Director Alistair Legrand has a special affinity for making creepy music videos. So, when the members of Data Romance decided they wanted something creepy for their “Can't Keep Your Mind Off” video, they turned to Alistair to direct it. We talked to Alistair about directing the video, auditioning 50 girls for the lead role, and getting an explicit tag from YouTube.

Doug: You’ve worked with Data Romance before, and I’m kind of curious how this particular video came about, how did you end up working on it?

Alistair: Amy and AJ, who are the two members of Data Romance, have kind of become friends of mine and we try to hang out whenever they come to LA because they are Vancouver based. They love my videos, they’ve always been big supporters of my work, and we’ve always wanted to work together again. We were just trying to find the right project, and then in August there was a video that we were going to do but it didn’t really pan out. Then with this one in November, Amy contacted me and she said she has this song, and she’s really proud of it, but it has a super poppy kind of light sound. She would love for me to come up with something that would contrast that. I was said, "OK, what’s the music about? What does this song mean to you?" We had a few talks where she was talking about themes of obsession, and stalkers and other nice things. "Come up with something creepy" basically is what she said. I get that a lot. That’s fine, I mean I love making scary visuals so that was no problem. I went off and came up with a couple ideas and the first one I gave to her she was kind of hesitant, just because I’ve been fascinated by these nanny killings in New York, where nannies will suddenly just kill the kids that they’re taking care of. I was going to do this big elaborate video about a nanny who works for a very rich couple and it was going to be inspired by Rosemary’s Baby and the upper class, posh Manhattan look. She was like, "that’s a little too much." That would have been a downer, so we’ll save that for a later date. Then I offered the female serial killer one, which is a concept I’ve wanted to do I think for about four years now.

Doug: Was the storyline based on previous serial killer style films, or did you take your own unique approach to it?

Alistair: This was unique for me because I wasn’t really inspired by any visuals, which is how I have gone about a few treatments in the past. I’ll see a piece of art or a drawing or a movie, and I’ll say, "I want do something in that realm." This was purely me sitting there and thinking of visuals that I’d want to see. The story just began to grow from this girl who lives alone in a posh suburban community who had an unusual hobby. It sprouted from there.

Doug: Was it coming together as a narrative like that? A lot of your other videos don't really follow such a narrative storyline.

Alistair: Yeah, it was really fun for me. I just wrote it out as a screenplay. There was a bigger part to it where we were going to see her as a child and how she's always had this problem - just her dealing with that. We didn't really get to that, so I just tried to make it as simple as possible - which is the black widow concept. Her going on dates, luring men back to her place and presenting them. She has this special room where she keeps them as perfect creatures for a little while. She makes art. She's very obsessed with the purity of things.

Doug: I’m curious with the styling of the video, you mentioned the posh suburban lifestyle. Was the styling of the wardrobe and everything like that was that done by you, or did you have somebody helping you with wardrobe and costuming?

Alistair: I had an amazing wardrobe stylist named Michelle Thompson and we had a few talks. I had a pretty distinct idea of what it should look like in my head. I wanted it to be Edward Gorey meets Restoration Hardware, that was the main idea. I wanted it very elegant, a lot of grays and blacks. I wanted these people to look nice when they go out. I'm just so sick of seeing videos with V-necks and tank tops, so we should just try to make this a little more adult. The more expensive J.Crew look just came through that - and Michelle got that immediately. There were a few discussions with her and my production designer; when you approach a serial killer project there are pretty much two roads you can take. You can take the OCD serial killer route where everything has to be absolutely perfect, and clean and sterile. Or you can go the opposite with the Rob Zombie, Ed Gein, Texas Chainsaw way with dirt, slime and chicken bones everywhere. We went with the more obsessive-compulsive, American Psycho way.

Doug: What about the casting on this video particularly of the female lead, what was the process like of casting that role?

Alistair: My producer Monte got me a day at this great casting place. I saw 40 or 50 girls. Since the way she should act was so important and without dialogue, I wrote out this big monologue. So we saw all these girls and we taped them reading this monologue. The monologue takes place after the video and she's been arrested. She’s sitting there and a psychologist is trying to figure her out basically.

Doug: Did you ever shoot that?

Alistair: Yeah, we did. We have a lot of tape of these girls reading this monologue. I don't know what we're going to do with it but…

Doug: Is that unusual for you to see that many potential actresses for one part?

Alistair: No, it's happened on two videos now. It happened on the Burns video too where I saw a lot of girls, but all we had them do there was dance. It wasn't a bad casting process, but it was also very hard to see if their performance was going to come across in a realistic way. This time I tried to make it better by writing something out so you could see if they could actually act, rather than just being a pretty face. She was just amazing. She got it immediately, and it was great.

Doug: Was dancing part of this audition at all? The character does do some dancing in the video.

Alistair: No, I asked her if she had any ballet experience and she said yes. I just took her word for it. The ballet portion of the video wasn't anything too elaborate. I wanted to see her warming up as if she were a conductor. Then she drains the men and goes about applying the makeup. The dancing, it was just a few movements. It wasn't anything too extreme and she turned out to be actually a really talented ballet dancer.

Doug: On YouTube its got in parenthesis "Explicit" which that was like a little surprising to me.

Alistair: That surprised me, too.

Doug: Especially based on some of the other stuff that you see on YouTube. How does that sit with you, that explicit tag?

Alistair: I went in to drop off the video and I talked to Zane at SQE, who has been handling this project from the get-go. He’s this really great guy who works for the label. He said "Yeah, well we were going to premiere this on MTV but we’re not allowed. They like the video a lot but they can’t because they thought it was too gory." I was surprised by that. It's not even that bad according to me. I mean, I know I watch a lot of horror movies but even still, I've seen much more extreme subject matter in videos and I thought it was so strange. So, now it just had to come out with that rating because they went through VEVO. Violence is not okay in music videos. You might get an explicit rating.

Doug: Pretty much anything else is but…

Alistair: Literally you can have 17-year-olds in thongs, snorting cocaine, and that's OK. At least no one has to do the "red band trailer," sign in to make sure you’re 18. Hopefully people watch and they're not scared off by the explicit. It’s a pretty adorable video.

Doug: It's weird that they do that on the Internet ever, it was just really surprising to me to see that there.

Alistair: Especially since I wasn't going for realism with the gore, I was inspired by Italian horror with the way it should look. That always looks pretty to me, the practical quality of it. You can sense there's a tube with blood pouring out of it. It looks really gorgeous and theatrical.

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.