I touched on the subject of Free Energy and their video a couple times. I had also posted a blast informing you guys that the audition was at Urban Outfitters in Philly. Well, Pitchfork conducted an interview with the director of the video for “Bang Pop,” Josh Nussbaum.
Here’s a short excerpt, but click here for the entire article (and to watch the video).
Pitchfork: This is obviously a super fun video. Was it fun to make? Or was it hard to wrangle all those people to look like they were having fun?
JN: I kept promising myself that I was going to have fun making the video. This was the mantra that I would repeat every morning. By nighttime, I needed to remind myself that I should be having fun with it. It was a huge challenge. The casting was left until two or three days before the shoot. At a certain point, I just had to put the casting into God’s hands. We shot on the week of the ash cloud, so I lost a couple key members of my crew, and I ended up taking a lot of that responsibility on myself. The creative process of making the video was incredibly fun, but my personal expectations that are so high that I’m constantly having to remind myself to have a good time.
Pitchfork: Why are there so many bubbles in the video?
JN: The bubbles were a momentary inspiration in my first meeting with the production designer. I was just trying to intimidate him by creating an impossible list of requests. I probably said, “Oh, and of course there’s gotta be bubbles the whole time”. So I was very pleased when I showed up and there were bubbles the whole time.
Pitchfork: In the hallway scene, Evan Wells, the band’s bass player, is doing all these wheelchair tricks. How many times did he fall down?
JN: Evan is just really good. In fact, he didn’t fall once. Half of my directions in that scene were to him because he was at the front of the scene. I really wanted him to fall; I thought that would be great for the video. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. He did give it his all, he just didn’t fall. The wheelchair was supposed to have fireworks shooting off it, but there were a lot of small to large pyrotechnics– as well as all sorts of nudity and drug references– that were at some point slated for the script, but fell by the wayside.
Musically Amusing 