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Music

Watch Julian Casablancas + The Voidz New Short Film for "Human Sadness"

The perfect visual for emotional loss. Plus, we chat with director Warren Fu.

Every next move for Julian Casablancas + The Voidz is unpredictable, in their sound or in the band itself. Each track on their album is sprawling and experimental, hitting a bunch of different receptors in your brain for way different reasons. With that established, the band just dropped a 13 minute short film/visual epic for their track "Human Sadness." It's only fair that this song deserves this amount of care and craft in its approach to the video, as we learned in our cover story for Julian Casablancas + The Voidz:

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"It’s Casablancas’s quasi-protest record, his lyrics tangled with obtuse ruminations on the state of things—apart from 'Human Sadness' which he admits was, at least in part, inspired by the loss of his father to cancer in 2013. It’s an experience he likens to the roof coming off: ''This comfort that you didn’t realize you had is gone; there’s no one to ask, as a man, and that has a deep effect."

We spoke with director Warren Fu (Daft Punk, Snoop, The Killers), who helmed the video along with Casblancas, Nicholas Goossen, and photography duo Wiissa (who shot these awesome Polaroids for us at FYF). And here's an exclusive pic of him and Casblancas… Read our interview and watch the video below.

Noisey: How long did you work on "HS" for in tota and how much of your sanity did you lose?
Warren Fu: We started conceptualizing the video at the end of 2013, before the album was released, and finished right before the 1st screening in May of 2015. It’s a 13 minute song so… let’s be real. No one thought it was ever going to be a stroll in the park. It’s hard to have perspective when you’ve worked that long, on and off, on something. It was kinda like, “This is good.” Then… “Wait—is this good?"

How collaborative was the process? What did Casablancas come to you with and how did you use that as the jumping off point? Were their visual references or were you leaning heavily on the lyrics…?

This was a collaborative process from beginning to end. It started with Julian and the band throwing around a few ideas for various scenes while they were finishing the record. I believe it was Jake that came up with the idea of having the band performance take place in some strange white room, and as they built on the concept, each band member would have some kind of personal flashback story. Some ideas the band came up with were more from an "entertaining music video" perspective, some were just vignettes that felt like that part of the song, and some ideas were there to address issues on a personal and broader global scale.

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From these loose ideas I put together an animatic, which is basically a rough cut of the entire video using temporary footage, storyboards and sometimes text placeholders. Once we were happy with how that felt, we went on to shoot the various scenes. Piece of cake right? Wrong.

This video has many different acts. What part of it are you the most proud of and why?

Visually, I really like how the end shots turned out with Julian surviving alone with his dog (played by Voltron Casablancas) amidst a pile of post-apocalyptic rubble. Because I stupidly brought the wrong kind of card for the intended camera (#BadAtLife), we had to shoot that scene using a cheap 90s pocket camera… but I was surprised how well those scenes turned out in the end considering we didn’t have any real professional equipment and a crew of two people including myself.

On an emotional level, I really found Alex’s scene to be the most powerful. That scene was brilliantly directed by Nicholas Goossen and his team, based on a loose idea I had for Alex to have an end-of-his-rope emotional meltdown out on the street. From the early stages of conceptualizing the video, Julian always wanted to depict some childhood trauma that resurfaces later on in life. I mentioned Matt Dillon’s final scene in The Outsiders to Alex, but what he brought with his performance was far more than any of us were expecting. He really channeled something deep down, and I think you really feel it when you watch that.

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What was the most difficult aspect of working on this video? Was there anything in the video concept that you thought—fuck me—how am i going to do that?

The war scene was the most daunting to me with a music video budget, which is why I’m glad Nick Goossen took it on. And the ambiguous-future/past-70s-live-performance-Turkish-TV-show-white-room-bunker-that’s-sci-fi-but-kinda-not-really scene? "Nick do you wanna take that bad boy on too? Great."

Generally you're the sole director on a video, but on this one you worked with Nicholaus Goossen and Wiissa. What was that like and how did that work for you?

It was actually great letting go of the reins after the concept phase and letting other directors have their take on scenes and come back with great footage to edit with. There was no way we could have done this video without them. A video like this needed multiple directors not only logistically, but stylistically. I think one of my favorite things about "Human Sadness" is that each story and character are so different from each other, and shooting with various mediums from 8mm, to vintage TV Beta tapes, to modern digital cameras (and a 90s pocket camera) gave this each scene a unique look but a different vibe when told through the various directors' eyes. It’s unlike any music video in that sense. I guess the closest comparison I can give is the movie Four Rooms.

The band have been screening the video around the country - you went to some of the LA screenings. What was it like to see people reacting to your work in real time?

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Part exciting, part terrifying. Terrifying in that I could have brought the wrong cut of the video or there’d be a technical issue with playback. Completely gratifying hearing people react to certain moments as they were intended.

Recently we've covered videos you've done for Weezer, Brandon Flowers, and Snoop. What's next for Warren Fuuuuuuu?

I’m going to Disneyland! And take some time off to flush out feature film ideas.

Watch "Human Sadness" below.