Last year, director Noel Paul and Bat For Lashes went three for three when it comes to making awesome music videos (over here at IMVDb, we call that a “hat trick”). Each video that Noel directed for Natasha Khan (Bat For Lashes) served as the perfect compliment to the three songs from The Haunted Man: “Laura,” “All Your Gold,” and “A Wall." We got the chance to talk to Noel about the videos, about working with Natasha, and about using different techniques to get the right performance out of actors. 

Doug: This is now your third video is a row for Bat For Lashes, was that always the plan, or was each of these videos booked individually?

Noel: They booked individually, but one to lead to another. Oli Hammerton, who was working as a commissioner at EMI at the time, sent me a demo of "Laura." I was alone in an empty production company office late at night. I listened to the song over and over again. Natasha wanted a simple video. Straight up performance and then dancing with two people, her friend Marques Toliver and someone older, perhaps an aged cross dresser. So I proposed that there be a third dance—with the camera. I sent a clip from the film Téorema where Anne Wiazemsky is just spinning with the camera in the middle of a room. Natasha asked if we could meet so I went up to London and Oli got us all together and we ended up talking about the video for hours and bonding over relevant YouTubes and DVDs. So that was how "Laura" happened. Then one lead to another.

Doug: All three of these videos come off of The Haunted Man album, respectively representing the first, second, and third singles off the album. Given that fact, are these videos connected at all in your head, either tonally or thematically? Or do they each stand alone in your mind?

Noel: Yes. They’re obviously very different but each one started from Natasha’s intuition and each one engages the album’s universe in some way. In "A Wall" we see that the party Natasha and Harry crash is for an unidentified "Laura-character," and we see Natasha ‘leaning out of a big car’ which is a reference to her song Marylin.

Image from "Laura" (Incorrect lyrics by someone on the internet)

Doug: You mentioned that each of the ideas originated with Natasha. Can you elaborate on that?

Noel: Yeah, for example, with "A Wall” she sent me a note that she wanted to do a simple love story: her and a guy, suburban nighttime party vibe, maybe shoot in the neighborhood where she grew up. From there we had a phone call and started to work out what could happen, and the guiding logic for how to put it together. I love working with musicians who are so invested in their videos. 

Doug: Each of these videos uses a different DP, Jake Scott for “A Wall,” Evan Prosofsky on “All Your Gold,” and Michael Ragen on “Laura.” What was behind the use of a different DP on each video?

Noel: It just worked out that way. Mike shot my earliest music videos, he's from Seattle and started at the same time as That Go. He’s the most humble guy, wonderful to work with. He has a good eye for composition and lighting and beyond that he has a really good sense of rhythm. And there’s no sentimentality in his approach, which was important on "Laura" because what we were trying to do was very delicate. Also when he left London he emptied his cargo pants of all his leftover change and just gave it to me and it was like £30, which I basically lived on all through post, for real. For "All Your Gold," I thought it would be perfect for Evan. We had been talking for a while, but hadn't really met in person. We bonded over the fact that we both come from very DIY backgrounds, but mine is totally digital, whereas he’s grown up shooing film. And he’s a really good evangelist for film. For "All Your Gold," we shot on Super 16. It was the first time I’ve done a real budgeted production with film, and man it was so fun. I didn’t use a monitor. It's amazing shooting like that, because when your gaze isn’t trapped in a monitor, you're free to look at the whole world. As we were shooting I was thinking about how all the old masters worked in a similar way, back in the days before they could camp out in tents 50-feet from the action watching a feed in HD. Basically I never want to use a monitor again. Then on the “A Wall" video none of my usual DPs were free, so what you do when that happens is you look at reels. I was researching and a lot of people were recommending Jake. I liked his work and we talked and hit it off. He had a lot of great ideas about how to light the environment and he was comfortable with the messy run-and-gun approach I wanted to take. He got really physical with the camera. Dirty and chaotic but still gorgeous and sensual. I love a DP who is willing to dive onto his stomach in cold muddy grass with a 35mm camera and push himself into a huge shrubbery.

Doug: Coming back to the topic of Natasha’s involvement in the videos, what about the back end? Was she just as involved in the editing?

Noel: On “Laura,” she was on tour when I was editing, so it was mostly feedback over email. On "All Your Gold," we met up after I’d done a rough cut and refined it together. This was more fun. But the best really was on the last video, on “A Wall." We had two days to lock picture so I sat on the couch in Natasha’s living room and edited the video while she was unpacking boxes, and hanging out, and making food, and looking over my shoulder giving feedback and ideas. It was great to work that way.

Doug: That’s really interesting. I feel like maybe some directors would not favor that process, sometimes they get discouraged when the artist has too much involvement, but it seems like that was really helpful in your case.

Noel: Well these videos aren’t about me. They’re her music videos, and they’re a collaboration. It’s an interpretive form of filmmaking. You know that your own themes and cinematic obsessions are going to seep in no matter what, so you just focus on trying to understand your subject and you work with her to make something good. When you are working with a subject as smart, talented, and enthusiastic as Natasha you’d be crazy not to welcome her involvement in every aspect of the process.

Doug: Do you find that from video to video, your role as a director was changing at all? Are you giving more direction to the actors and to the performers in the more narrative style videos more so than in a video that is primarily just Natasha dancing on camera?

Noel: Well I mean, every actor, every situation—is different. Sometimes you have to take a stronger hand and shout above the din to make sure that there’s order in the chaos, and other times mayhem is your ally. A challenge in music videos is that you don’t want the film to be entirely dependent on the song for its emotion. The images have to pull weight too, they have to have soul and rhythm and life without the song, or else it’s lazy. With "Laura" what I wanted to do, without giving any plot information, was to create a sense of relationship via the emotional arc of each dance. So on set I tried to create an environment where Natasha’s chemistry with those two guys could flourish.

Behind the scenes of "All Your Gold" (Photo by Lauren Doss)

Doug: How are you able to vocalize to the performers what to do in a dance heavy video?

Noel: A great teacher once told me that one of the director’s responsibilities is to make sure that there’s an idea in the room, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be the best one. I’m great at not having the best idea, especially when it comes to choreography. And anyways I’m not telling the performers what to do, I’m trying to draw a performance out of them. It’s in them already. I just try to sculpt it. One approach is to dance for them. The result is usually comic cause I’m a horrible dancer. But it breaks ice and fear leaves the room, and it does help to communicate rhythm and pace of gesture, even if the gestures I make are absurd. Anyways I want to be able to do the things that these amazing performers can do, I want to be there with them doing it too, you know? I want the whole video to be one big dance, all the elements working together. It’s not a video of a dance, the video is a dance. So I’m dancing too, in my way. And so is Mike, which is good because in normal life when he’s not holding a camera it’s really hard to get him to dance. For "Laura," I met with Lavinia, who is the cross dresser, and with Lauren Doss who has been a secret weapon on these videos. Lauren and I went over to Lavinia’s flat and we figured out some different movements. All of us dancing around. We listened to the song a bunch and let Lavinia internalize it. So then on set Natasha had this real emotional presence in Lavinia with whom she could interact, and animate, and comfort.

“All Your Gold" was based on kernels of choreography that Natasha has been working on with Jorge Crecis and Katie Lusby for a long time before I was in the picture. The movements come from Natasha. Jorge helped to define and refine them and then we all structured them to the song.

Doug: What was the brief like for "All Your Gold"?

Noel: Well, Natasha wanted something elemental, raw, sensual. The brief was “imagine Patti Smith doing a Madonna video.” So I said ok we have to shoot this in black and white, on film, and I wanted to do this thing where we cut between night and day with these really strong graphical matches and retro-reflective costumes, which is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. The reflective thing was inspired by the work of Marianne Maric. Ameena Kara Callender designed and made the costumes and they are literally the highlight of the video. So those were the elements. I mean it’s a straight up pop performance video, really. She dances on a beach.

Doug: What was the approach for “A Wall,” given that is a more narrative piece than the others?

Noel: Well I’m not a very experienced director of narratives. The one thing I’ve learned so far is to try not to talk too much. Like all these long-ass answers I’m giving you. Lately I wonder if I should cast actors with whom I don’t share a common language just so I won’t be able to confuse them with long notes. So that’s my starting point. When Natasha said, “I want a simple love story,” that was a challenge because how do you do that in a music video without it being something we’ve seen a million times before? Not that that’s a big deal, actually, I don’t mind a familiar form. When it’s good. But how do you do it well? How do you set it up so that you can spend the short duration letting the details of human expression breathe? So I thought OK, "A Wall" should be a love story where the moments that you get to see are the in-between parts. The cut out bits. The private moments that don’t advance a plot. And if the dynamic between the Natasha and the boy is real maybe you will feel a story by osmosis. When we cast Harry the first thing we did was just hung out for a few days before shooting. I was a bit evasive when they’d ask me questions like “who is my character? what’s the story?” The more important thing was finding a real chemistry. The three of us were at Natasha’s house and she needed help assembling a new bed frame so we built it together. We joked about it being a team building exercise, but that shit goes a long way. I would like to assemble furniture with everyone I work with from now on. Natasha and Harry had a great rapport. When I saw that they could have fun together I knew we could reach for some darker moments without it seeming false. Cause actually Harry’s character needed to be very disturbed. I wanted the video to have a lot of tumble and push and pull in a way that would suggest something different to every viewer. But you have to give your actors something to go on, so I told Harry he was blind. That isn’t a secret decoder ring for a purposefully obtuse plot. I just thought that would give Harry a really concrete way for him to approach the role and find its particular physicality.

Harry Treadaway and Natasha Khan on set of "A Wall" (Photo by Arthur Le Fol)

Doug: It’s super interesting. I certainly didn’t pick up on that, but I now I’ve got to watch it again. I want to go watch it again right now with that in mind to have it in my head, but that’s a really interesting technique.

Noel: Well I also like it cause of the way it works with the lyrics. “Where you see a wall, I see a door.” It’s so literal that it goes beyond literalism, it’s metaliteral. In terms of what you feel from the couple’s relationship, I wanted it to be ambiguous as to who sees a wall and who sees a door. I was looking at an image of Klaus Kinski from Aguirre Wrath of God, with this insane faraway stare on his face. Profound insanity but also: transcendent inspiration. A vision no one else sees. El Dorado and a new empire to eclipse Spain. I wanted Harry to have that kind of vision, but without the benefit of any exposition or context. And it just occurred to me that the simplest way to make him see what no one else sees would be to ask him to play it blind. But that was for me, really, and for Harry and Natasha. We tried to keep it really subtle. However, if you watch it again you might notice him touching her face, never making eye contact with her or anyone else, other little gives. You hear sometimes that people find what they will in a film or a story, I’m not sure that’s right, I think maybe it’s more accurate to say that people find what they can. So maybe the only people who would really pick up on the blindness interpretation are themselves blind. And that really pleases me, a music video for blind people. That was my goal with "A Wall," to make a music video for the blind. Since we’re on the subject, I want to use the last bit of airtime to thank everyone who worked on these videos, and especially Luke, Nico, Tai, Barney, Oli, James, Holly, Sonya, Tiernan, Johnny, Dulcie, Lauren, Mike, Evan, Jake, Ameena, Catherine, George, Harry, Lavinia, Marques, and of course Natasha. I am extremely grateful to my excellent collaborators.

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.