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Meshuggah "Bleed" Video Interview with Directors Mike Pecci and Ian McFarland
By Dixon Christie

PunkTV.ca: Hey guys. Why don't you introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about the work that you've done?

I: My name is Ian McFarland. I own a company called Killswitch Productions started back in 2004. I played in a hardcore band called Blood for Blood from 1997 on and I kind of just started doing music videos for friends of mine from the hardcore and punk world, and that rolled into what we do today. We do everything from stuff for PBS to local companies and all kinds of stuff, like multimedia editing to music videos, and that is kind of how Mike and I got wrapped up together. I had seen a bunch of Mike's work here in town and he is an awesome photographer and he was definitely into film. We kind of just teamed up and have been working on projects ever since.

M: I don't come from the music scene, I came from photography. Most of my stuff has been dark little short projects. Teaming up with Ian was a great way to enhance my visuals.

PunkTV.ca: Ian, can you give us a bit of background of some of your influences from musical directors, and Mike from music directors and photographers?

I: I have loved Marc Romanek and he is my favorite director. I get a lot of inspiration from a lot of my peers and I get a lot of crazy ideas then turn them into projects and videos like this. I really just get inspiration everywhere.

M: My inspirations usually change. I find when you are doing a bunch of different mediums you try to make your work as fresh as possible, so a lot of times for a project I would try to erase all of my inspirations. One of the guys that I fall back on through is Ridley Scott, and I can't imagine doing the amount of stuff that he has done. He definitely has his own style though, whether it's an epic battle scene or anything he does. I try to be influenced by something new and when I work on a project it's like, give me a couple days to erase my mind and get some ideas. Photography is the same deal. When it comes to composition, though, I have always been inspired by comic book art.

PunkTV.ca: Especially guys like Frank Miller.

M: Oh yeah, and the fact that they were able to make a movie like Sin City that is so stylized is amazing, and some people don't like it but I definitely dig it. He is not just carrying his style in comic books but throughout all mediums.

PunkTV.ca: Do you think that the purists would be looking for a Will Eisner style?

M: Well, what is the Will Eisner style when it comes to movies? I get so ticked off with comic book movies. I thought that Spider-man was fantastic but it was too damn glossy. The new Hulk is coming out and it looks like a commercial.

I: It just looks lame.

PunkTV.ca: So Ian, I know that in some of your videos you are listed as director and Mike is the DP. Can you tell us where the role of director starts and where the role of director of photography starts in your relationship?

I: I first started doing these things before I met up with Mike, then I met up with Mike and he was like instantly seeing eye to eye on so many things where I had not seen eye to eye with other people. When we started working together once I saw how passionate Mike was about this, and every image and every single frame was that important to Mike as it was to me, and when I saw what he was giving me I was like, this is awesome. Then in the creative process we started going back and forth a lot more. When do you draw the line, but when it comes down to doing these videos and the producer and the director and Mike being the DP I guess we all do it together, it's just about what credit we take. Every one of the videos has been edited by me because I kind of need to have that control over it. I think that the control level helps when creating that end product together rather than saying, "I am going to direct and you are going to do that." I can't shoot like Mike. Mike is an awesome DP and really creative so when the two of us sit down we're only going to come up with something that much better.

M: It's all good and titles don't really matter when we are doing a project. We really try to be selective with what we do and that way we can focus.

PunkTV.ca: I think it can be said that all of the kids in this world reading this interview will certainly know the role of a director but they won't know the role of the director of photography, but everyone in the industry knows that the best directors are actually directors of photography.

I: I completely agree with that, and if you don't have a good DP you don't have shit and if you don't have a good editor you are going to even have more shit. So you have to have an awesome DP because you are telling a story and they are going to help bring that story out and bring it to a level that you really want it to be at. Luckily we work together really well and I am happy with it so far.

PunkTV.ca: I would like to get a summary on your approach to making some of the videos that we have all seen and love. Let's start with "My Riot" by Roger Miret and the Disasters. You guys chose to shoot that in black and white and it's a very strong contrast. Tell us about making that video.

I: The reason we chose to do it that way is we feel like every video we do, Mike and I sit down and we say, "Okay we're going to go in this direction, so let's come up with a concept based on that idea." The Disasters wanted to go with black and white and the whole idea was we would be able to stop the video at any point and where you stop it is going to be a beautiful still frame, and that was our goal. The narrative was kind of a personal thing with Roger where he had received a phone call from a person he had known for a very long time and there was conflict so we told the story of him making a phone call. It was based on that and then the emotion comes out from that. Honestly it is my favorite video that we've done and a lot of crazy stuff happened on the set, too, so it was interesting.

PunkTV.ca: Mike you chose to shoot this one in black and white. Obviously not a lot of video buyers are going to be encouraging you to shoot anything in black and white.

Once again it comes down to trying to convince your client and the band supported it. Black and white was best suited for New York and it was just so gorgeous and there's so many different grays and textures in that city. What happens when you shoot color is a lot of times you just miss all that and you miss how absolutely gorgeous this subway is and how stunning the city line really is. There is a sequence when the guitar player is standing on this really old rickety dock and if I had shot that color you would see the blue of the sky and the blue of the water, but as soon as you do that black and white all the beautiful textures you see right away. It was a no brainer because the city is so textured and it really comes to life and pops up. What you are doing too is killing out all the advertising because you are killing out all those colors that are very strategic, and none of that distracts you so when you are looking at the video you are looking at the musicians in a certain way and the setting. I think it makes it more vulnerable, too, and it really made each member of the band more vulnerable in that scenario and that location. I love that video and I have the stills on my wall of that video.

PunkTV.ca: I got to ask you guys about the Marc Romanek video for Jay-Z's "99 Problems". Did you really enjoy that one?

I: His video is fantastic and I would never even compare it. I would say that we did look into his video and what he is doing for his video and looked at the black and white photographs. The reason why I love so many of his videos is he bases a lot of his concepts on traditional art and a lot of times he researches his aesthetic and I really admire that. He is definitely one of my favorite directors.

PunkTV.ca: Can you tell our young filmmakers about the state of the industry as it relates to making videos these days? What is the music market like for new video directors?

I: Okay, for one you got to realize that there is absolutely no money whatsoever in this. If you think you are going to make money doing music videos it is not going to happen.

M: We are rolling in the bling right now.

I: But if you can hook up with the right bands it allows you to be creative and hone in on your skills and opens you up to do more things. All the great directors, they started because they are so open to being creative and a lot of people like music videos because it's a short form where you can be extremely creative and there is a lot of room to have fun there, but you are never going to make fucking money.

M: There are some guys out there that pretend to make a lot of money doing it.

PunkTV.ca: Mike would you say there is kind of an irony there that if you cut your teeth making the most creative movies of your career there is quite a contrast going to make films for PBS and corporate documentaries as many of us are indeed doing in order to make a living?

M: Yeah, I end up doing a ton of stuff from photography to graphic design. You can't really just say, "Guess what, I'm a director of photography now and have a solid career doing that these days", because the business is so saturated and there is so much competition out there that your clients can shop around and bring your prices down. I have been working as a digital director of photography since I started my career out of necessity because that's how I could try to compete with this class above me. Dealing with budgets these days is difficult and to do a video right it takes weeks of preproduction and negotiations and all this time is essentially not paid for, so to try to have a career in this business the only reason to do it is for creativity. When you make that transition into the corporate world it is completely the opposite and you find yourself wanting to kill yourself because you are getting paid a lot of money to be there but it is so stifling. If I find myself excited about the project I can't pay for rent and then I have to go to the complete other end of the spectrum and work on these jobs where I want to hang myself. Essentially what a music video is is a commercial for the band and the label, so I mean it's not all just being creative. The band is trying to get a message out there and the label is trying to insert little things to make the kid think they are going to buy the record and luckily with the bands we deal with we don't just take a project because we want to make a couple of bucks and do this or that, we take it because of a lot of different things and sometimes it is not worth dealing with some things because there is no money. We just turned down doing a pretty big video because the band literally handed me a scri pt, and I love the band a lot but I sent it back and go, "This is a scri pt, you gotta help me out here," but they were like, "This is what we really want," and I was like, "Then we are not doing that."

PunkTV.ca: Why don't we talk a bit about how this Meshuggah job came about and what the treatment writing process was like for you guys and how the creative team all came together for it?

I: Well, I have a close relationship with their record company and they're really cool people, so they sent me a lot of their promos and things like that and when I got the new Meshuggah album I was like, holy shit. The cover just blew my mind and immediately I showed it to Mike and I was like, "That would be a cool story to tell." I contacted the label, pushed the idea to them and they loved it. Later, email after email, I had to convince the band of what we wanted to do and at the beginning they were skeptical but luckily these guys were really cool about the whole idea and I couldn't believe how much they stepped away. They didn't pressure us at all and it was like a dream come true. They are an unbelievable band and they go, "Here, make a video with this money and just run it by us before you do it." We had some hard work ahead of us and the scary part came along where Mike and I said, "Okay, now we have to make it."

M: It was an interesting exercise and I really think that the band liked it. It's Meshuggah's highest watched video on their MySpace page right now and it was awesome. Having a band say to us that you can come up with something cool and the only stipulation was that we scare them.

I: Mike and I always talk about these ideas and we kind of hold onto them and pull different things from past ideas that we had that we never really did anything with, and it happened to work out with this. It was just this crazy creative process that kept on snowballing and just getting bigger and bigger. I think that everybody working on the video did a fantastic job pulling off what they did with the resources that we had.

PunkTV.ca: As we play the video why don't you guys just go back and forth and talk about the video.

M: Well first of all this is a clock that we shot on location, actually, in the Killswitch studio.

I: Yeah the basic premise for the video is our main character here who we have dressed up like the typical John Carpenter character, and he has been casted to hell.

M: This whole video was actually shot in 20 foot by 20 foot space and the cockroaches and everything else were in there.

I: We kept on swapping sets and swapping sides and we had to go that route because the location that we were trying to get our hands on fell through at the last minute, so we were forced to shoot like that. The original design was done by a friend of mine, David Lynch, and he designed it on paper and then went through the production designer to make this interesting puppet mechanism.

M: The dress we actually had the lower half shipped in from China and then the top half was made out of paper by our costume designer, and that girl, she is painted in black liquid latex, and she had a blast doing this.

I: We're not going to tell you guys what all that means because you should figure it out for yourselves.

M: Our interpretation of the character from the cover of the album was actually played by my uncle who, if you go back and look at some of my films, starred in my first film and he played a dead guy, then he went on to the Suicide Girls shoot with Bailey Suicide as a zombie.

I: I had to talk him into sitting on this 6 foot tall pillar naked in front of everybody.

M: The other cool thing is these collars and these chains are real and our friend made them so they actually cut the actors.

I: We wanted real metal for a metal video.

PunkTV.ca: I do like to ask all our directors how much they shot compared to the final cut time.

M: We shot four tapes and they weren't all usable stuff, obviously, and it turned out to be a seven minute song but the band cut some of the solo out.

I: We will go on record as saying we wanted the video to be seven minutes but that was the band's decision.

PunkTV.ca: So your ratio was 60:1.

I: Plus you have to take into consideration that there are a lot of tricks and really interesting stuff, so I used a ton of footage.

M: There are multiple takes inside each frame.

PunkTV.ca: Last question is: what did you shoot on and what do you edit on?

M: We shot this on 70 mm right?

I: The entire video was shot on a helicopter hovering in the studio.

M: No we're not telling you, man.

I: We'll put it this way: it's a camera that most people don't use and that is about as far as I am going to say on that, so do some research kids.