"Graceless," The National and director Sophia Peer's second collaboration from the excellent Trouble Will Find Me album, features the band members drinking lots of beer and ruining their nice suits at a sweet pool party. It was shot at The National frontman Matt Berninger’s parent’s house, and features the band jumping in the pool, sliding down a slip and slide, and shooting a potato gun. Sophia, who also directed the one shot "Sea Of Love" video, does a great job of capturing the band’s personality and making the whole process feel very natural. We talked to Sophia about working on the video, drinking beer, and Matt Berninger’s dad.

Doug: This is the second video you've done for The National. Did the first project lead into this one?

Sophia: I think we worked together really well on “Sea of Love” and were ready to go from one shot to hundreds.

Doug: Was the concept of this video based on anything? Where did the idea originate?

Sophia: It all started with an email that said The National wanted to do a video for “Graceless” involving a pool party at Matt's parents' house, in Cincinnati.

Doug: Did you have the location for this video in mind when you wrote the treatment? Or did you come up with the concept first and then find a location that fit?

Sophia: The location came first and all the ideas were built around it. I made attempts to plan for the location remotely when I was still in NY. I watched Tom Berninger's (Matt's brother) doc, Mistaken For Strangers - which was awesome by the way - to get a sneak peek of the house, and Matt sent a few photos as well. I really couldn't have known how many great options there were until I got there, though. A lot of the ideas were built through phone conversations and treatments, but the important details were figured out about 4 days before the shoot, when the DP, Zoe White, and I, drove up to the house. I came into the situation with a list of scene options, and inevitably things were added and nixed when we got to the house and Matt gave us a tour. Zoe and I spent a lot of time there in the days leading up to the shoot, to plan everything out.

Doug: Was there actually as much drinking going on that day as the video implies? There is one scene of them shotgunning beers, was that pretty much going on all day?

Sophia: We did send the PAs out for more cases of beer 2 or 3 times that day… I can say that if they were wasted, it didn’t slow things down at all. We crammed a long list of scenes into the day and shockingly got through all of it.

Doug: When it comes to performance direction in this video, how involved are you? Are you just letting the guys go nuts, or are you getting more specific with what you want from them?

Sophia: That's really scene specific. Some parts were very planned out and others, the best thing I could do was let them do their thing in a designated area, and make sure we could shoot as much of it as possible.

Doug: This whole video has a very natural, organic feel to it. To the point where I have to ask if the guy cleaning the pool and cutting the grass was a cast member, or a dude actually working?

Sophia: The man cleaning the pool, mowing the lawn, etc, is Matt's dad, Paul! In addition to being great on camera, he was tremendously helpful with everything. He even drove us around in his pick-up truck so we could get some shots of the road. Paul always having a tool of some sort, and acting as a responsible adult male tending to his property, was injected into the scenes to juxtapose the juvenile behavior of the band. We have Paul to thank for making our location look so great. When we were there, he was in the process of singlehandedly altering the path of the creek by moving piles of rocks. He had a system going that involved marking his path with beer cans, which was a nice coincidence.

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.