Alex de Campi does not sleep. That is just a fact. Here comes another one starring Amanda Palmer (from the Dresden Dolls). It’s big, fun, and full of spectacle. Not only did she hand deliver this one to SRO office, she even gift wrapped it with an interview. Watch the video, read the interview and find out how SRO landed this video first and foremost. Suck it Pitchfork!

[SRO] How did you hook up with Amanda Palmer? How did you land the job?

[Alex de Campi] I do a lot of experimental work with the London cabaret and alt-circus community, and I shot a fun little piece for cabaret artiste Des O’Connor’s song “Pretty Little Miss Dysmorphia” on short ends back in January. (I can never keep film in the fridge; I have too many cool friends that I can plop in front of the camera and make do something.) The thing we shot was based on Ira Cohen’s “Mylar Chamber” photographs in the 1960s: we shot Des’ distorted reflection in classic Alex Circuschrome, and the result was really quite visceral – it looked like an animated Francis Bacon painting. (This is a technique I want to explore more, the no-man’s-land between fine arts/ traditional painting’s rectangular frame and the cinematic frame). Because Des’ shoot was all in-camera effects, there was that uncomfortable and dangerous sense of the real, rather than the styrofoam whiff of uncanny valley.

Anyway, Des sent it to Amanda, who loved it and checked out my other work, she also really liked the three videos I shot for the Puppini Sisters – and I asked if I could write on a future project for her. She said yes. And then the real fun began…

[SRO] Was there any fear or difficulty working with a video tipping over the 5 minute mark?

[Alex de Campi] Not in the slightest. My work is quite narrative, so I have no fear of long work – I’d previously done The Puppini Sisters’ “Jilted”, a BARRY LYNDON-esque period costume drama – which weighed in at five and a half minutes (and was shot on S16 for only £2,500, with costumes loaned by Vivienne Westwood). And let’s not forget that “Leeds United” isn’t actually a five-minute-plus song. I MADE it one, by tacking on an intro and an outro.

My background is as a writer (I’ve written for TV and had a bunch of comic book/graphic novel series published) so I’ve had a lot of practice in story pacing. This was the challenge with “Leeds United”: allowing each “Wow!” moment enough room to breathe, before building on it.

[SRO] Did any parts of the song influence the video? Where did the inspiration come from?

[Alex de Campi] I pitched blind. Amanda was like, “send me some ideas”. I was like “…I can has song?” because usually my ideas are a mash of my current obsessions and feelings/synaesthetic images that come directly out of the song and the artist’s persona. Amanda: “No song.” So I pitched two things completely blind: the idea that eventually became “Leeds United” and another idea which I’m not going to disclose as I still would love to use it for a strong, glamorous female singer or group. The “Leeds United” idea was an attempt to deconstruct the process (and stereotype) of “female singer goes solo, does big glamour-diva video” even as Amanda was going through it. You know: chick goes solo, label does beauty-pass video that’s all about her, her her. So I wanted to start out with a video that looked like it was all about Amanda but then turned out to be about all the people around her. A star is supported by tens, if not hundreds of dancers, producers, PR, marketing, manager, legal, label etc and thousands/millions of fans. These are actually the important people. So when Amanda’s left all by herself at the end, you really get the feeling of how lonely she is without everyone.

Luckily for me, “Leeds United” was being discussed as one of the first singles from the album and Amanda felt my idea fit the song really well. So, after Amanda and I refined the idea, and after I made a brief visit to Roadrunner to show that I wasn’t, you know, a four headed monster, I landed the commission. Unsigned director FTW!

[SRO] How was it working with Amanda Palmer?

[Alex de Campi] We’re both quite strong minded but also think quite deeply about things and love working collaboratively, so although there were points where we disagreed, we’d always find a compromise, and we both kept in mind the primacy of the finished product. And there was a great level of mutual respect going. I had to really convince Amanda on some aspects of the video, though! Even up to the day before the shoot, she was not sure about including the sign with her name in lights, but she was kind enough to trust me on that one. Amanda also made a lot of suggestions that really improved the finished video – she picked out her own wardrobe, as she wanted a greater contrast between herself and the dancers, and it was a magnificent decision (even if, running around less than 12 hours before the shoot trying to borrow wardrobe from London fashion designers, it rather tired out Your Humble Servant). And she was very involved in the edit, which worked really well. It was basically herself, me and Paul Maynard (a god among editors) working through presenting the visual story.

[SRO] Okay, for the American’s can you explain “Leeds United” and what it means for the song and the video? And plus isn’t Amanda from The States?

[Alex de Campi] “Leeds United” is a football team whose support base is the city of Leeds, in Northern England. Their away colours are blue and gold, which may explain some of my wardrobe and colour choices in the video. Leeds is a scrappy half-broke club who inspire incredibly fierce loyalty despite (or possibly because of) never really making it over better-funded Southern clubs. When Leeds win, they’re fucking heroes, because they don’t have a cozy Russian billionaire stocking their lineup with pricey foreign players.

The song came about because Amanda dated a well-known musician from Leeds for about two seconds, and so was plunged into the football culture of him and his friends and the song’s pretty much about her (who normally hangs out with very artistic people) dealing with a really different way of music/art/life – lad-rock, basically.

There’s another song called “Leeds United” by Britpop’s eternal bridesmaid, Luke Haines. Haines is a fucking immense talent and unfortunately somebody else releasing a hit song of the same name scant year after his effort is par for Haines’ appalling fortune. Go, gentle reader, and search out the video for “Off My Rocker at the Art School Bop”. (See, this is why I will never make any money at being a music video director, because if someone whose work I really believed in, like Haines, rang me up and was like, “I have £500, could you do me a video?” I’d be like “Shit yeah!” and somehow accidentally end up spending a grand of my own cash too. Any profit I make will go into subsidising projects with other artists… and buying a 2C. Man, I want a 2C.)

[SRO] Any correlation with players entering your video and violence entering in shortly after that?

[Alex de Campi] No, other than there was a place in the cut that the player entrance really fit, and meshed well with the onstage choreography, so it kind of had to go there. We actually had lengthy, lengthy discussions about how this was NOT going to be a video about football fans being violent, because that’s such a tired and incorrect stereotype. In fact the football fans come in and it leads to a big love-in with all social tribes united through a common love of CHOONAGE. And when the violence kicks off, it’s absolutely not the football fans who start it. (This is so spoiling the video for people who haven’t seen it yet.) I think one of Amanda’s fans summed up best the message I was trying to get across with the football fans: “party hard always, and never judge anyone until you know them”.

[SRO] How smooth did the production go? Seemed to have a lot of people to handle on the video.

[Alex de Campi] Smooth like butter. Preproduction was a hellacious nightmare, but on the day it all worked beautifully. I hadn’t shot with Joe (Dyer, the DoP) before but we just instinctively got along and knew what the other wanted. Our preferred shooting styles are very similar, and there’s nothing like being pushed in a direction that you want to go anyway. It was also my first time working with Irresistible Films and they were champs, too. And I have to give massive and humble love to the choreographer Steven Mitchell Wright and the dancers, the Whoopee Beaux Belles… and Sign King Richard and the People Show… I know I’m verging into Oscar Acceptance Speech territory but SO many people believed in the vision and were integral to making this video happen.

A big worry for me was extras turning up. It’s Novice Director Error Number One to be like, yeah, we’ll film this awesome video with a huge audience and get all the artist’s fans to show up! Because nobody ever DOES show up, and you’re left shuffling eight bored people in t-shirts round a space the size of a football field. But in this case, Amanda’s fans totally DID show – at 9am on a Sunday morning – dressed to the nines, as did a lot of the cabaret community, and a huge bunch of club kids that my friend David Braithwaite (he of the peacock-feather horned hat in the video) recruited. There were really heartwarming stories, of two friends who got up at 3am and had one of their mothers drive them down from Manchester just for the shoot (look for the cute dark-haired guy with the white shirt, tie, and black spectacles, and the girl with short purple hair in pink, down at the tables). Plus, nobody had wardrobe. Those were their own clothes. Pretty awesome, huh? (I’m still never doing it again. It would never be as good the second time.)

[SRO] My favorite shot is the one of Amanda after the lights go out. Was that always meant to be part of the video?

[Alex de Campi] Yep, that was all planned. I’m, uh, pretty OCD as a director. I had this entire shoot storyboarded. We knew every major camera position before we got there. It comes out of working on very ambitious projects on super-low budgets: you are just not going to get through all your slates unless you have really done your planning, and you need to pace your shots when working on film. You can’t just keep rolling – so there’s a very fine balance between not having enough coverage (and thus constraining yourself in the edit), and over-covering/wasting film and time.

I find once you have this iron backbone, it actually gives you more freedom to improvise during the day. And your camera department and lighting department can get on with their jobs more easily. So although Amanda’s final moments on stage all alone were boarded and shotlisted from the very beginning, the pout was something she did in an early take and I was all, “that’s GREAT! Do it every time!”. The work with the extras, as well, was boarded in that we knew exactly where we were putting them, what they would do, where the camera would be, and even what lenses we were using before they even set foot in the theater. But then you can stay open to the little happy accidents and moments that happen during the day – the flying baby, the pie in the face, the blonde girl headbanging – all of that was made up on the spot, as was a lot of the stuff in the upper terraces.

[SRO] How was it to have an actual budget to work with?

[Alex de Campi] I’m like Cecil B de Mille, I fucking love spectacle. Give me £10k and I’ll try to ram a £100k idea into it. Just look at “Jilted”. What kind of nutcase would film that on £2k? Or “Apart of Me”, which was the only video by an unsigned director to get into Soho Shorts this year, and probably the cheapest at £1.5k. So although the budget was twice what I’d had before, it was still far below what we probably should have had for a concept this huge. Also, our budget got slashed by 1/3 the week before the shoot, which meant a lot of unhappy compromises like shooting on the Varicam instead of on Super16, which is where my experience lies and which would have suited the shoot so much better. We didn’t even have the money to shoot on the Red. Thank heaven Arri stepped in and chucked us a decent set of glass. Arri (& Fuji): bailing out my sorry broke ass since 2006.

So how was it like having £10k? Weirdly the same number of headaches as having £2k or £5k, thanks entirely to my over-reaching. I was sourcing costume and running production errands up to the last minute – and dealing with potential disasters (like a miscommunication that almost resulted in the “Amanda” sign having a Spinal Tap inches-for-feet accident). There was never time to step back and look holistically at the shoot, not a single moment. Some of my team keep pushing me to stop with the over the top and just shoot crappy studio performance videos for £10k and take half the budget as profit. But I just can’t do that.

If I ever, you know, make it into the actual system and I get a £30, £40k video, you just wait. It’ll shake the earth. The system’s pretty ignorant, though, especially with someone like me that’s really hard to pigeonhole (I work in animation too) so I’m not holding my breath.

[SRO] I love the choice of shooting a big band performance video. Did that desire come right out of the song? Any hesitations about going big band?

[Alex de Campi] I couldn’t get a fucking big band! Christ, the efforts I went to. I desperately wanted to work with Lord Large ( http://www.myspace.com/lordlarge ) who are Stax-tastic and bloody nice people to boot, but various key members were on tour. Then there was an all-female big band, but we couldn’t pay them enough. Then Trinity Music College (which I had worked with on the “Jilted” video) stepped in and helped me recruit some of their music students to play. As it turned out, I couldn’t have actually fit a proper big band on that stage with all the dancers and Amanda, so in the way these things often do, the journey ended in the right place.

[SRO] Are Amanda Palmer’s eyebrows really that luxurious?

[Alex de Campi] It all depends on her mood! She was really happy that day, so drew them on extra-luxurious.