Lorde "Yellow Flicker Beat" (Emily Kai Bock, dir.)
You bought a pack of smokes for your 18th birthday. Ella "Lorde" Yelich-O’Connor celebrated her's by releasing a hugely anticipated video for this new song off The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1. (And hey, maybe she also bought cigarettes, although I doubt it).
The video skips the usual movie clipjob in favor of a series of unexplained, yet surely not unrelated vignettes that bear several filmic influences, especially Kubrick.
Emily Kai Bock, director: "Ella emailed me during the summer while she was on tour with Majical Cloudz, who I made a video for a couple years ago. I was amazed that she would reach out to me directly. Usually with such a big-name artist, there is a team of people you have to go through, but she kept a close connection to me from start to finish - from feedback on the treatment to editing notes, we were in constant touch.
Ella is a true collaborator. She had sent me a reference video of Mae West being interviewed by Dick Cavett. In the clip, Dick Cavett walks across a massive airplane hanger to this tiny lit set, where Mae West is reclining in this chair - it's a really surreal interview setting. I wrote her a treatment with a bunch of these kind of set ideas, of things that could live within a dark void of a large vacant space, under a singular light - a motel room, a confessional, a chandelier, a streetlamp, and so on - and she loved it. I was really excited about the idea of using black as a way to transition between the worlds, losing the context of what is exterior and what is interior.”
