El-P knows what it takes to promote an album. As a hip-hop producer, artist, and co-founder of the record label Definitive Jux, El-P has experience in every step of the creation, release, and marketing of an album. For his latest release, Cancer For Cure, El reached out to director and photographer Timothy Saccenti and asked him to collaborate on all aspects of promotion, from the album packaging to the music videos, and everything in between. We talked to Timothy about this unique opportunity, and found out how the two amazing music videos, "The Full Retard" and "Stay Down," fit into the equation. 

Doug: You've done two videos in a row for El-P, where did your relationship with El begin?

Timothy: I have a unique relationship with El because I did the album art, the press photos, and most of the visual campaign as far as stills go, for his previous album “I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead.” At that point, I hadn’t actually done any video work. I’d been a photographer on my own for about five or six years, but I was just starting to get into video, so we didn't do any msuic videos for it together. But when this album came out, he wanted me to creative direct the packaging, the press, and the videos as much as possible, which is really unique. I hadn’t really had that relationship with someone before. Basically, we were able to sit down six months before the album came out and plan what we were going to do, an actual attack plan about having the press photo be a certain way, and the album art be a certain way, then do teaser videos that lead into these particular music videos that we plan on doing. To have that kind of strategy was really unique, so by the time we went to go develop the video for “The Full Retard," we had already been working on this project for six or seven months on and off. We had a very good rapport and very good shorthand about what we were going to do. We understood the limits and parameters with particularly with these kinds of things, budgets are very constrained so that you have to be creative in other ways. It never really affected our quality because of the design and the way we were going for it. It made it so that we had to be kind of conscious and on the same page as far as ideas were, because there wasn't going to be a lot of wiggle room. El came to me and said was he wanted to make the funniest video that people had seen in a long time. He wanted the first video to be really funny.

Doug: So is that when the idea for “The Full Retard” started to materialize?  

Timothy: I particularly wanted to do “Stay Down” first, because I felt like that track was like nothing he had done before. It had a good crossover appeal, and was some more in my world of what I want to see in music videos. More light, texture, ambiance, and a darker tone, but he didn't want to do that. He wanted to do “The Full Retard.” He thought it was something the fans would love. He is very into making sure that the first video was really strong. Really funny and interesting. El is actually an extremely funny person, even though it's tempered by this very dark, dystopian edge. Then he can flip on a dime. If you listen to his music, it's in that same realm where you're not quite sure if he's kidding about things. It's a sardonic take on things that is so extreme that I don't even know if he knows half the time what he's thinking about it. It’s just humor and despair combining or colliding. So, he just said “I want it to be the funniest video people have seen in a long time and I want it to be a buddy story." On my end, we had been working on a campaign for Oxfam, the charity organization, which involved these characters, a donkey and a elephant, having a food fight. We had these really intricate masks made for it. It was funny, and one of the people who had worked on that actually had worked on "Toonces The Driving Cat" sketches from SNL, which El-P also loved. He said, “I would love to do like a 'Toonces the Driving Cat' thing,” and I felt comfortable doing masks and puppets because I just get in that world. El also mentioned Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I had done a video for the band Washed Out recently that involved some really complex mirror screen projection, and it gave it a very lo-fi feel. We designed it around the techniques that I felt comfortable with and that would come across this sort of wonky, really funny lo-fi, definitely other worldly, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas manor, but with some kind of partner in crime for him. 

Doug: When did you decide that Mr. Killums, who is addicted to violence, hookers, and drugs, was going to act the way he does?

Timothy: El is involved in every step of the process. We go back and forth and back and forth. I’m definitely translating his ideas and makeing them visual, and then bouncing them back to him and adding my sense of humor, and it goes back and forth and back and forth. That’s why for me, it’s a very rewarding relationship. I’m not showing up with 50 ideas and him shooting them down and then we decide on one. I wanted to make this kind of very disturbing video, but we figured you can’t have an actual person doing these things. You can’t have a human being, especially not a male, going around having sex with hookers, shooting little girls, and doing drugs. But you can get an anthropomorphized animal to do that, and it becomes funny. It becomes more symbolic, and the viewer can project on to it without bringing up all the connotations that happened with an actual person. I could get my head around that whole idea, and felt like we can really go crazy with that without any of the psychological fallout that you can get from watching a human being do all these things. Then, El being from New York, he said “I want there to be a squirrel with an eye patch.” I have no idea where the eye patch came from. 

Doug: So, the actual actions of Mr. Killums and what he's doing on screen, is that coming from you, from El, or from the puppeteer? How does that break down?

Timothy: Production had this great guy who actually ended up designing the puppet. He's from Kid America, it’s a puppet show. Then I worked with my storyboard artist whose name is Joe Pogee. He came up with some really amazing ideas. Then El and I just came up with a list of like dozens and dozens of ideas. We had horrible things we wanted the squirrel to do. That was basically how that come together and I just shot and shot and shot and shot. We had spent two days with a puppeteer and a full crew, and then I shot for six other days with just the puppet, myself, and the DP—doing a lot of the more horrible things that he does which I couldn't really do in front of a full crew. It was that kind of concept you could get something to feel epic; it's the way you brain processes it. It's about bring it in different environments and seeing different things happen. For this piece in particular, it was not about the timing of one big payoff, it was about a bombardment, which for me felt more like how his production design is. It's bombarding you with sounds, and noises, and ridiculous things all the time. I tried to match that visually, and to do that I had to have massive amounts of footage and events happening. Things that we would even just use tiny clips of, maybe we only use ten frames of something sometimes, but we still have to shoot that for six hours, that was the only way for me to get across that intensity of humor that I was trying to get at, and I feel like it worked. We had to sacrifice a lot of more of the complex lighting, and texture, and elements, but I came to the conclusion that if something’s not funny, no one compliments the lighting on it. If it's super high res and completely sharp, it doesn’t make it any funnier than if it’s a little off and the lightings a little imperfect. That’s not how humor works. It was just about getting volumes and volumes of stuff, and the the amazing line mechanic editor who is amazing at storytelling and humor and is a filmmaker himself, figured out how to bash all these things together to make it actually feel like this epic event. But even when we finished with that, at that point we didn’t know who Mr. Killums was, he came to life through two weeks of shooting. By the time we were done with it, we knew he was a really disturbed person, or creature, or whatever the hell he is. We’d bring him on set-in and the energy would just change because it would be like there’s a squirrel with an Uzi, with an eye-patch, and he’s vomiting. That changes the energy of the room, and then people started responding to him in a way that was pretty interesting. We had a day of shooting topless models with the puppet, and at first they seemed a little iffy about it, but at the end the girls were like, “I know I’m going to call you Friday night and be like, 'I need Mr. Killums, bring him back over here'.” I was personally surprised. But, then El took it and just ran with it. He took it on tour, he was doing interviews with it, and those would be various people from our team who did those actual interviews. It was just a really fun character to keep alive. I think the concept being really strong, and that he  is representing the darker parts of your personality, and the most damaged parts, made it so that people can relate to him. I know that I can. 

Doug: Was it based on the success of “The Full Retard,” and the way people were reacting to Mr. Killums, that he makes an appearance in “Stay Down”? Or was that always planned?

Timothy: We had a trilogy of videos planned and we’re probably still going to do the last one. The “Stay Down” concept actually started when we were just finished “The Full Retard,” and it was in an embryonic stage at that point. The tone was very serious, and the production was on a scale that was pretty epic. Since El-P was going on tour, we had to tone the scale down, but the concept was the same. The concept stars with El performing because we wanted to have a performance video, which he hadn’t really done before. He had played “Stay Down” on David Letterman and I was really impressed by it because usually, to me, when you see a lot of hip-hop, it’s a little bit lacking because it’s so driven by production. So I came back and said, “Well, we really have to do a live thing because this is really strong live. You’ve never done a live video before, like a performance video. You probably want to do one during your career, I think. I really enjoy shooting them because I like watching you perform and I think I get something out of that.” There are lyrics about stage moms and things like that, and then we had the idea that the choruses are basically representing people’s fantasies and dreams, and the projection of a reality that doesn’t exist. That’s why Killums gets destroyed in the end, and then El is more the bringer of truth. Maybe not as pretentious as that, but that is supposed to be the dynamic there. With El-P, if you get those ideas settled, he lets you run with it.

Doug: When did you guys decide to do is as a prequel?

Timothy: We went back and forth about how what the concept was, and we kept wanting to squeeze in Mr. Killums because he was so popular at this point and we had also really grown fond of him. We just couldn’t figure out at first how to put him in. I wasn’t really that into having him just show up for no reason, so I thought that it might not really work and would probably take the viewer out of the picture. Then just one day, a light bulb went over my head and I thought “prequel.” Whenever you say prequel, people can get their head around it and go, “okay, right.” It let us justify a lot of things we were doing because it ended up being an origin story, and there’s motivation for building concepts around it and building this world around it. We wanted it to end so that if you play “The Full Retard” right after “Stay Down,” it would make sense both chronologically and visually in the end. We want it to seem that "The Full Retard" is the day after the “Stay Down” video, and explained why he lost his eye and why he's going crazy and why there’s a girl in “The Full Retard” video that had the crown on that Mr. Killums shoots. It was loosely tied back to the pageant girls because they had crowns on, and if you do play them one after another, it does make sense. 

Doug: “The Full Retard” video only came out a couple months ago, so it's possible that someone could encounter “Stay Down” first. Was it important for you to make “Stay Down” work without prior knowledge of the first video?

Timothy: Yes, that to me was really important. Also, for “The Full Retard” video, it had to come out completely bulletproof, like a bomb that had exploded. It had to come out extremely vicious, and start really strong, and just destroy everything in its path. Because it was the first video for the album and it’s really important to do that, and we designed it that way for it to be really impactful. The “Stay Down” video was not designed that way and I didn’t want it to be. It was meant to be like a middle chapter in something much more. It is obviously much slower paced, much more immersive. When we're doing pieces, I either want to make the piece life affirming, or life questioning. it should end either very triumphantly, or somewhat mysteriously. “Stay Down” was the questioning one, which I really enjoyed doing. As much fun as it is to do exciting videos where the humor is ramped up, sometimes the slower ones may get less attention but they seep in a little deeper. It was important to make sure this video was the one that made you a little more squirmy and uncomfortable, and hopefully a little more thought provoking, but still really funny because that's it's aesthetic. But, if Mr. Killums was not in the video we could have just cut it differently. We probably could have had a different ending obviously, and it probably would have been designed more viciously at the end. But, I'm really happy with how it came out. It’s very rare that you get to go back to an artist and they say “let’s continue the story.” 

Doug: I haven’t heard of a music video director helping an artist to plot out how they're going to market an album from start to finish, was that a pretty rare opportunity for you?

Timothy: Yes, it was really rare. I think El-P in particular understands the industry because he ran a label. He understands how the system works as far as how you put out a record. Just all the technical things. You put out a record, you need a video this far before. You go on tour, you need a video to show up in the middle of the tour. If you want them all to tie together, you have to shoot it three months before you’re going. He understands a lot of these logistics. Whereas with a lot of artists and a lot of labels, they call you for a video not realizing they need it in two weeks. There’s a lot of that rush to get it out, and they can’t even think that far ahead. A lot of times the labels do one video for an album, and if the record doesn’t blow up, they don’t promote the album any more. Whereas El has vested interest in promoting the album, and understands the long game of how the cycle works. I understand it too, and for me, you say it’s rare the director gets involved so early, but I have a unique position in that I do still photography and about 50% of my time in still photography. Very often I’m meeting artists way before the album is even done. We’d be shooting them for an editorial or something, or because they need album art, and we meet up and discuss things. You gain their trust and you get to know them. You’re not involved in the very brutal pitching process that normally happens where you’re just a random director being thrown into the mix. That’s where I have a little advantage, but definitely with El because we have worked together before. Yes, it does rarely happen that they come to you and say "we want to do multiple videos in this whole story." You see it happen sometimes, but often it seems like artists jump from director to director, depending on the song. Usually the artist is just so busy they can’t even be involved once the album is out. 

Doug: I notice that Pitchfork.TV produced “Stay Down,” and it also premiered on Pitchfork. Considering that you were involved so heavily with the whole process of the album promotion, were you also involved with the Pitchfork partnership? 

Timothy: The way it works with Pitchfork, they’re not like a line production company who is actually producing this shoot, as far as showing up on set, ordering cameras, and things like that. They’re more executive producing it, so they’re overlooking some of the aspects of it, but we actually have a production company. I’m actually starting with Radical Media, and they had some input into that, but the line production was done by the company called Starworks Group, I’ve worked with them on the whole campaign and they’re friends with El as well. They actually did the day-to-day production, and we would bounce things back and forth through Pitchfork, but they were the ones who really pulled everything together. 

Doug: I noticed a few months ago Pitchfork put out a casting all call for this video, where did the idea of fan casting come from?

Timothy: I was involved with casting, but not as much as a casting director. They would send stuff and say, “What do you want?” I tell them, and then they go and do their casting call, and they did one on Pitchfork. I wasn’t that involved in that element of it. They send you the pictures and ask if I think they will work, and then we all decide. I did a video for Passion Pit which was a similar where they had fans in the video, and it was good for them because we needed a huge amount of people for the video. Well, 100 people on a video is huge depending on the production. That one worked out fine, but sometimes those things can be a little bit sketchy because people aren’t professional. They might not realize that they have to wait around six hours between shots, so they fade out of it. With the El-P video, we had a set of people that were the fans, who were interested and seemed dedicated and stayed all day, and then we had our key actors who were the pageant people, mainly women and their daughters, who were actually pageant girls. They actually compete in beauty pageants, so it was a semi documentary in that fashion. The pageant girls were actually quite surprising because I wasn't sure how they were going to take the tone of the video, it's not quite a flattering light for them. I put them in front of the camera to do the initial tests, which were early in the day, and I asked one of the moms, ”Can you just smile?” She said, “I can’t smile, I have too much Botox. But, I can look like a real fucking bitch,” and then I thought, “We’re going to be okay.”

Doug: Is there much directing of the actors when they're not actually actors?

Timothy: I basically just told them to go crazy, or stay still, or go from disgusted to whatever, and you give them some motivation to do that. The first few takes we’re just scanning the crowd, and we’re shooting at a hundred and twenty frames a second, in attempt to make a video mostly about the portraits of their faces. That’s why it’s so slow, the camera pan is slow. The small nuances of changes of emotion, that’s my photography background. We would do the first few passes and then look at the take, and between the DP and myself and sometimes El, we would pick out the ones who actually really seem to nail the emotion, and then designed the shots around them a bit more. There’s definitely an organic process for figuring out who worked and where, and that took a while to work out in the morning. Then we had those characters designed, we could say “she’s the one that’s more intense and evil. She’s the one that looks really nice and has a sadder face.” We designed and directed around that. But yes, to put them in front of the camera and then talk about it, it’s not something that could really be predetermined. In some ways that’s when my photography background helps, because early in the day, I could film the girls while lights were being set up and starts to get the feel of how their faces were. It’s a contracted schedule, but it’s not like we can have a full casting for weeks and look at each girl film test. 

Doug: Another interesting casting element in this video is the fact that Nick Diamonds, who is the real person who sings the hook on “Stay Down,” is portrayed by Jaleel Bunton, from the group TV on the Radio. What was behind casting Jaleel as Nick? 

Timothy: We really wanted to have Nick in the video, but this is the second video on the campaign, and with featured artist, they don’t have as much time. They’re involved in their other projects, or they’re out on tour, or something like that. Scheduling to get Nick was really tricky, and we kept missing windows because he’s not actually in El’s live band. He has his own various bands. El, again, being the genius says, “Well, let’s just shoot somebody else because we’re already doing a pageant type piece.” El is supposed to be performing as kind of himself, but as this sort of alternate El character, because he’s in a show and there’s a squirrel drummer. I think the rules of reality can be bent because we had such a suspension of disbelief already. I just thought it was genius to think of having somebody else do it, and we went through a few different people, but Jaleel had this amazing, completely polar opposite energy of El that we wanted. He was amazing. He was hilarious. He did so much stuff that we couldn’t fit into the video. We shot so much of him, and then when we went to the edit we realized that he’s actually only in the track for about 45 seconds. We were trying to squeeze him in wherever we could because he just did so much funny stuff, and he really got those girls going crazy. The reverse shots and things like that, all the expressions or emotions, something is actually happening onstage and mostly it’s him just being ridiculous. If we just put it on paper first it won’t make any sense. If you're actually in the organic process, it’s like steering a ship and the ship is trying to get from point A to point B. There are all these rough waters, and the rain comes, and a shark is over here, and you're trying to avoid things, but you still have to get there. While you’re getting there, all of these challenges come up and they’re really interesting, because the hard part is figuring out if this will work and how do you get it to work. You’re constantly like morphing the shape of the piece, but still having to make sure you get that concept at the end. El works by starting with the concept, starting with the tone, and then building the idea and the expression of that tone around it. Rather than it being designed around one tricky shot or something like that. When working on El's stuff, there is not a lot of gimicky, tricky pieces that happen. There's no anchor shot. We could always modify a shot or change something, and as long as it matched the tone and the overall concept, we knew that we could get the film to work as an entire piece. Switching out the singer, I think Benton made actual sense then if we had Nick for real.

Doug: I also gotta say, I love that you guys dressed him up a little bit and put the wig on him and stuff, too. 

Tomothy: Oh yeah, the wig. He tried on a lot of wigs that morning and that one really sold it. When we had Nick in the role, he was going to kind of float down from the sky and be a bit more like a David Bowie type character, more like a mystical preacher type element because he wears and a cape and he’s a more slower and gestural. We had to change some of the energy with the wig and stuff, but I think it worked. 

Doug Klinger is the co-founder/content director of IMVDb and watches more music videos than anyone on earth. You can find him on twitter at @doug_klinger.