Before David Fincher became a top movie director — The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, Fight Club, Se7en, etc — he was a top music video director, delivering some of the most famous clips from the first Golden Age of MV's and founding epochal video production company, Propaganda Films. Some of his video credits include:
- Madonna "Express Yourself" and "Vogue"
- Aerosmith "Janie's Got A Gun"
- George Michael "Freedom 90"
- and pretty much every Paula Abdul video you remember, except the one with the cat
Fincher has been doing press for Benjamin Button and he revisited his music video days during an interview with UK paper The Guardian... Click on through for an excerpt...
Mark Salisbury, The Guardian: ...And then you started to make pop videos, just when pop videos were being taken seriously.
David Fincher: Were pop videos ever taken seriously?
MS: Well, more than they are now. People don't watch them now.
DF: OK, yeah, for good reason. It's interesting, I just grew up in a really interesting and bizarre place in a bizarre time. There was a real nexus of things. From third grade, I was making movies in 16mm, and every year, in film class – and everybody took film – they'd give you a song, a 45 and they'd say, "Make a film to this song," because there was no sync sound. So you'd go out and shoot stuff with your friends, and you'd cut it and it was made to that song. So when MTV came along, people went, "We want you to make a film to this song," and I thought, "I actually know how to do that. That may actually be the only thing I do know how to do." That was a good gig for me.
MS: So did you treat them as a film school?
DF: Yeah. I hate to say this because I took millions of dollars from people to do these things. But the day that they started to put your name on it was a horrible day for me. I just thought it was so cool that you could try out this stuff and no one would ever ... you know, they'd blame it on Michael Jackson. [audience laughs]
MS: But movies were always the goal, when you were making videos like Express Yourself, that Metropolis thing.
DF: Yeah, we thought that was good fun. I don't know, she came up with that idea. She was like, "I wanna do Metropolis," and I thought, it's her million bucks.
MS: At what point did Hollywood notice you? Was there one video that put you on their radar?
DF: No. You know, Hollywood always pretends not to notice you. I don't know. In a weird way, you have to be in LA long enough before anybody will realise that you're serious about it. The last thing they want to do is enable people who aren't going to be dedicated to their cause. I'd been making videos for 10 years, and this sounds stupid but I'd been there for six or seven years and felt like I had been there forever. I mean, I moved there in 1984 and started Propaganda Films in 1987, so I'd been doing commercials and videos for eight or 10 years before anybody gave me a shot at making a movie. And I wish they hadn't.
Read more at TheGuardian.co.uk...
