Having an inanimate object star in your music video can be difficult for both the director and the artist. For the director, they have to figure out a way to make a story about an object compelling. For the band, they have to be cool with this object getting more screen time than they do. Luckily, for the video for “Why Am I The One,” director Jordan Bahat and the band fun. were able to overcome these obstacles to create a touching story that just happens to be about a suitcase. We talked to Jordan about the video, the issues with shooting in a crowded airport, and how he was able to bring an old yellow suitcase to life.

Doug: How did you get involved with the project? Was it a treatment bidding process?

Jordan: To back up, I was excited about fun. and I remember writing on the “We Are Young” video. I wrote the biggest video I could think of, basically. It was before that song and this album came out and I thought, “Wow, this is massive.” It stuck with me that I didn’t get to do that one and I was excited for the chance to pitch again for them. Initially I got the track and there wasn’t a whole lot of brief. It was kind of wide open. The only parameters were either it has to shoot on this date in Seattle, or this date in Mexico, both with the band. At the time, they wanted something that had a full six-piece performance setup in it. Other than that there was no creative brief, which happens from time to time. I wrote an idea that took place in a bus depot in Reno. We tell half a story from the portraits of these people in transit while the band performs. The Reno idea went in and we didn’t hear anything for a while, and then finally they came back and said, “The band actually came up with their own idea. Would you be interested in pitching on that? We’re going to a smaller sample basically”.

There was a bit of overlap, I think, between my idea and their concept. I thought it would be cool in a bus station and they thought it would be cool to tell a story about luggage, which would start in an airport. Maybe I got the dart close, and so they included me in the conversation. From there, that was the idea. We wanted to tell a story of lost luggage and where it goes. I went back and wrote again, and the things that I was focusing on, on the treatment level, were the journey and trying to expand that and make it feel like a real road movie. I think more than anything I was focusing on the bag character and trying to give it an identity, and trying to give it a face. That was followed up with a conference call, then they green-lit it and three days later we had the shoot in Seattle.

A page from Jordan's treatment

Doug: What was the timing of everything? I’m trying to place it, because obviously they just won the Grammy and had been nominated for a while. How did it fit into that? Had they been nominated at that point when this production was going down?

Jordan: They were nominated before the shoot. The whole process started moving less than a week before the Grammys. To put the timing in perspective, they gave us the green light to shoot and then three days later we had the shoot in Seattle. I called my producer who was in Wyoming and he drove back from Wyoming that day. We shot in Seattle, came home, had one day to scout, then shot Saturday and Sunday in and around LA - or California, ultimately - for the road trip sequence, pawn shop, and mob sequence. On our last shot of the day we were in the snow somewhere south of Palmdale. We get in the car, we’ve just wrapped all our stuff and all of us get texts from our parents saying that they won their first Grammy.

Doug: So was that ever part of the conversation with the label, having to take that into account that this was a newly Grammy-nominated band? Or was the only thing that you really heard from them beyond just the initial contact was that they wanted the band in the video?

Jordan: I really don’t keep track well enough of awards. I certainly knew the band as their songs are sort of omnipresent, but I didn’t know about the Grammy nominations until after the job was awarded. It wasn’t part of the brief or anything. What’s funny is the initial label brief was simply the parameters of the shoot, where and when, the budget, and the fact that they wanted a big performance, which is what you would think traditionally. They want to highlight the band and show everybody in a more traditional way. When the band generated their own idea, they really minimized themselves. They were like, “No, this is about luggage.” I was excited by that. That’s always cool when a band is willing to place the idea as a higher importance than their face time. It was really generous.

Time breakdown

Doug: Whose idea was it originally to have their song playing at the airport? Did that come with their idea or was it something you brought?

Jordan: We were at the airport and the baggage claim that we were shooting at was supposed to be under our control, because the bag is supposed to come up and the terminal is supposed to be empty. For about an hour and a half we just stood there while every international flight landed and bags just kept pumping out of this thing. We had an hour and a half of downtime - maddening downtime - at the airport, as all these Chinese tourists started coming out and swarming the baggage claim and I couldn’t communicate with them. We had a permit to shoot but we didn’t have a permit to shut it down. You can’t just go into an airport terminal screaming, “Everybody fucking stop what you’re doing!” There’s a good chance you’ll get killed if you do that. I mentioned that it would be really cool if we put some Muzak in the prologue. Like cheesey elevator music as if it’s coming out through the PA system. Andrew Dost, from the band, suggested doing a version of their song and so it was again, a melding of ideas.

Doug: That’s crazy that basically right in the middle of your music video shoot you had to wait for luggage for an hour.

Jordan: It was absurd. I was freaking out because the clock was ticking and they had a flight at 8:00 PM out of that same airport. It wasn’t just like we were going to inconvenience them by keeping them. They literally had to get on a plane and leave. Then in the middle of it, as if it couldn’t get any worse, this 30-person girls high school volleyball team walks through the terminal and recognizes the band. Our "security reps," or TSA people, started asking the band for photos. It became this Twilight Zone nightmare but the band were very cool when they didn’t necessarily have to be.

Storyboard by Ed Cook

Doug: You want to be able to give time to fans or whatever, but not after sitting there for hours.

Jordan: Especially because the way we ended up shooting, and it was for the first shot in the video, and we’re shooting that essentially last. That was supposed to be a wider shot, to shrink them down in the emptiness of the terminal. First of all, the bags are all coming out, then I started planting crew members to start kind of illegally taking the bags off the conveyor so we could get 20 seconds of time to shoot this shot. We were basically on the ready, ready to shoot this shot for an hour and a half. When they started getting hassled by fans and stuff, it was like, “Oh, my God, not only can we not get the shot, but if we do get a window they’re going to be in the middle of a swarm.”

Doug: I’m curious, when you got the original idea back from the band and they said they wanted it to be about luggage, did the idea immediately go to a place where it would take on this human characteristic?

Jordan: Yes, I can you send you my treatment. It goes on and on way too much about how much we need to feel for this bag, and the fact that we need to look at the piece of luggage and think of an orphan or a lost dog. There were a number of touchstone references for that, like The Brave Little Toaster, like Flat Stanley, that kid’s project. There is this Ikea ad that’s amazing that Spike Jonze did years ago that’s about a lamp, and you feel terrible for this lamp that’s discarded.

Doug: That's a great ad, I've seen that one.

Jordan: Yes, and that strange Swedish guy comes out and he’s like, “You’re crazy. It’s a lamp, and the new one is much better.” But that’s how we had to feel. Not only that, the design of the face needed to have an ambiguity to it that you could transpose any emotion on it given a set of environments and circumstances, and the face would seem happy or sad dependent on the environment. We kept calling it the Mona Lisa smile, it can read as anything. Yes, it was critical from the beginning, amongst us, that we identify it as a real person.

The suitcase prior to being dressed up

Doug: You also had production designer, Alessandro Marvelli, work on this project with you again, right?

Jordan: Yeah, Alessandro worked on this and Alessandro was on it from the beginning and came with us to Seattle. We brought a skeleton crew from LA to Seattle: myself, producer Taylor Vandegrift, my DP Andrew Wheeler, and our Steadicam op Ross Coscia who operated the whole video. Then we all came back to LA and carried on.

Doug: What was the process of dressing and finding the suitcase? How much of that was the suitcase itself and how much of it did you guys have to tinker with to get that smile and face?

Jordan: The suitcase is a big deal. The star of your piece is basically a prop. My initial idea, and maybe it’s because it’s a quirky concept, my reference points were Spike Jonze and Wes Anderson’s super oversized luggage, stuff that has real character. The band's directorial reference point was Steven Soderbergh and trying to make things very modern, which ended up working I think because the environments are all quite cold. The bag is our one splash of warmth in the color palette. I found that bag on Craigslist form a guy in Venice. We auditioned five bags, but I had my eye on that guy. Then we brought a ton of materials to Seattle, stickers and stuff like that. It went through a few iterations, and it was actually the hardest part of the whole video. It was like coming to consensus on, “OK that’s the face, but is it too obviously a face and do these elements that create the face feel like they could maybe be happenstance?” Or, “Do the eyes look like something that could sort of practically be part of a bag’s design?” and that kind of thing. I think in the end we really settled on the simplest design.

Doug: Was coming up with the design of the bag and how it would look, is that a large portion of what Alessandro’s contributions were to the project?

Jordan: Yeah, and I should say the design of the bag ended up being like all hands on deck. My producer, Taylor, was there adjusting the mouth and coming up with stuff. I think the band arrived on set at 8:00 AM. We only had the bag approved, locked and ready to go at 8:30. It came down to the end of it. Alessandro had some people in Seattle, like Lisa Hammond who was his art director up there and was very helpful. It was all hands on deck to get this bag – we call him Stanley – to get Stanley all dressed and looking like the right face. Other than that, we shot at entirely pre-existing locations, from the house to the restaurants, and everywhere else. There was some dressing but the bag was just such a focus. We tried as much as possible, if possible, to determine a continuity to the bag’s evolution.

One of many potential suitcase designs

Doug: I'd like to get into a little bit of the road trip portion and the characters that you meet along the way - the humans that the luggage interacts with. What was the process of putting that together?

Jordan: I just wanted him to go on this complete journey. We ended up adjusting it in post, but at one point during that weird mob fight, there was a knife stuck in him. Maybe that was a bit too dark and weird (though I wish that bit was left in). But overall, the idea was to take him through a classic road movie where Stanley experiences growth along the way. He experiences kindness, and also the darker side of things. We wanted it to feel like an epic, like maybe this bag was a different person by the time he arrives back at the house. One of the challenges of this video that the band and the label set, and I think rightfully so, was that they wanted us to tell this story without seeing anyone else’s face other than the band - and I don’t think it was a vanity thing. It was more so like the Muppets. These are the parts of human beings that this bag interacts with, so that’s what we see. So we tried to integrate that visually to determine "bag-e-vision." I think another thing that we went over quite a bit was how animate we wanted Stanley to be. There was a lot of discussion over "When the car passes, does the bag turn? Will the bag’s expression change?" and stuff like that. Ultimately, I decided that the story is such a fantasy that it’d be best to ground his movements or reactions in reality. We gave Stanley a face, but we wanted the physics all to feel fairly logical.

Doug: You said you went on a 250-mile road trip, did you have it pre-mapped out?

Jordan: Yes, we had it pre-mapped out and we knew exactly how much time we had. We shot the Malibu coastline, and then the fields in Oxnard, and the desert in Palmdale, and the mountains nearby. It was completely unpermitted and we were mounted, doing bike-mount stuff. It was hectic, but that was a really fun day and one of those experiences you can only have shooting in California, because all of that landscape is within reach.

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.