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OK Go’s frontman Damian Kulash and bassist Tim Nordwind sat down with director Aaron Duffy earlier this week to look back on 20 years of the band’s insanely intricate, choreographed videos.
All three spoke for panel with Screen Daily film critic Tim Grieson at a screening for From Treadmills to Industrial Robots: A Retrospective, held at the Fine Arts Theater in Beverly Hills on Wednesday. Duffy and the band also premiered their music video for “Love,” from their upcoming fifth studio album And the Adjacent Possible, their first album in a decade.
During the panel, Kulash — also the co-director of the 2023 Apple TV+ comedy The Beanie Bubble about the ’90s Beanie Babies craze — recalled attempting to get Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind filmmaker Michel Gondry to direct a music video for them in the 2000s as he was working with an up-and-coming Kanye West.
“Somebody we knew him and we heard that he had this incredible plan — this massive, awesome, elaborate, choreographed video that he was doing for some rapper named Kanye or something,” Kulash said with a laugh. “But we’re the dance band. So we made [a video] just to send to him, and it was before YouTube and it went viral on this site called iFilm because people were laughing — because it was ridiculous.”
Gondry worked with West on the video for “Heard ‘Em Say” featuring Maroon 5 singer Adam Levine. Michel’s brother, Olivier Gondry, would end up directing a version of the music video for 2005’s “Do What You Want.”
Asked by Grierson if the band ever heard back from Michel Gondry, Kulash replied, “No! And whatever happened to the rap guy?”
OK Go has long been known for their music videos, winning a Grammy for best music video in 2007 for “Here It Goes Again.” That video was one continuous shot of the band performing a treadmill dance routine choreographed by Kulash’s sister Trish Sie, who also directed Pitch Perfect 3. It has since racked up 67 million views on YouTube and was one of the most-viewed videos on the platform during YouTube’s early days.
“At some point, we realized it had been downloaded as many times as we had sold albums and that it was not our rock and roll fans, but it was people who we were directly connected with,” Kulash said. “It turned out in that two-year period, YouTube had started and we were one of the first things on it, and it changed everything. But it wasn’t trying to be funny or even make a rock video as much as it was, ‘Awesome, we found our people. They like ridiculous stuff and we like making ridiculous stuff.’”
The “Here It Goes Again” video was filmed at Sie’s house in between touring for their second album, Oh No — without the knowledge of the band’s management or their then-label, Capitol Records. Kulash says the band then sat on the video, calling it “not an urgent thing.”
“We told our management we were going to make something, but if we told them we were going to take 10 days off the tour and spend like $4,000 to do that, they [would say], ‘absolutely not,’” Kulash said. “It wasn’t until OK Go’s webmaster — Kulash’s “best friend from working at NPR” — nudged the band to release the video on an “up and coming site called YouTube. I remember being mad at him. But he was right.”
Duffy also previously directed the music video for the band’s “The Writing’s On the Wall.” The video for “Love” was filmed at a historic train station in Budapest. The song’s accompanying album And the Adjacent Possible is set to release on April 11. At Wednesday evening’s event, the Kulash also reflected on the evolution of their music video productions since their first release.
“One thing that struck me watching in order this is that it’s clear that we were a rock band that didn’t know what to do with the camera,” Kulash said. “The idea [was], we’ll stick the camera over there and we’ll do the stuff. What you do on stage is what you do as a rock band. There was a very slow development from being like, ‘I guess we’ll stick it over here and dance over there or we could dance on the machine. So I guess we can go to the camera.’ It’s not been really about the filmmaking part of it as much as can we make an event that people want to witness and be in the room for.”
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