"Do you think you could cry and grind at the same time?" There's no room for subtleties when casting for the lead role in a music video like "Cry Like A Ghost" by Passion Pit. So when Daniel Scheinert (of DANIELS) asked Tallie Medel to star in the video, that’s exactly how he asked her. He also asked her to come out to LA a few weeks early to choreograph and cast the video with them. Luckily, Tallie was up for the task and the result is one of the coolest uses of dance in a music video than we’ve seen in a while. We talked to Tallie about staring in and choreographing the video, the casting process, and Dan Kwan’s amazing ability to cry a single tear on cue. (Photos by Joyce Kim)

Doug: How did you get involved with the project?

Tallie: Daniels are my long-time friends and collaborators. They’re big fans of the dance comedy team that I do here in Brooklyn and in Manhattan - we’re called Cocoon Central Dance Team. We’ve been trying to work on something together for a while. Initially when they pitched it, they asked, "Do you think you could cry and grind at the same time?" and I said, "Yeah, probably. I could practice." So I practiced for a while in my room and then they flew me out, as I’m not based in LA. When Daniel Scheinert first sent it to me, I was like, "Come on, man!" I’ve known Daniel Scheinert longer. He’s known all of my boyfriends, and I got nervous, like, "Why did you write this?" So far, none of my ex-boyfriends or my current boyfriend have said anything, so that’s good.

Doug: So you were nervous because of what the character goes through and how she is represented?

Tallie: Yeah, I think of my dad reading the YouTube comments, because everybody is writing, "Oh, so she’s like a slut, right?" Reading the treatment, I didn’t really see it that way, but I can see why people would perceive that. The treatment initially, I thought, "Oh, I completely understand where this person’s coming from." I didn't really see it as a bad thing, just as something personal.

Doug: Has that been the primary feedback that you’ve gotten about what the character is going through? Or have you heard other things from people looking at it at a different level?

Tallie: I still haven’t gotten to talk to Dan or Daniel since it’s come out. We just send each other long texts. But the stuff that I’ve read the most is how excited people are about dance being incorporated and the choreography, which is great because it was completely a group effort. It says in the making of video that I’m the choreographer, which is partly true, except that Dan and Daniel were there for the whole thing, as well as Ben Sloan, Wes Scarpias, and Danny Dolan. They’re all dancers as well. We workshopped all of it. It really was completely co-choreographed. That’s been the most exciting thing. Everything that we were worried about not working has been what we’ve gotten the most support on, so that’s awesome.

Doug: And what do you perceive the storyline and narrative to be?

Tallie: I'm not sure if this character is Sylvia, because my understanding of the song is that Michael Angelakos wrote it about a woman he was living with who was his roommate. I think that was the extent of their relationship, but I have no idea. I never talked to him about it. I think whenever you’re going through any issue in a relationship - in a current one - you have to evaluate what happened in the past ones and they figure out what the common denominator is and what your own patterns are, pushing people away or whatever it is. I think that she isn’t blurring them together out of carelessness, but something that I personally always get overwhelmed with is why do we think that we can treat people a certain way? Because later on, you’re like, "Why did I do that?" That’s what I think she’s going through. Realizing that once you’ve hurt someone, you can never know them in the same way again. You might get to be their good friend again, if you’re lucky, but you will never get to have that same closeness, which is devastating.

Doug: I definitely get that, especially with the performance. If it was just a girl who was dating a bunch of guys, the emotional rollercoaster that’s going on in the video wouldn't necessarily be there. What was the performance direction that you got from Daniels during the video? Not just with the dancing, but as far as the emotions and the facial expressions.

Tallie: Daniel Scheinert and I first shot a dramatic short together when I was a junior in college, which was six years ago. We’ve been working together for such a long time and we’ve known for a while what each other’s strengths are. Daniel Scheinert, particularly, likes to make me cry. We’ve done mostly comedy together, but then after that we could do all the dramatic material that we’ve wanted to experiment with. My favorite directing moment on the set was when Dan Kwan took me aside at the first chorus break, the first Sylvia. He told that after the reversal of falling back up out of the bed, that he wanted one single tear to come down my face. I was like, "I don’t know if I can do that." And he said, "Are you sure? You can’t just…" and then a tear rolled down his face. I said, "Come on, man! How did you do that!?" It took no time. He was explaining it as a director, and he knew how to get there physically. I was going off into the woods, tearing my hair out, and like "I’ve hurt everyone that I love!" and then coming back and like, "OK, I’m ready." I was there for an entire week before we started shooting because we needed to do casting together. We needed to do all the choreography, so we had a lot of time to go through the treatment over and over again and to figure out what was going on. So I think it happened sort of naturally.

Doug: You mentioned that the choreography was a very collaborative effort with Daniels and with the other dancers and actors in the video. Can you describe a little bit of what it was like getting the choreography to work within the visual effects of the video?

Tallie: There’s a choreographer that they loved who couldn’t work on this video with us, but I’m sure that they’re still trying to work with him. His name is Matt Luck, and he has a duet with Emma Portner to "Dancing in the Dark." The style of choreography looks like he’s been edited. He’s doing popping and locking in a way that's highly emotional. I have sort of distanced myself from contemporary and lyrical, it was never my favorite kind of dance. He’s doing something that I just hadn’t seen before and it’s beautiful. There’s all these phrases in the dance where she is, for instance, tucking hair behind her ears, and then every now and then, he’ll do it for her, but there’s no hair - her hair’s pulled back into a tight bun. They go through this whole part of a relationship together that’s something that dance can show better than anything else and it’s so beautiful. That was something Daniels were really excited about, and after seeing it, I was like, "Guys, that’s awesome, but that’s not what I do," so I was really nervous. Cocoon Central Dance Team, which is my company in New York City, we’re all comedians. We all grew up as dancers, and are serious, but not in an ABT sort of way like a community dance school. I’m from southern southeast Alaska and my dance school, even though it was competitive, if you really wanted to study, you would go to Seattle or another nearby school. It was the same with the other two dancers. They all grew up in their dance schools, but no one had plans on being a serious ballerina. After watching Matt Luck and all these other videos that we wanted to draw on, I felt so intimidated. We talked about how each pairing that happens in a video would draw on a different set of movements, and each dancer we cast had a distinctly different style of movement, so we could say "Oh that's what that love was like." We wanted some sort of cold cruel detachment from [Wes], he’s the one who is behind me snapping my neck so that I’m spinning and falling back into him. Wes does wushu - a martial art - so he's very graceful and lovely, and having him be the cruelest one was exciting. Basically, we were just so excited because Dan and Daniel are incredible dancers and they always try to work with dancers. It was a time that all of us got to look through all our favorite moments in dance history, and after defining what each relationship meant or what each person got out of it - you have a different connection with every person that you get to be with. After figuring out that history, we were then able to look at different dance styles that would fit. Because we had to condense it all into such a short piece, I think that it eventually became a vocabulary. We just drew on the same bits of choreography over and over again.

Doug: You mentioned that you were in LA a week early to help cast the video. What was that process like? Did you guys have a bunch of guys come out to a casting call, or did you have people in mind initially?

Tallie: We did have Ben Sloane in mind because we love him and the way that he moves. He plays the boyfriend in the leather jacket with the cigarette hanging out of his mouth. He’s an incredible actor, and he’s sometimes in a dance company here in New York called Movement Theater Workshop, which is led by Leslie Guyton. I think all of us love working with people who are not traditional dancers, because everybody can do anything. You get to work with non-actors and sometimes they’re a thousand times better than the actor that you might have cast otherwise. The auditions were held at Prettybird. We wanted to hold them on the basketball court that had just been put in the offices, but the floor was still being finished, so we just moved chairs and sofas back and held them there in the offices. We put out casting calls, and we got all kinds of different guys. Some of them they had met at a dance class that is at the Sweat Spot in Los Angeles. There’s a choreographer that RuPaul always calls upon on Ru Paul's Drag Race, his name is Ryan Heffington. He is really good at dancing in high heels. He has a top knot and beautiful facial hair. He has a studio that’s called the Sweat Spot and there’s Wet Wednesdays, which is a super, hard-core, hip-hop class. So Dan and Daniel, who had never been to a dance class, went to a Wet Wednesday, and from there, they asked a bunch of dudes that they thought were great movers to come in. It’s always such a relief to be able to cast from a pool of people that you already know, because casting can be such a miserable process. We were just emailing people, asking "Who do you know who’s dancing right now in Los Angeles. It doesn’t matter if they considered themselves a dancer or not. Who is just an awesome dancer?" We got a lot of people sent that way. Then at the auditions, we had groups - sometimes there would be just one person in our group and sometimes there’d be ten. Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, they hold the best auditions ever. I’ve been to another one also. They are so good at holding a fun workshop. The auditions were essentially workshops and we played a couple games.

Doug: Was one of those games slow-mo sword fighting? I’ve gone to a Daniels workshop where they did slow-mo sword fighting.

Tallie: Well, we did slow-mo fighting to "Take Care" by Beach House. We made up this game with Ben earlier that was switching from tender movement to violent movement in slow motion, and we did it to that song. Or, just staying in violent movement, because that song is so sweepingly pretty and generous, that fake punching each other was so much fun. Sometimes I would go in or sometimes the boys would fight each other. That was one of our last exercises. We warmed up by showing each other our favorite stretches or dance moves and we would try to keep it stupid so that everybody felt free to be themselves. We got a block party feeling circle going, where everybody was welcome to go in and do their tricks. Everybody had such utterly different dance styles. I wish I could remember this dancer’s name. I kept screaming that he was a wizard because he had really, really long beautiful hair and all of his clothes were ratted and hanging in threads, so that everything moved. He was like seven feet tall and he was so skinny. He had like no bones. Can you imagine what that would have looked like? He was so cool. So we wanted to cast everyone. Oh man. Basically, they have an unending pool of the best dancers in Los Angeles now.

Doug: You're right about the Dans being good dancers, too. I've seen them, they've got some serious moves.

Tallie: The thing about the two of them is that they’re the kind of directors who just can’t help themselves. They’re creating something just because they have to, and getting work on a set with them is incredible. They have such a solid crew, their art team is insane, their DP, their assistant director, everyone works so fluently. I haven’t worked on too many sets, but they definitely have something really special and I think it’s because of those two in particular. They deserve everything that they’ve gotten.

Tallie performs live with Cocoon Central Dance Team tonight and next Friday (April 19^th), so if you’re in New York go check them out! 

"Cry Like A Ghost" comes off of the album Gossamer by Passion Pit.

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.