, let me tell you. [Laughs] Again no one had clothes on!

We’ve talked about pre-production, but I’m sure post-production can be a long process too.
Yeah. Again, the longer you’re given, the better the product will be. To me, you really want the edits to bring out the song. The video should make the song better. You should be able to hear the song better, watching the video. The edit is really, really responsible for that. I’ve loved editing for a long time, but I used to work with a couple editors who I loved working with. But as the budgets got smaller and smaller, I even had to cut editing fees. That’s the first thing I can save money on. So I’ve started editing myself. It’s been a blessing in disguise. I’d love to say I didn’t spend those extra two or three weeks in the darkroom away from my family, but we can’t afford that. It’s actually helped me, because it’s given me control all the way through the process. And an intimate, hands-on relationship with the work all the way through.

With the Wally video for sure, I was cutting that and re-cutting [up to] the night before. I made three last changes for some reason. And I could do that. Whereas if I’d hired an editor, I would have locked it off and would have had to sit with a couple of those decisions even though they weren’t right. So I love having that access to the work myself. But it can take a very long time, because I’m not very technically proficient. I do it the long way. Some of my processes are apparently very unusual. [Laughs] I’m told I have a very weird way of doing it. But it works for me, and I think I will continue to cut my own stuff.

Powderfinger ‘Burn Your Name’

Was your Powderfinger clip one of their last?
It was. Their second final band video. At the time, they hadn’t decided or announced their disbanding. So it was a really jovial atmosphere over there in Thailand. There was a massively positive atmosphere about the whole shoot for everyone, so I had no idea what was around the corner. They’d been one of my favourite bands pretty much my whole life, so I just had to put all of that history away. As soon as I got the green light on the video, I took a deep breath, put my Powderfinger stubby holder in the drawer and went “Forget about that.” [Laughs] They’re now just a group of dudes I’m working with. But that was a really big career highlight for me.

And that was inspired by your own experience witnessing this celebration?
Exactly. We’d been there a year earlier. Now that image has turned up everywhere. In the last year, those lanterns taking off is on TV ads, in Flight Centre brochures. It’s actually the cover now of the Thailand Lonely Planet Guide, as of a few months ago. So I think we got it just in time, before the rest of the world discovered it as well. But I encourage everyone to go. It’s beautiful.

Is it ever strange to see these almost imitations of your ideas pop up?

Yeah. The coolest, though, is those parodies that turn up. [Like] all the Gotye parodies online. They’re so funny. A band called The Former Love Pirates did a really great one, but there’s heaps and heaps of people at home just in their own time, recreating the video and painting on their walls. And kids at school and in schoolyards doing it for their friends. That kind of stuff is really baffling. I find that so surreal. And creative: people do them with dolls and hand puppets.

It’s a massive compliment, the flattery of that. That people could be so affected by something that was basically a brain fart I had one day. [Laughs] The next thing you know, someone halfway around the world is recreating it in their lounge room. I had no capacity to deal with that, really. [Laughs] I think I’ll have to wait a few years before it all makes sense. It’s just one surprise after another. I still can’t believe I’ve got an ARIA on my bedside table.

Watch all of Natasha Pincus’s work here.

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PART ONE: Pincus on working on Gotye's 'Somebody That I Used To Know', Paul Kelly's 'God Told Me' and Sarah Blasko's 'We Won't Run'.