The band Hollerado has made some sweet music videos that require elaborate pre-planning. Some of their videos, however, particularly when collaborating with director Michael Maxxis, take a different production approach. "Showing up at a location with no idea what you're going to shoot" different. We talked to Michael about their most recent collaboration, “Pick Me Up,” casting on the fly, and the watermelon scene that unfortunately didn't make it.

Doug: Hollerado has made a lot of unique videos in their day - they’re obviously a band that seems a benefit in making quality videos. This is now the second video you’ve done for them, did they contact you directly to work on this project?

Michael: They definitely put tremendous pressure on you to make a great video. They let it be known up front that the video is very, very important. I got to know the band after they did those two videos with Greg Jardin, which are great. AMERICANARAMA is amazing, it's still by far their most successful video. After they did two with him, they decided to hire a commissioner to look at other treatments, which was last year for their song “Good Day At The Races.” They had no interest in working with a Canadian director, and I'm Canadian. Most Canadian artists usually just go to a Canadian production company for their director because they rely on grants for funding, but Hollerado hires a US video commissioner. They pay for their videos themselves a lot of the time, instead of relying on grants. That’s really incredible because every other Canadian artist does, with the exception of a couple. Hollerado’s US video commissioner solicits treatments from directors from all over the world, and both videos came to me through my US rep, DNA. They were looking for a director, so I pitched to them this hot air balloon festival in Albuquerque, which I knew of and had been waiting to shoot at for a long time. I pitched them the idea of shooting at the festival, which they loved and it booked me the video.

Doug: Given the importance they place on the video, how collaborative is the process working with Hollerado?

Michael: It got very collaborative the moment we landed in Albuquerque. Money was limited, and I had done so many low budget travel jobs that I knew there was zero point in trying to come up with much of an idea beforehand. You cannot control anything and you can’t afford to pay for things once you're there. You have to see what you can get for free - what cast you can find, which locations, etc.. Then you take those things and build an idea around it. Based on the very broad idea of a hot air balloon festival, we knew there would be all sorts of characters down there and all sorts of visual things. They tried to collaborate beforehand, but there is no point. I said, "I don't want to start writing because I can't promise that we'll be able to deliver anything we write down in advance, other than there will be hot air balloons."

Doug: So essentially your treatment could have just been the brochure for the festival.

Michael: Yeah. That’s actually all it was. It was a Google Images link.

Doug: How did you approach casting? Did you keep the camera nearby and film people on the spot, or did it work out differently?

Michael: I put great emphasis on casting. If you look at videos I've done that are the same tone as this one - the quirky offbeat comedy ones - I always try to cast interesting people. Whether it’s the way they look, or the way they talk, or the way they move or walk. The kid in the video, his dad was actually piloting one of the balloons we rented to shoot in. We just saw the kid sitting there and I thought he was one of the cutest, most amazing kids I’d ever seen. I said to the band, "Hey, what do you think of this kid? We should build the whole idea around him!" We had a whole other idea planned with the band as these characters, and we were going to have these stop motions puppet creatures. Then they saw the kid and said, "Oh my god, we love him! Let's do it!" We had already shot for a day toward the different concept, and we changed everything. We said to the dad, "Would your kid be interested in being in this video?" And we paid him to be in it.

Doug: Oh, you guys paid him? Nice.

Michael: Oh yeah, he was there for three days. We shot a whole other scene with him, actually. It's another example of things being organic. The beginning of the video is at a grocery store. We thought we'd go to the store, and the band had this idea of wanting to have the kid smash watermelons – but, It turns out the kid could barely lift the watermelons. We still went to the store, because we found this really derelict grocery store in the ghetto that I loved the look of. It always had crack heads and derelicts hanging out in front of it. I saw it earlier as we were driving around and wanted to shoot there. We decided we were going to find the kid a "mom," and we would shoot him shopping with his mom and then shoot him smashing watermelons in the parking lot.

We get there and there is nobody there at 11 in the morning. Then a black lady drives up, and she's amazing. I loved her and so did the band. We paid her $100 cash and shot a hilarious scene. We shoot this scene where the kid is helping her unload her groceries and he breaks the watermelon, and she freaks out on him. All planned, but she's screaming at him. It's hilarious. She's giving him shit, and then the kid looks up in the sky and there is a hot air balloon above, which triggers the whole video. We're all laughing and think it’s great, until we tell the band’s manager. He put a foot down: "You can’t show that, that's racist! You can't have him breaking a black lady's watermelon!" And we're like, "Oh shit, I guess so.” But, I don't think it's racist. It didn't feel racist on set. We had it in the first cut, then the label and management and everyone said, "There is no way you can have a red headed kid breaking a ghetto black woman's watermelon and her screaming at him in ghetto dialect. There is no way we can risk it." So, it's not there, but that’s another example of how the concept was built. For me, it's the best. It's hilarious. I'm going to try to edit it on my own.

Doug: Man, I didn't even consider the racist thing the way you initially described how it all worked out, but I guess maybe they had a point.

Michael: The management was originally worried because people would think the kid is handicapped, even though he isn't. They were worried that people were going to give us shit because they thought we were exploiting him, although nobody has. The tone of the song, the performance, the colors, there is nothing about it that is hateful, or negative, or underhanded at all. It's just fun, and that intro was fun. The lady had green barrettes in her hair and a lime green t-shirt that matched them. She was the best, she was so funny. I don't think people would have misinterpreted it, but they didn't want to risk it and you can't really blame them.

Doug: That's a bummer, though, because it sounds hilarious.

Michael: It's so funny, and he does it like it's an accident where he's trying to unload it out of the cart. He can't hold it and it just falls out of the car and breaks. Then she yells “Goddammit! You broke the fuckin’ watermelon!” It was really funny.

Doug: You said you shot some stuff of the first day that you said was more toward the original story line, was that some of the performance stuff that you guys did?

Michael: It was performance, and then some of the stuff of them in the balloons on the phone. Two guys in the band, Nick and Dean, were going to be phoning Menno and Jake on the ground - we were going to shot Menno and Jake on the ground a different day. Then we found the kid the next day and thought, "Let's make them phoning the kid!" We had all this great dialogue of the kid on the phone, too, but they ended up not wanting dialogue over the music. There is this really hilarious conversation that they were having with him. He is autistic, so one of the things that would happen is if you asked him a question that had to do with a concept, he couldn't take that concept outside of where he was. For example, it was really windy so we had to record the audio inside a car. We'd shoot him on the hill and we'd say, "Hey Braden, where are you?" and he would say, "I'm on the hill!" Then when we'd shoot him in the car to record clean audio, we'd say, "When we say 'Hey Braden, where are you?' you have to say ‘I'm on the hill’." Then we'd say it and he would only say, "I'm in the car!" He couldn't say he was on the hill, it was really neat. So we would deliberately have him saying the wrong answers in the video, and the concept evolved into him driving the band crazy because they were looking for him, but he kept telling them the wrong answers of where he was. It was really funny, but they didn't want the dialogue.

Doug: On the technical side, there is some stop motion and claymation in the video. Did you guys do all of that stuff in New Mexico?

Michael: That was all done in Toronto. It was all conceptualized in New Mexico, but then our animation and puppet guy Phillip, who was in New Mexico with us, went back to Toronto and animated it. He made the creatures there and animated them. Then the editor Jason did all the blip animation. Sometimes you'll see the balloons weirdly aligned and the perspective is off, and they disappear, and multiply and stuff, that was all done by the editor in Toronto.

Doug: My last question is more of an observation that I need confirmation on, is the drummer wearing a Heisenberg tshirt?

Michael: That's the Hollerado merch shirt. It is Heisenberg, but it's their shirt. That shitty drawing is in the series, the sketch of him from Breaking Bad, with the word “Hollerado” under it. The funny thing is, that show is also shot in Albuquerque, which is where we shot the video. He wore the shirt on purpose knowing that. They're obviously huge fans of the show, so it was just another bonus for them to have the shirt tie into the video.

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.