Talking with Gus Van Sant
Gus Van Sant Gets WEIRD
THE MUSIC VIDEO SHOOT FOR HANSON'S "WEIRD" WAS A VERY ELABORATE ONE. ZAC, TAY AND IKE HAD PUT TOGETHER A CONCEPT FOR THE VIDEO AND TOLD ME ABOUT IT OVER THE PHONE ONE NIGHT WHEN I WAS VISITING MY PARENTS IN KENTUCKY.
I REMEMBER MY FIRST REACTION BEIN: BOY THIS IS REALLY WEIRD.
The idea had a lot of things going on in it. There was a subway that we had to find and one of the subway cars was supposed to be filled with water. There was a revolving white room that the guys had dreamt up and a lot of weird people to walk by in the subway with punk rockers, twins and businessmen riding in the subway cars. Hanson definitely was into the special effects in a big way and they wanted to play with the audience's mind a little bit with this video. So I called my producer Danny Wolf and we forged ahead to try and think up ways that we could accomplish all of these ideas in one video.Danny called the cinematographer Harris Sevides who liked the idea of doing a video for Hanson and jumped on board the "Weird" project.
Harris is famous as being one of the only cinematographers that Madonna likes to work with on her videos because Harris is so talented that he makes everyone look really good. Between Harris, Danny and I we had worked on videos for David Bowie, Elton John, Madonna, Mariah Carey, REM, Michael
Jackson and Red Hot Chili Pepers. But Hanson was as challenging if not more than any of the others. We made a story board that the guys liked and began to build the white room which ended up to be a giant round Victorian room with a floor of lights that rolled on it's side and was twenty five feet tall.
This was built by Tom Foden who had designed and built the spaceship for Michael Jackson's "Scream" video. The painting on the wall of the white room was "The Judgement of Solomon" by an eighteenth century Italian painter named Tiepolo and was an enlarged color print fixed on the wall of the room and was smooth so that Hanson could slide across it as the room revolved.
The entire spinning room was very weird to be inside of and not that easy to walk around in when it was spinning although Ike Tay and Zac pretty much mastered it right away and didn't have any accidents. There was one close call however when Tay forgot to jump down off of the a ledge of a doorsill and when he finally did the room had revolved enough that he found himself perched atop what seemed like an enormous skateboard ramp and had to jump down in a shot which looked very dangerous.
Another very tricky part of the video shoot was having Hanson swim underwater a lip sync to the song at the same time. The guys had to wear weights so that they wouldn't float out of the shot. And that had to hold their breath for a whole verse while they swam toward the camera.
Ike, Tay and Zac pulled it off without any gulps of water. After it began to air around the world, Mercury Records told us that "Weird" had become a number one play request on MTV-right up there with Puff Daddy and Madonna which made me very happy, and Hanson happy too.
Email: totallytaylor83@hotmail.com
