Video Chats: Hiro Murai on 'She Wolf (Falling to Pieces)' by David Guetta

Odds are, if you’re reading this blog, you’re familiar with our podcast Music Video Land, where once a week we interview cool music video industry people. After 57 episodes, we’ve realized that there are way more than 57 cool people involved with music videos. We’ve also realized that some of the people we’ve already talked to keep making cool stuff.

In an effort to address the growing number of cool people in the music video industry, we’ve expanded our interviews into our blog. Our podcasts will continue to feature super good audio style (listenable) interviews, but starting now, the blog will also feature super good text style (readable) interviews for you all to enjoy. These interviews will come each week, and they will focus on a director working with a particular artist, either on a single video, or a series of videos.

We begin this series with director Hiro Murai, whose video for David Guetta’s "She Wolf (Falling to Pieces)" was released today. Hiro traveled all the way to Iceland to shoot this video that includes sweet snow dogs, some even sweeter video effects, and a naked lady butt. 

Doug: Was there a brief along with this video or did the treatment come fully from you?

Hiro: The brief was really, really, really open which is super unusual for an artist like Guetta. They wanted to do something kind of narrative and the only thing referenced in the brief was AG’s Spiritualized video, and I’m not sure what that reference was for but they just wanted to do something narrative, and quote unquote “edgy,” and not a big pop video. They wanted to do some alt-y, I think that was their phrasing. So, that was super wide open. But, the song is also not a very alt-y song, so I was trying to think of something that could please all parties. The original idea was way weirder than what it ended up being. The song is super sincere and I’m kind of a snobby, contrarian type; so my impulse at first was to make something really weird that they would never agree to do. The original idea was still a wolf chase, but they were being chased by dear with machine guns instead of antlers, so they had gatling guns on their antlers. And I thought “there is no why they’re going to let me make this really fucking weird video.” So, I just kind of simplified it. Also, it’s an emotional song and I think the thing about making videos for pop music is you have to embrace the music, to get lost in it and be in tuned with it to make something. I felt like that idea was the opposite of the song, so I just took the wolf from it and simplified it. 

Doug: You say the original idea, was that an idea that you actually sent off, or was it just the original idea just in your head?

Hiro: I did a draft of it and I looked at the treatment and when you’re writing you think “oh, this is going to be awesome.” And then after you’re done you read it and are like “oh, wait. There is no way they’re ever going to let me do this. This is probably a terrible idea.” So, I just rewrote it and the version that you see is the one that I sent in.

Doug: So shooting in Iceland, that came from you?

Hiro: Yeah, because I wrote in snow, and it was August, so I was told “you can shoot in 2 or 3 places right now, and one of them is Iceland.” So I said, “that sounds amazing, let’s go to Iceland.” Also, I did write it as a travel job. The last video I did for The Shins, that was the first travel job I’ve had in a really long time, in Portland, and I just loved doing it. You just bring a crew of people that you trust and know are super, super talented and you just go to a new place to be stimulated, and hang out there, and kind of take it all in. The whole process is just really invigorating. So, even though I didn’t know it was going to be Iceland for sure, I just wanted to go somewhere with a crew and shoot something.

Photo from Iceland, stolen from Hiro's Instagram feed.

Doug: Was it the same crew that you brought with you to Portland that you brought to Iceland?

Hiro: Pretty much, with the exception of the DP. Shins was shot by my buddy Will, and this one was shot by Larkin.

Doug: Was any of the cast or crew assembled in Iceland?

Hiro: Yeah, it was weird because there were only about 5 or 6 of us from LA and everyone else was Icelandic. It was kind of a coproduction with this Icelandic production company named Pegasus. All the art people, and makeup people, and the cast, and dog trainer, and everybody else were production people from Iceland. But, the funny part is they are also shooting a Darren Aronofsky movie right now in Iceland, so their production resources are stretched really thin. And they kept saying, “in Iceland, it’s very busy right now. We can’t get this or that.” And everybody is freaking out because Russell Crowe is in Iceland. Larkin put in our gear list and they came back to us and said, “there is only one Apple Box in Iceland right now.”

Doug: So, I guess you lucked out that there were no snow dogs in Darren Aronofsky’s movie.

Hiro: Yeah, we’d have been fucked.

Doug: How was working with the dogs? Was it something where you get a good animal trainer and they take it from there or where there some headaches involved?

Hiro: There’s always headaches when you work with animals just because they’re not aware that they’re on a shoot and they don’t give a shit about getting the shot. But I have to say, they weren’t even animal actors they were just straight up sled dogs, and they do it for tourism and they go up through glaciers and ride around on the dog sled, but the dogs were way better than animal actors I’ve worked with in the past. Just because the guy who runs the dog sled place, because dogs have that pack mentality where there is an alpha, and the guy who runs the place is literally the alpha of the 15 or 20 dogs that they have. So, it wasn’t like an animal actor trainer asking very nicely with treats and manipulating the dog, it was like if he ordered the dogs to run in a straight line and do this, they did it. It was a really weird situation, but it was way less painful than I thought it was going to be.

Calvin the dog handler, wearing shorts in Iceland.

Doug: So, even less painful than when in your Shins video you had to get a dog to wear a wig on it’s head?

Hiro: That was near impossible, for some reason putting the wig on that dog was harder than getting 15 dogs to run in a line on a glacier.

Doug: There was a teaser video, or a trailer video, that came out a few days prior to the official release. That’s something you see often with big pop videos like this one. Did you guys cut that video?

Hiro: They said “we want to do this teaser video, do you have time to do it?” And I was already in effects mode. But Mandy, who edited the actual video, was available for a day or two so she just cut something together really quick and sent them the teaser. But, I was actually listening to your podcast the other day and you guys were talking about tesers, and trailers, and lyric videos and it’s an interesting little world.

Doug: It is, those videos definetly get a ton of traffic and stuff, too. I think your teaser is already at a million views.

Hiro: That freaked me out, dude. When we do our Pitchfork videos or our indie videos, hitting a million is like high-fives all around. And then we put out a teaser video and in four days it’s over a million hits. It’s like, “what is happening with this world?”