Romanek Shifts From Music Videos to Movies

09/19/2005 3:20 PM, AP
Jake Coyle

Jay-Z shot. Trent Reznor spinning upside down. David Bowie teetering on a rooftop. These are just a few of the iconic images Mark Romanek has fashioned as an elite music video director.

On a new DVD compiling his clips (part of the Directors Label series that earlier chronicled Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze and Chris Cunningham), Romanek's admirers include Steven Soderbergh, Ben Stiller and Bono.

His work varies from Lenny Kravitz's dreadlock bash "Are You Gonna Go My Way" to the emotional "Hurt" by Johnny Cash, which juxtaposed the 71-year-old with archival footage of the young country star and was proclaimed the greatest video ever by Rolling Stone.

He's touched off controversy with a child-porn theme in Fiona Apple's "Criminal," and was censored for the industrial gross-out "Closer" by Nine Inch Nails. He's worked with Madonna ("Rain"), Beck ("Devil's Haircut") and Michael and Janet Jackson ("Scream").

Now he's moved on to feature films — his debut being 2002's "One Hour Photo," starring Robin Williams. He's currently working on commercials (he made those dancing silhouettes for the iPod ads) and a new script.

AP: What's most different between making videos and making movies?

Romanek: I don't mean to sound egocentric when I say, it's mine. It's my expression from the ground up, as opposed to, as a video director, I'm kind of in the service industry. I take it very seriously that I'm not trying to completely subsume the artist's music with my idea of what the visuals should be.

AP: So you view your work in videos as not yours?

Romanek: Yeah — which isn't a bad thing. It's like getting a script and interpreting it. It's extremely collaborative in the sense that the entire soundtrack is predetermined, the text of the piece is predetermined — I think of lyrics as a text or a script. The first thing I do when I get a song is to type up the lyrics ... and I go, "What is this song about?"

AP: Your video for "Hurt," a cover of a Nine Inch Nails song, was called a breakthrough for music video expressing emotion. Were you thinking this was your ...

Romanek: Yeah.

AP: ... true medium?

Romanek: Oh, I thought you were going to say the last thing I do as a video director. I think what happened was, that was the first video I did after I made my movie. I was looking for more fulfilling challenges in that format, that medium. Whatever made that video resonate with people so much, it's not really what I did. (The video was made on short notice not long before Cash died. Romanek stumbled across the old footage, and inserted it randomly at first.) I feel a little queasy talking about it as something that is mine. I was smart enough to get out of the way of something that was much bigger than me.

AP: Is there a video you consider more "yours?"

Romanek: I'm very proud of — I'm not sure if that's the same thing — the Janet Jackson video ("Got 'til It's Gone"). ... There isn't one of them that's the most representative of me. For some reason the Janet Jackson one popped into my head because, it might sound weird to say, I have a love for a lot of aspects of black culture. At the time I thought black culture was being depicted pretty one-dimensionally and that was my little, liberal, white-boy contribution to trying to open up the range of what types of black culture could be depicted in a music video.

AP: Have you found it difficult to get artists to trust your vision?

Romanek: There was a lot of apprehension on Jay-Z's part of him being gunned down in his video ("99 Problems") and I was trying to explain that the intention was for that to be kind of abstract. But in the hip-hop world, it's not abstract. In many instances that has been a literal reality. There was a certain amount of back and forth about it, and he literally typed in an e-mail to me, "I trust you."

AP: Has the variety of music acts and looks to your videos made you especially adaptable?

Romanek: I was trying to foster an image of somebody that you couldn't pigeonhole. ... But generally speaking, I did want to become very adept technically with music videos so when I made a movie I didn't have to worry about it so much ... That's the great advantage of this if you think about it as a very elite film school — post-post-graduate film school.

AP: This DVD series gives more import to a previously disposable medium. Is it worthy?

Romanek: I think the directors in this series are some of the most exciting, experimental, poetic short filmmakers in the last 20 years. It would be hard to deny that — that Spike Jonze's work is not incredibly original and amusing and deceptively sophisticated, or that Chris Cunningham isn't some kind of genius, or that Michel Gondry isn't some king of M.C. Escher of cinema. The music video, at least in some people's minds, has become like a pejorative — it means flashy or ephemeral or gaudy. But these guys are the exception to that.