This series of exotic butterflies illustrates nature’s innate beauty resulting from a caterpillar’s journey through metamorphosis. Seeing this process as a metaphor for human life, Bayer believes that dramatic transitional experiences yield beauty, creativity and achievement.

The highly successful exhibition was punctuated by Bayer generously donating a portion of the print sales to The Art of Elysium, who’s mission is to encourage working actors, artists and musicians to voluntarily dedicate their time and talent to children who are battling serious medical conditions.

Previewed Transitions.

When it came time to think up a treatment for “Payphone,” the first single off Maroon 5′s upcoming Overexposed album, frontman Adam Levine knew exactly what he wanted … he also knew there would be some occupational hazards involved in getting his way.

“The video is this crazy thing; it’s about a bank robber, it was actually an idea that I had, and Sam Bayer, who’s a brilliant director is doing it,” he told MTV News on the “Payphone” set. “I work at a bank and I wear these glasses that are really a bit creepy and maybe make me look like a child molester. It’s a real go-for-it, swing-for-the-fences video, I get brave and I steal a gun from one of the guys and try to be a bad-ass, which is weird, because I’m not a badass.”

And from his mind to an actual bank vault in Los Angeles, the “Payphone” video is shaping up to be a pretty epic clip … not to mention everything Levine imagined.

“I love to write video treatments; I would actually professionally write treatments. I don’t even want to direct anything. I just love coming up with outlandish, fun things that I’ve always wanted to do,” he said. “I don’t think they’ll be able to play it on MTV actually, because there’s guns in it. Maybe they’ll have to blur the guns out. But we decided to kind of not play by the rules, as far as the typical video goes; I’m sick of seeing just a band playing a song in a video, I think it’s fun to try to do something far more different.”

Of course, doing something different also means lining up none other than Wiz Khalifa to guest on the track, especially since, on OverexposedLevine said the band maintained a strict “no guests” approach (especially given the success of the Christina-Aguilera-guesting hit “Moves Like Jagger”). Though, with the song completed and the video shot, Levine says he’s glad the band bent the rules to get Khalifa.

“Wiz is an amazing dude, and he’s just the future. He’s already so huge, but he hasn’t really done many big pop records, actually, so just the idea that he’d be interested in doing it was enough to get him involved. It was too good to pass up,” he said. “He’s a wonderful guy, he’s so creative and so quick … watching him in the studio, he was just so in it, within 30 minutes he had this incredible verse and he’d already knocked it out. That dude is really prolific and really talented.”

BY JAMES MONTGOMERY with reporting BY KARA WARNER | MTV.COM 

Since 1984, commercials have been as much a part of the Super Bowl as the football game itself and sometimes better. But few of the millions of viewers realize that behind all the great ads are directors doing their most creative work.

If there is one place a commercial director wants to be on Super Bowl Sunday, it’s in the game. After all, the Super Bowl is the premier showcase for commercials with a staggering number of Americans watching the National Football League’s championship showdown. Last year’s Super Bowl XLV drew an estimated 111 million viewers, making it the most-watched television program ever. And this audience doesn’t fast-forward through the commercials. The spots are as highly anticipated as the game itself. A poll of young adults conducted days before last year’s game revealed that 59 percent were actually looking forward to seeing the advertisements.

Samuel Bayer shot “Born of Fire,” Chrysler’s emotional two-minute long tribute to Detroit with Eminem guerrilla style. Photo: James D. Smith/AP Photo

“When I got into advertising 20 years ago, I became acutely aware that if you were going to have your spots play on a national stage and have people talk about them, the Super Bowl was the place to be,” says director Samuel Bayer, who was behind Chrysler’s heralded “Born of Fire,” an emotional two-minute tribute to Detroit featuring Eminem that aired during last year’s Super Bowl and won the 2011 Emmy Award for Outstanding Commercial.

The Super Bowl, first played in 1967, wasn’t always such a major platform for commercial directors. Some memorable work had emerged from the early years, including the legendary 1980 Coke “Mean Joe Greene” commercial directed by Lee Lacy that had the football star famously tossing his jersey to a young boy who gave him a Coke. But it was Apple’s “1984,” directed by Ridley Scott, that blew the game wide open in terms of how epic and powerful a Super Bowl commercial could be. “What I received was the script, and because I wasn’t computer savvy—I’m a pen and paper man still—I didn’t know Apple or what it was,” says Scott. “What attracted me [to the job] was the absence of the product in the narrative and no mention of what it was or what it could do. Brilliant!”

The late Steve Jobs, whom the director never met, had expressed concern about not seeing the product being advertised the Macintosh computer in the commercial, according to Scott’s recollection. But the agency stood behind the idea, Scott says, adding, “The rest was history. It certainly converted Steve to advertising.”

The spot, which aired in 1984, opens with a startling image of a woman sprinting down a dark corridor clutching a hammer and being chased by police. The woman ultimately bursts into a chamber full of zombie-like men dressed in drab gray paying rapt attention to a Big Brother-like figure spewing propaganda projected onto a giant screen. The leader’s spell is broken when the heroine hurls her hammer at the screen, causing it to explode and signaling the arrival of a new era in computing.

Home Alone: Lance Acord auditioned hundreds of actors or his Volkswagen spot “The Force” about a kid who dresses up as Darth Vader. Photos: Courtesy of Park Pictures

Not to mention a new era in commercial directing. Scott had been directing commercials and films; he already had Blade Runner under his belt for nearly 20 years when Chiat/Day approached him to direct “1984.” After it aired, everyone wanted to know who directed it. “Producers were slowly realizing that the guys from TV commercials were capable of making movies,” says Scott. “So they hunted down who made the Super Bowl spot only to discover [in this case] it was an old hand.”

While high-profile Super Bowl work can elevate a commercial director’s career within the advertising industry and beyond to this day, the opportunity to quarterback a spot broadcast during what is a critical advertising showcase comes with high expectations and demands. Clients are shelling out anywhere between $250,000 to a couple of million dollars on production costs, and millions more on the airtime buy, which averaged $3 million for 30 seconds last year. Chrysler spent $9 million to buy two minutes for “Born of Fire.”

Directors start bidding on Super Bowl spot jobs based on briefs from advertising agencies beginning in the summer prior to the game. That process heats up in the fall, and the competition is fierce. “The bidding process is also part of the conceptual process of a job,” says Lance Acord, who directed Volkswagen’s “The Force” spot for last year’s Super Bowl. “The agency is engaging with directors to get their input and take on a script, then in a collaborative way develop and evolve the idea.”

That said, an idea is never set in stone. It’s not uncommon for concepts to be drastically altered, or even scrapped and replaced with new ones right before a spot is set to be shot. Just ask director Bryan Buckley. He made his Super Bowl directing debut during the 1999 game with Monster.com’s “When I Grow Up,” a funny but sobering spot in which children talk about their career aspirations, which includes filing all day and clawing their way up to middle management. It was a great concept, but it wasn’t the assignment Buckley was initially awarded. “There was an entirely different board when I won the job somebody sitting in a shrink chair, talking to a psychiatrist about getting a better job. They switched it to “When I Grow Up” at the last second,” says Buckley, who had to quickly shift gears to shoot a commercial that was entirely different in terms of look and tone from what he had initially prepared for. In the end, the spot helped him win the DGA Award for Outstanding Achievement in Commercials that year. 

But that wasn’t the only kudos Buckley received at the DGA Awards that night. Steven Spielberg came up to him and told him how much he liked the spot, and recalled him asking, “Did you shoot it black and white, or did you drain the color?’ I said, ‘I shot it in black and white,’ and he said, ‘I knew it!’ It was a great moment. It was so surreal that he was thinking about that.”

There are also the instances not uncommon when the addition of a famous face to a Super Bowl spot means a director has to scramble to make enormous changes at the last minute. Buckley was working on last year’s Best Buy futuristic shopping spoof “Ozzy vs. Bieber,” starring Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne and Justin Bieber, right up until the eleventh hour because Bieber only became available for the shoot at the last minute. And last year Bayer had to hop on a plane from Los Angeles back to Detroit to shoot additional scenes for “Born of Fire” only 10 days before the Super Bowl after Chrysler signed a deal with Eminem for him to appear in the spot.

Super Bowl spots generally don’t go into production until December or even January, just weeks before the game, and if there is one element of preproduction that directors focus on most intensely, it’s casting. “It all comes down to casting,” says Acord, who saw countless kids maybe hundreds, he says when he was looking for a young boy to star in “The Force,” which centers on a kid who is dressed up like Darth Vader and attempts to employ the Force to move household objects.

Acord had a much easier time with a 5 year old than Joe Pytka had with Michael Jordan, who famously showed up two hours late for the Nike “Nothin’ But Net” shoot that had him playing an increasingly complicated game of hoops with Larry Bird. A snag in contract negotiations kept Jordan from reporting to the shoot on time, and that presented a big problem for Pytka, who had only been allotted six hours to shoot the spot with the two basketball stars. “When he finally got there, I asked him if he was going to give me the two hours,” says Pytka. “And he said, ‘No.’ ” So Pytka had to move fast to capture all the action in just four hours. He succeeded, and the spot, which ran during 1993’s Super Bowl XXVII, remains popular to this day.

While Pytka had to get the Nike spot done in just a few hours, the average Super Bowl commercial shoot is one full day two for more complex productions. “The pressures are always immense, especially going into the shoot days, but it’s like a sport, and, personally, I have a tendency to like the rush of that chaos and nervousness,” says Buckley, who has been a regular contributor of commercials to the Super Bowl sometimes five per game for more than a decade. “You have to be ready for the ride and say, ‘Okay, this is going to work out.’ ” 

Super Bowl super star Joe Pytka’s “Applause” for Anheuser-Busch features soldiers returning from war. Photos: (top) Courtesy of Pytka, (bottom) DGA Archives

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Directors who go against the grain when it comes to production have done some of the most successful Super Bowl work in the last decade. While the Super Bowl is generally known for slick, colorful commercials, Craig Gillespie chose to go another route when he shot the Ameriquest spot “Surprise Dinner,” one of the commercials that landed him the 2005 DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Commercial Directing. “I wasn’t shooting it like I was shooting it for the Super Bowl. We went against all notions of Super Bowl production value,” says Gillespie, who shot handheld, creating a grainy, dark look for the spot about a guy preparing a surprise dinner for his girlfriend, only to have the cat knock over a pot of tomato sauce.

It didn’t look good for the guy when his girlfriend entered the apartment and saw him standing in the kitchen holding a knife in one hand and a sauce-covered cat in the other. As the spot was originally storyboarded, the cat knocked over the pot of tomato sauce while it sat on the counter. Gillespie had an idea to make the spot even more dramatic by putting the pot on the stove so when it fell it looked like a shocking pool of blood. But he only had three takes to get it right.

“It was really up to me to set up the joke in the most surprising way,” says Gillespie. “And by shooting it the way I did, not making it feel like a comedy spot you’d expect to see on the Super Bowl, the payoff was all that much more surprising.”

Buckley had also taken an unusual approach by shooting “When I Grow Up” in black and white. “The idea was to do something to counter what was out there and to make it prettier,” says Buckley. “I do remember the client asking, ‘Why do we have to shoot this on film?’ He was sort of ahead of his time, I guess.”

Ridley Scott’s “1984″ for Apple changed the field for Super Bowl commercials. (Photo: Scott Council)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shooting digitally is certainly more common now. More and more directors, including Pytka, are going digital for the big game and beyond these days. “Film is not a luxury anymore. Film is archaic,” says Pytka, who mostly shoots with the Canon 7D. “I hate to say it because I was a film guy from the beginning, but in the last two or three years digital technologies have improved so much that it’s made film somewhat obsolete.”

Acord, a director and cameraman who has been a DP on feature films ranging fromLost in Translation to Being John Malkovich, shoots all of his own commercial work. He shot “The Force” with Arri’s Alexa digital camera. “I’d done some testing with it, and I knew it would work beautifully for the final shot of the car at the end, and working with a kid and being able to turn the camera on and let it roll and roll and roll was great,” says Acord. “I love shooting film. It’s still my favorite format to work with, but I also love to experiment.”

Bayer, also a director and cameraman, shot “Born of Fire” himself, although he passed on digital in favor of shooting on 35 mm film because he wanted to achieve a gritty look. “It was guerrilla filmmaking in Detroit,” says Bayer, who captured moving shots from a van. “There was no Technocrane, no Steadicam, no lights.”

Bayer isn’t sure if he wants to direct another Super Bowl spot after the success of “Born of Fire.” “I think I am going to leave on top,” he says half-seriously. “Historically, the stuff I have done for the Super Bowl was right at the bottom of the list. It was always very depressing. I’m just so excited that I had a good one, and people remember it, and I can bring it up at cocktail parties.”

While Scott’s “1984” elevated Super Bowl spot-making to a new level, it was Pytka who took the ball and ran with it. This prolific director, who has won the DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Commercial Directing three times and earned a record 15 nominations, made his mark with a string of hits that rolled out game after game starting in the early 1990s, including the rousing Ray Charles Diet Pepsi “You’ve Got the Right One Baby, Uh-Huh” commercial; the Nike “Hare Jordan” spot that had Bugs Bunny bouncing around a basketball court with Michael Jordan; and all of those Budweiser Clydesdale ads that in Pytka’s hands became an honored game-day tradition for Anheuser-Busch.

Pytka is not shy about saying he longs for the good old days when he first got into the game and directors had the final word as to how a Super Bowl spot was made. It’s not like that these days, he maintains. “The process is so complicated in ‘Panicsville,’ which is the state of the industry now,” says Pytka. “Instinct used to run the business, but now with everyone being a corporate conglomerate, it’s all down to research.”

To wit: Pytka recalls longtime client Anheuser-Busch, which was acquired by InBev a few years ago, getting focus group feedback for the storyboards for a spot titled “Clydesdale Fence,” which chronicles the friendship between a Clydesdale colt and a calf, before it was shot. When it came time for Pytka to direct the spot, the director says he wasn’t allowed to deviate from the research-approved storyboards, so he wasn’t able to add key scenes he thought necessary, and the spot didn’t make the cut for the Super Bowl or so it seemed. Pytka later went back into production and shot additional scenes for the commercial at his own expense, which is unheard of, and “Clydesdale Fence” came together in the editing room and not only aired during Super Bowl XLIV, it was one of the 2010 game’s most-acclaimed spots. Pytka says he felt vindicated by the end result.

 

Cat Soup: Craig Gillespie went against what was traditional and shot Ameriquest’s “Surprise Dinner,” about a guy making a surprise dinner for his girlfriend, handheld and grainy. Photos: (top) Courtesy MJZ; (bottom) Alberto E. Rodriguez/GettyImages

 

 

 

 

So what makes a successful Super Bowl commercial? While there isn’t necessarily a winning formula, there is no denying that humor helps. And if you can throw in some cute babies or animals even reptiles, judging by the enduring popularity of the 1995 Budweiser “Frogs” spot directed by Gore Verbinski into the Super Bowl spot mix, well, it can’t hurt.

Gillespie has often relied on deftly employed visual gags. “Visual storytelling works well during the Super Bowl because there are so many places where people are watching the game where it’s loud,” he says. “If you see something that you can actually watch without hearing the sound, and it still tells the story, that helps.”

While the Ameriquest “Surprise Dinner” commercial is a brilliant example of this, Gillespie also had a hit with the 2010 Snickers ad “Game,” which featured a young guy playing football with his friends. Hunger strikes and he turns into a cranky old lady in the form of Betty White, who then gets tackled. Like “Surprise Dinner,” Gillespie also shot “Game” handheld, but the spot was heavy on effects because of the tackle. “It looks like we really did tackle Betty White, and that’s the fun of it,” says Gillespie. “But it’s the work of a good effects company. We shot it twice—once with Betty and the stunt guy running in toward her and making contact but not knocking her down, and then we did the same exact move with the stunt guy tackling a stunt person. The effects people combined the two, and they even took Betty’s face and placed it on the stunt person who got tackled.”

As well as humor works, Super Bowl spots aren’t solely about laughs, especially these days. Since 9/11 more serious and emotional commercials have taken center stage during the game, including 2005’s “Applause,” directed by Pytka for Anheuser-Busch. In the spot service people are shown returning from war, walking through an airport where they were greeted with spontaneous applause. Pytka would only direct “Applause” if two conditions were met there was to be no product in the commercial and real soldiers were to be cast. The client acquiesced on both. “This is about as altruistic as you could get in a commercial,” says Pytka. “I have always felt that the best commercial doesn’t need to have any logos in it.”

Pytka cast the service people featured in the spot from photos and only met them the day of the shoot. Not ideal, but dealing with the military to get permission was a complicated process, according to the director, who shot the commercial at Los Angeles International Airport. “I’ve shot at LAX many times over the years, and I have a good relationship with those people. There’s a food court above the check-in counters [in one terminal], and they were able to close it off, and we built a gate,” says Pytka. “We kept the colors on the set muted to keep the focus on the service people.”

Pytka didn’t spend a lot of money to shoot “Applause,” which is often the case in today’s economy, but the perception is that some of the most celebrated Super Bowl commercials had exorbitant budgets.

Scott recoils when asked if it were true that he had $900,000 to make “1984.” “Bollocks! It was approximately $250,000. People say this, and it is really irritating. The million dollars was spent on the air buy time, not on the spot,” says Scott. “Actually, I got a lot of work [back then] because I was so competitive with budgets,” Scott adds. “I’d go for an idea always, never because there was a big budget.”

For many of the top commercial directors working today, it all comes down to the idea. If they fall in love with the concept, it’s not always about how big or expensive the spot is. “It’s a pretty critical audience watching the Super Bowl now,” says Acord. “The little Doritos ad that cost $120 grand to produce can sometimes have way more impact than the $2 million ad that’s just a lot of eye candy

BY CHRISTINE CHAMPAGNE

Commissioned by Sam Bayer, this is the 3rd design in a series of Ford GT projects that includes performance upgrades and graphic livery development from concept to delivery. Design direction by Camilo Pardo – Chief Designer of the Ford GT.

This project was produced with The GT Guy LLC. Composed of two engineers involved in the development of the Ford GT from the beginning of the production program – Rick Brooks and Dennis Breitenbach. The paint and finish was executed by Premier Finishes. With the achievement of 60 Ford GT paint finished Brian Borowsk.

Don’t try this at home, kids. Maroon 5’s new music video for “Payphone” features frontman Adam Levine escaping a bank robbery, dodging bullets, stealing a car and running from police.

“Payphone” is the lead single from Maroon 5’s upcoming album Overexposed, set for release on June 26th via A&M/Octone!

Directed by Samuel Bayer, the clip starts out with Levine standing by an exploding car. Then, Levine is shown sitting in a bank that is soon robbed. We then get to see how he ended up standing next to that exploding car. Although it’s fun to see such a big-budget clip from the band, the story line doesn’t make complete sense. Since Levine’s character didn’t rob the bank, why does he keep running from the cops? And why does he leave the pretty lady behind? But at least there’s plenty to look at.

Maroon 5 first performed the new single on The Voice, where Levine stars as one of the four coaches. Wiz Khalifa, who is featured on the track, also appeared on the show. After the performance, “Payphone” debuted atop the iTunes chart. Due to its opening sales week, the song arrived with the best digital sales frame by a group, raking in 493,000.

Watch Maroon 5’s new video below. 

BY REBECCA FORD | THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

3. Nirvana, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ (1991)

I’ll be honest and say that when I first heard a music video director would be doing a remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street, one of the most beloved horror franchises of all time, I wasn’t too crazy about the idea. Sure, we’ve seen brilliant music video directors such as Fincher and Jonze go on to have very successful film careers, but just as often, we get overstylized filmmaking with no sense of how to make a 90-minute film cohere as a whole.

Then I read up a little bit more on director Samuel Bayer and I realized that the man has helped to define a generation of music videos, creating some of the most iconic images of all time. His music videos are stylish, visually interesting, bold, and unique. His commercials are attention-grabbing and beautifully shot and edited. If there are music video directors out there that can successfully make the transition into feature directing, Sam Bayer certainly has the potential to do so.

I had the chance to chat with Mr. Bayer for a lengthy interview. We discussed the making of his favorite music videos, what other movies he’s tried to direct over the years, why he’s remaking Nightmare, what he hopes to accomplish with his new take on Wes Craven’s classic, his next planned projects, and the legacy he hopes to leave behind. You can read the interview after the jump or download the interview via the /Filmcast below. A Nightmare on Elm Street is out in theaters on April 30, 2010.

Samuel Bayer, thanks so much for speaking with us today at Slashfilm.com.

Thank you.

So, a lot of our listeners might know that you are going to be directing the new ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ film, but they might not know your music video work. I’m wondering if you could just talk a little bit about your career over the last 20 years, and how you got your start working in music videos.

Yeah, I was actually a painter, living in New York, and– this is back quite a few years ago– and to make ends meet, I worked on music video sets to make money. And this was back in the heyday of MTV, and music videos were very exciting, and this was when Fincher was doing stuff, and Michael Bay was doing commercial videos. And I don’t know, I just got it under my skin and got the idea that I could do videos, and moved out to Los Angeles in 1991, and knew somebody at a record company, and took them out to lunch, and bought lunch for them and didn’t buy it for myself. And when the person asked why I wasn’t eating any food and I said, “Because I can’t afford to eat, but I can afford to buy you lunch, and how about a job?” And so she gave me a music video to direct, and it was Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” That was the first thing I ever directed, and hopefully kids today remember what that is, and that started my career.

And I did a ton of commercials and music videos, and that went on for a while, and I think the last kind of hurrah I had with music videos was I did all the videos off of the Green Day record American Idiot, and we won a bunch of awards at the MTV Awards in 2005. And then I did– I think the very last video I did was with Justin Timberlake and Scarlett Johansson in 2007. So, long run.

Well, let me ask you. There is an urban legend of sorts that the reason you were chosen to direct “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is because your demo reel was the worst one. Can you talk about that experience?

Sometimes urban legends are true. That one’s true. Yeah, I had a pretty bad reel, and I think that Kurt Cobain decided that it was a very punk thing to do to pick the nonconformist to do his video. And I saw it as my big break. And actually, when he showed up on the set, he hated everything I did, and we fought like tooth and nail over the job, and it was a very intense experience, actually, and there’s all kinds of things about that video that are really cool. The cheerleaders were strippers; the janitor in the video was the janitor from my apartment complex in Venice, and he had an asthma attack from all the smoke on the stage. The kids I recruited from a show at the Whiskey A Go Go, and they were drinking, and they destroyed the set, and– just a really amazing day. But I think the video looks pretty cool.

Yeah, I’m sure a lot of people would agree. But it sounds like it was a combative relationship. I mean, did he tell you that that’s why he chose your video, like on the first day?

No, I think I heard it sort of secondhand. It’s an interesting thing the stories that happen behind things, the stories behind the movie projects, the stories behind the videos, the stories behind things that you hear. The truth of it is, because I was there, it’s like Kurt really was so unhappy with what I was doing, he refused to lip-sync the song. And I turned– my whole career was on the line– and I turned to the head of the record company and I said, “Look, you’re going to have an amazing video if you just let the guy sing the song one time. I don’t care how much he doesn’t like me, just sing the song one time.” And he gave this incredible performance that was kind of directed at me that was filled with venom and anger, and everything– and angst– and everything else, and it’s this weird thing of pushing people, whether they wanted to be pushed or not. It’s like he gave this incredible performance that really became the heart of the video.

You’ve created some of the most memorable and iconic images in all of music video history. I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about your creative process. How do you come up with the premises of your videos? How do you conceive of them? What’s the thought process that you go through, and how do you feel that that’s changed over time?

Well, you know, first of all, I mean, I’m a huge music fan, and I think one of the things that I’ll always remember from my music video career is that I got a chance to work with a lot of my heroes, everyone from John Lee Hooker to the Rolling Stones, and Ozzy Osborne, and Nirvana, and Metallica. It was a very exciting thing to do– and David Bowie– just to get to meet and to hang out with people that you grew up with and listened to their music and everything else. And my thing was that I really approached music not from an intellectual place but an emotional place, which is– I don’t know if people today would remember some of these videos– but if I did a video for a band like Garbage, like “Stupid Girl,” the name of the band was Garbage, and the music sounded like beautiful garbage, and that’s how they described their music. It was like cut up and dissected. So I made a video that I actually cut up and dissected and put back together.

Blind Melon, “No Rain,” which was a really infamous video– they had this beautiful album cover with a girl dressed up as a bumblebee. And I talked to the band about how they got that picture, or why that picture was important, and I developed a whole story about the story of the bumblebee girl. And so the ideas kind of came from the– I don’t know– the emotion of the music. And sometimes I never even knew what the songs were really about. And I kind of didn’t want to know what the songs were about. That was just my interpretation, and that was the joy and the fun of music videos. And I think actually the sadness of a lost art form, because the days of big music videos are really kind of over. And about 10 years ago was a really exciting time, where there was a lot of cool stuff coming out.

Right. Just out of curiosity, I know you’ve done dozens of music videos. Are there any other ones that you want to name for our listeners to maybe find on YouTube or see on your website that you’re particularly proud of?

There’s a few. I really like Smashing Pumpkins’ “Bullet With Butterfly Wings.”

Great music video. Great music video.

Yeah, thank you. I really like that video a lot. There’s a Rolling Stones video I did called “Anybody Seen My Baby,” that if you look closely, the beautiful girl in the video is Angelina Jolie, and I shot her back in 1997 when she hardly knew anybody, and I had her running through the streets of New York in her underwear, and that was kind of exciting. And, oh boy, what else? I like Metallica “Until It Sleeps.”

Let me just ask you about “Bullet with Butterfly Wings.” How did you come up with the premise of that? Obviously you play around a lot with depth of field and with sort of the color palette. If you could just talk a little bit about the making of that video, I’d love to hear it.

I mean, first of all– I mean, the “Bullet With Butterfly Wings,” it was a very big, anthemic album that came out. This was like an event. It was the first single off a double record that Smashing Pumpkins came out with. And you know, I think I had seen these photographs by Sebastiao Salgado of– who’s a wonderful still photographer of diamond mines in South Africa, and–

I actually thought about– I was watching the video the other day, and I actually was like, “This looks a lot like Salgado,” and I guess that’s no coincidence.

Yeah. And so I think I was very influenced by the Salgado images. And then I really liked giving the film– and then I shot– actually, it was very exciting. I had a set of lenses developed at Panavision, that they actually grinded off the– the whole thing that you learn about film is sometimes less is more, and one of the reasons why older films kind of have a beautiful kind of shallow depth of field and a very deliberate focus is because the way they used to machine glass on the lenses was a lot less exact than they can do these days. So in a very kind of organic, primitive way, I asked the guys at Panavision to develop some lenses for me, and they actually– I think they took something and they ground down some glass on some lenses, and I had a whole set of lenses that I used for the video that really kind of gave it a very cool look, and unfortunately those lenses got destroyed. But I used them for a while. They were really badass.

Awesome. Well, lets talk about your budding movie career. You’ve been a music video director for about two decades, and I’m wondering if during that time you’ve received any other offers to direct films.

Yeah. I mean, it’s been a– listen, it’s been a long road, and I think the first meeting– I’ve developed stuff or been attached to stuff for whatever reason didn’t happen. I was attached to ‘Monster’s Ball’ 10 years ago. I had a movie with Benicio Del Toro that was set up at MGM. Sean Penn was writing something. We were going to write something together. I was going to do a remake of ‘Vanishing Point.’ I had quite a few projects that I wanted to see happen, and for whatever reason they didn’t happen. And I’ve always wanted to make a movie. I think it’s very difficult for a first-time director to make the right choice, but you can also wait forever and never make a choice. So I think this was the right movie to make.

Well, speaking of this movie in particular– Nightmare on Elm Street– I’m wondering– I guess there’s a lot of reasons to remake a film, right? Maybe the original didn’t have the resources or the technology to make it work, or maybe present-day circumstances give the old story a new meaning. So why did you feel like the Nightmare on Elm Street story needed retelling?

Well, it’s a couple of things. I mean, first off, I really like the producers on the project a lot, and even though I think that they get a lot of flak from the horror community, they’re actually– they really enjoy what they do. They really like remaking horror films, and they like trying to reinvent something. And that’s interesting to me, and I like Michael Bay a lot, and there’s a history between all of us. And there’s other movies they’ve offered me that I’ve turned down. But this was the one that was really interesting to me, because– not that I think that every movie should be remade– but I do think you can reinvent something. And I’m a big fan of what Wes Craven did, and I’m a big fan of the first movie and the idea of Freddy, and I think Freddy should be scary.

And my thing is that I think the franchise kind of just lost a lot of its– I think they ran out of ideas. I think it lost some of its power. I think that Freddy kind of became a vaudevillian comedian rather than a really terrifying character. And when I talk to people about Nightmare on Elm Street, people say, “That guy scared the living hell out of me,” and I’d like to bring that to a new generation. And I think sometimes, in this delicate landscape when you talk about remaking things, I’d like to consider reimagining it, and reimagining it for a new generation, and reinventing it. And that’s why it’s exciting to me, because I don’t think certain movies should be remade, but this is one that I think you could cast differently, bring some different resources to it, shoot it differently, and still come up with something fresh and different.

You mentioned the produces, such as Brad Fuller and Andrew Form, who have done a lot of horror remakes, and they kind of put their stamp on each one of these remakes in several ways. In working with them, were there every any sort of creative constraints or requirements that were put upon you, or did you feel like you had complete creative freedom?

Well, when you work with Platinum Dunes, I think that there is a– I think that nobody could ever accuse them of not making beautiful films. I think all their films look really pretty, and I think that maybe it’s been a process for both of us to come to a kind of equilibrium, to come to an equal ground on how we both see things. And I think people are going to see something in this movie they may not have seen in another Platinum Dunes movie. I’ve tried to really push the characters and the acting and the performances and the cinematography in a certain way. And absolutely it’s got a Platinum Dunes stamp on it, but hopefully it’s got a Samuel Bayer stamp on it too, and people will see that.

Just out of curiosity, how involved is Michael Bay in the process?

Michael comes and goes, and he’s one of those guys that he really– he shoots from the cuff, and sees things in a very– he’s not the type of guy who’s going to sit on set or sit in the edit bay for hour after hour. But when you show him something, he knows what he likes and he knows what he doesn’t like, and why it is or isn’t working, and doesn’t want to hear all the reasons why somebody did something. He just wants to know why it isn’t working. And I really respect that. And I think Michael, just like Platinum Dunes, is someone who gets flak for some of the wrong reasons. And there’s a reason why he’s so successful, and he’s got really great instincts, to tell you the truth.

You mentioned that you really tried to push certain things in this newer version. What would you characterize as sort of the biggest differences between your version and, say, the 1984 Wes Craven version?

Well, I mean, I think that some of the elements– I mean, look. I think sometimes people have a revisionist history. It’s like, yes, they cherish this franchise, but please. I mean, look at some performances in the original movie. Might have looked great in 1984– I think that’s the year it came out– and they might have looked great then, but I think that sometimes the low budget, the caliber of talent that came to the table I think really shows itself, and I think that some of the– without saying anything bad about the movie. I mean, I think some of the performances border on camp. And I certainly don’t want to do another– and I also think that sometimes horror movies get relegated to the– I call it the “horror movie ghetto.” Like, “Okay, well that’s a horror movie.” The same way something’s a comedy. “Well that’s a low-budget comedy, and that’s a horror movie, and we can’t look at those movies the same way as we do with big-budget, star-driven projects.” And I’ve tried to tackle this movie as a real movie, in a different way. It’s not just a horror movie. I’ve tried to make it something bigger, and hopefully people will see that, that it appeals– I want this to appeal to diehard Nightmare fans, and I want to find new fans, and also find people that may not be necessarily fans before.

Well, you’re talking about how things have changed since then, like the acting style might be different today than it is back then. Obviously movie-making technology has also come a long way. What are some of the ways you’ve tried to take advantage of the special effects advancements that have happened in the last couple of decades?

You know, it’s interesting you should say that. I mean, I think that some people will be surprised that– I think this is a movie that’s actually– there’s a lack of technology in it. And I think there was two different versions of this movie. There’s the CG-heavy version, which tried to push every kind of post-effect you possibly could in it, and I think that my version is much more rooted in kind of gritty realism. It’s like sets are built, they’re art-directed. I don’t think people are going to look at this movie and say, “Oh, that’s a real showcase for 21st century technology.” I mean, maybe in certain places you’ll definitely see that, and I think you’ll see that with Freddy’s makeup, to be honest with you. On some elements of some of the dream sequences. But it’s pretty much organic filmmaking. What was shot is what we got.

I’m wondering if we can talk about the dream sequences, because for many Nightmare fans, including myself, those are probably the things that stick out the most, since they scared the hell out of us when we were younger. How did you approach those dream sequences in this film? How did you find the balance between sort of making something new versus paying respects to the dream sequences from the older film?

Hopefully we’ve– I’m proud of what we’ve done. I think we’ve done a very delicate balance. And you can’t please everybody. I think some people are going to say, “Okay, well why did they lift sequences from the original movie? Why couldn’t they come up with something different?” And we did come up with things different, and sometimes we did pay homage to the original movie and take iconic– I mean, I just don’t know how you could reinvent this without having the hand in the bathtub, or maybe the character in the original, Tina, flying in the air. We’ve got our version of that. And I really don’t want to give too much away, but we had a screening, and people were clapping when some of those things came up, and we did that for the diehard fans. And I think what’s cool about it is I think there’s some new scares in there that were not there 25 years ago, because we did try and reinvent it. And then there’s definitely some new stuff going on. One of the coolest things about the movie is we have the concept of micro-naps, which is based on real stuff that goes on. If you stay awake for 72 hours, you start dreaming with your eyes open, which is a terrifying concept that we make a big part of our story. Which, now it’s no longer you can’t fall asleep, but you might fall asleep whether you like it or not.

Let me ask you: as a director, in general, I guess big-picture-wise, what were the biggest challenges of going to directing a film versus directing a music video for you personally?

I think the biggest challenge is– and I heard there’s another director that I heard this quote from. I do a lot of commercials and music videos– well, I do basically commercials now, but I did do a lot of music videos. And doing commercials and music videos are a sprint. When I do a project, the beginning and the end of it’s within three weeks. This is a year of my life. It’s been a marathon. So the biggest challenge is just endurance. Can you be fresh and objective with something after you’ve looked at it week after week after week? And I can honestly say, after doing a movie, I know why bad movies are done. Because I think that people are hypnotized by what they’re looking at, and they’re not– it’s impossible to see clearly after you’re looking at the same thing day after day after day.

So what were some ways you tried to avoid that, if any?

I think to walk away from it, or not let things be precious, or show it to enough people that you take the criticism or the confusion about the story. And it’s always that it’s never– I think it’s also something that I think Michael’s not afraid, is like, it’s never right. There is no right answer. It’s never perfect. You’ve got to keep– whether you’re cutting away or adding something, or adding an ADR line. It’s like, there might be a better solution to something. And that’s very difficult, especially when you think you nailed something, to try screwing it up to make it even better. It’s definitely an exercise.

That sounds really challenging compared to doing music videos. I’m wondering what is something that you’ve really enjoyed that working in music videos doesn’t have.

You know, to be very honest with you, what I enjoy about it is that there’s nothing permanent about my legacy of making music videos, and it’s very sad in a way, because I did it for a really long time and I’ve made some– I think some memorable music videos, and I did some huge commercials that I’m not so sure people would know today. They just get forgotten about. And making a movie’s forever, and that’s the most important thing to me, that you can’t take it away. Your name goes on and it goes into someone’s library. You can download it. It goes on iTunes. You can go get it from Netflix or something. It’s like it’s there forever. And I cannot compare that to doing music videos or commercials or any other sort of element of the business. It’s like being a writer and saying you’ve never published a book, . And I think it’s like being a composer, or being in the music business and not doing a record. It’s like everything has something that I think has a level of permanence to it that you aspire to.

If the film does well, do you think there’s going to be a sequel? Would you be interested in directing the sequel? What are your thoughts on that?

I really hope the film does well. I will not be involved in a sequel…I don’t want to have my next movie be a horror movie. I’m already looking at stuff and I think I’m probably going to do a– it might be an action movie, or there’s a comic book they want to make into a film I’m very attracted to. But I think I’m going to move on and let someone else handle the next one, and it’ll be great.

Yeah, that was going to be my last question, which is what do you think you’re going to be doing next, and I guess you just described some of the possibilities. Can you elaborate on any of those?

There’s a comic– I’m sure my agent would kill me for this, because I’m sure I’m not supposed to talk about it or whatever, but I don’t really care, is that– no, my assistant is shaking her head. No. No? No? I was going to mention a project. Shut up? Okay. I’m doing what people tell me. Yeah, I’ll bury myself with this one. There’s some very, very cool stuff out there. I’m really into graphic novels and really into the superhero genre, and I really think there’s some interesting stuff going on, and I think that’s what I’m leaning towards.

All right. Well, sounds really exciting, and when that happens, we’ll be sure to report on it. But in the meantime–

Awesome. And listen, I do know your site very well, and I’m really excited to do this.

Well, Mr. Bayer, we thank you so much for your generous time here today, and we wish you the best of luck with the film.

Thank you so much.

BY DAVID CHEN | SLASHFILM.COM

Chrysler’s “Imported From Detroit” ad has been called one of the best commercials of Super Bowl XLV. “It’s not like we set out to do a two-minute commercial with Eminem,” Melissa Garlick, head of Chrysler advertising, tells EW. He was originally approached just about using “Lose Yourself” in the ad because it’s a great comeback anthem. The more Chrysler management, including CEO Sergio Marchionne, spoke with him, the more they realized they shared the same passion for the city, and he agreed to be in the commercial. “We weren’t looking to make him a spokesperson or a sales pitch guy. We wanted him to talk from the heart,” Garlick says. It just felt natural for him to deliver the final line in the script: “This is the Motor City, and this is what we do.”

The spot was directed and shot by Samuel Bayer — the commercial, music video and feature director who helmed “Smells Like Teen Spirit” for Nirvana and multiple American Idiot videos for Green Day — who impressed Chrysler and Portland-based ad agency Wieden + Kennedy with his treatment. “From a cinematic quality, we wanted this to be a very organic execution. We didn’t want it to be over-produced. He picked up on that,” Garlick says, adding that Bayer spent a few weeks in Detroit getting to know the city before the official five-day shoot in mid-January. (He had a handful of hours with Eminem on one of those days. This is the only Chrysler commercial Eminem’s set to appear in, but his music will be used in other Chrysler 200 spots over the coming months.)

Chrysler originally bought two 60-second spots with the plan for one of them to be a Chrysler 200 ad, Garlick says. The company had to request special permission from the NFL to extend the standard 90-second break to two minutes — and get other advertisers to move, because the minutes it originally bought were in two different quarters. “The original intent was to develop a spot for the relaunch of the Chrysler brand, but I think we were pretty realistic about some of the sentiment that existed about Chrysler, about Detroit, about the automotive industry domestically. There’s been a lot of hard work and effort that’s gone on around here over the last year, and we just wanted to tell our story in a very optimistic light, not to be apologetic — we are who we are — and to take credit for the people and the fabric of this town.”

While the vast majority of viewers were moved by the spot, there are some who didn’t buy the message. ”We’re not surprised by that,” Garlick says. “What we talk about is really more of an American story. I think it’s the idea that in America, you can do anything that you set your mind to if you have enough conviction and will power. And I think people deserve second chances, and I think everyone loves a comeback. No doubt, we expected some people to be skeptical, but there’s been a lot blood, sweat, and tears put into the products we’re bringing forward, and we’re very proud of them. I don’t think people will be disappointed.”

BY MANDI BIERLY | EW.COM

Hunky, drowsy, brain-scrambled Dean (Kellan Lutz) walks, or sleepwalks, through the Springwood, Ohio, diner. And finds Freddy Krueger (Jackie Earle Haley), the razor-fingered dream stalker. Back in his booth, Dean seems to be struggling with himself, then takes a knife and slits his own throat, deep and deadly. The title card A Nightmare on Elm Street snaps onto the screen, and the audience at last night’s Times Square press screening erupts in a gleeful cheer.

Or maybe that was from the Dolby, because much of the postscreening chatter — at least what I overheard the New York bloggerati say about this remake of the 1984 Wes Craven half-classic — was enthusiastic only in its contempt. They’d behaved themselves during the screening, but on the street afterward they could have been Tea Partiers at an Obama Is a Commie rally. “How can you not do the face-suck?” one of the Cravenists asked with a rhetorical sneer. “Did they think they were remaking West Side Story?”, another contumelied. Their tone of dismissal echoed this morning throughout the geekosphere.
I liked the new Nightmare, but I know that any new version of a revered text — a favorite old book, play or movie — invites invidious comparison. In this case, your fondness for the remake may be in inverse proportion not just to the extent of your admiration for the Craven original but also to how recently you saw it. I last watched Heather Lagencamp battle Robert Englund’s Freddy (with baby-faced Johnny Depp an early victim) about a decade ago. It was fine, and it had the advantage of being the first.

The new one, directed by vide-auteur Samuel Bayer and written by Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer, is what I’d call a fine copy. Yes, it offers a higher frequency of Freddy interventions. And it’s as scrupulous as Kick-Ass in applying today’s technology to the old story: a boy video-blogs his Freddy fears before his head is smashed into the screen; as an exhausted girl works at her PC, it flashes “Computer entering sleep mode.” But this is not a “reimagining” — that would be what David Cronenberg did in his 1986 masterpiece The Fly, based on the so-so 1959 film. The new Nightmare is a straight, shiny, honorable remake.

Bayer replays dozens of the elements Craven established. (If you are one of the few people who never saw the first Nightmare, you should probably STOP READING NOW.) Of course this film retains the notion of a fiend from the past who torments a group of small-town teens as they sleep. But also: the Psycho strategy of investing the audience’s interest in one character, only to kill her off and switch focus to another woman; the frisson of Freddy’s form seeming to lean out of a girl’s bedroom wallpaper; his possession of the girl’s body that summons the levitating powers of Linda Blair in The Exorcist and Fred Astaire’s dancing on walls and ceilings in Royal Wedding; the visitations of dead schoolkids; one girl’s burning her arm to say awake; and the final grim twist — a parent finally feels Freddy’s wrath.

Bayer, who directed such music videos as Nirvana’s “Smells like Teen Spirit,” brings a craftsman’s loving attention to every aspect of the movie, from the opening credits (which appear in a child’s script, like an S.O.S. jotted desperately on a sidewalk, and where the sign “Badham Pre-School” turns into “Bad School”) to flicked references to old scare movies like Cronenberg’s Shivers (a somnolent teen in a bathtub, her legs asprawl, with Freddy’s claw rising briefly, teasingly). Bayer isn’t Orson Welles, exactly, but he has plenty of assurance and the props to back it up.

I also enjoyed watching the young cast, even when they had to enact horror-film tropes like the guy who leaves his girl alone near the climax. The five actors in the teen leads might look a little mature for 18-year-olds (they range from 22 to 25), but the characters have surely been aged and withered by their psychic torment, and they have the dead-seriousness of U.S. soldiers on their fifth and perhaps terminal tour of Iraq. Serious is also the word for Haley — unlike Englund, who devolved in the five or six sequels into a campy lounge act. He’s pure predation, and he’s responsible for the film’s definitive blecccchhh moment: when he approaches Nancy (Rooney Mara), whose back he had scarred when she was in preschool, and growls, “You’re my little Nancy,” then licks her face.

Bayer also conducts, a bit more cunningly than Craven did, a symphony of cinematic sadism on the viewer’s nerves. Most horror films have downtime between the gross-out scenes, space for audiences to grab their wits and prepare for the next shock. Often a movie lets you know when to relax. With The Exorcist, for example, we soon learned that we were safe as long as the camera stayed out of poor Regan’s room. Sea-monster movies like Jaws taught us we were safe if we stayed out of the water (except for last year’s craptacular Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, in which a really great white leaps from the water to attack and devour a 747 cruising at 30,000 ft.).

Nightmare at first seems to offer periods of downtime, since we’re led to believe that a kid is in jeopardy only when she or he falls asleep. Ah, but whose nightmare is it anyway? Whose frantic brain are we inside? After some adjustments, we figure it out and realize with a shiver that Freddy’s in there too: the weirdo in the red-and-green striped sweater and the burn-victim scowl. He’d be among the creepiest villains ever — if it weren’t for the kids’ parents.

The adults, you’ll recall, are the ones who, 15 years earlier, turned Freddy from an eccentric preschool janitor, a toxic influence on the children he doted on, to the maleficent undead creature who haunts their sleep. (The new movie has a more sensible explanation of Freddy’s crime — we’ll just say it coincides with the crime Haley’s character was convicted of committing in his Oscar-nominated role in Little Children a few years back.) Now teenagers, the children still don’t know what happened, so when Freddy comes back to play inside their skulls, they are both terrified and baffled.

The story’s sociopolitical message is blunt and potent. Your parents, it says, are sedaters, trying to control you with their silence, evasion and lies. These guardians of the official adult culture, the soothing, fraudulent status quo, want you to be ignorant of both the man who can harm you and the knowledge that might save you. When the kids beg for help, the grownups advise them to “try and get some sleep.” Only Freddy tells them the truth — “You really shouldn’t fall asleep” — just before he slaughters them.

But since Freddy is also the ultimate horror image of an abusive father figure, the plot of the original Nightmare and this borderline-gripping remake plays like a emergency session in psychoanalysis. Interpret your dreams, come to grips with the past, confront your demons, and you shall be free. Unless audiences make the movie a hit and a sequel appears in a year or so — and the whole cycle of torture and revenge recommences like a dreadful dream from which you can’t awake.

BY RICHARD CORLIS | TIME.COM
Photo courtesy of Warner Bros.

Wieden + Kennedy has picked up its third straight Emmy Award for Outstanding Commercial—this time for Chrysler’s “Born of Fire” Super Bowl spot starring Eminem. The two-minute spot was directed by Samuel Bayer of Serial Pictures and edited by Tommy Harden of Joint Editorial. The ad beat out five other nominees—which you can see after the jump. (Somewhat controversially, the list didn’t include Volkswagen’s “The Force,” from Deutsch, which was arguably the best-loved spot from the Super Bowl.) Olivier Francois, CMO at Chrysler Group, said in a statement: ” ‘Born of Fire’ was more than a commercial about the Chrysler 200, it was our anthem and signified the return of the Chrysler brand and our company. We are honored to be given this award and would like to share it with the wonderful people of Detroit who served as our inspiration and, of course, the hard-working employees of Chrysler Group LLC.” W+K won the Emmy in 2010 for Old Spice’s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” and in 2009 for Coca-Cola’s “Heist.”

BY TIM NODD | ADWEEK.COM

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The director, a veteran of memorable music videos and commercials, makes his feature debut with a reboot of the Freddy Krueger slasher flick. ‘This was “Twilight” before “Twilight.”

No matter how fierce your devotion to popular culture, odds are you’ve never heard of Samuel Bayer, who makes his feature directing debut Friday with the reboot of “A Nightmare on Elm Street.” But you’re almost certainly familiar with his work.

A prolific commercial and music-video director, Bayer has been responsible for some of the most memorable images of the last 20 years: Kurt Cobain thrashing around a gym in Nirvana’s music video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit”; the bespectacled girl in a bumblebee tutu finding elusive companionship in Blind Melon’s “No Rain” video.

BY STEVEN ZEITCHIK | LATIMES.COM

By Andrew Hampp, New York | February 04, 2013 12:23 AM EST

Not surprisingly, Beyonce was the most-Tweeted artist of Super Bowl 47 by a mile. But the race for most-Tweeted music-related commercial was very close – with Bud Light’s Stevie Wonder-starring ad slipping past Volkswagen and Jimmy Cliff by less than 100 Tweets, as of the 11 p.m. ET cutoff time. Check out all of the music-based ads from the big game right here.

Brand Bowl’s 10 Most Tweeted Commercials

1. Bud Light

Superstitious? Bud Light needn’t be when Stevie Wonder helped them score the most Twitter buzz of the night.

 *   86,884 Tweets
 *   +68% Sentiment
 *   68 Score

2. Volkswagen
Nothing like a little controversy to help stir chatter. Volkswagen’s Jamaican-flavored ad, featuring Jimmy Cliff’s “C’mon Get Happy,” was a close second in the most-talked about brand race.

 *   85,916 Tweets
 *   +67% Sentiment
 *   66 Score

3. Audi
Already one of the most-liked ads heading into the game, Audi’s “Prom” scored many fans on Game Night too.

 *   67,731 Tweets
 *   +75% Sentiment
 *   58 Score

4. Calvin Klein
Though its Depeche Mode-lite score earned a few favorable tweets, let’s not kid ourselves about the reason why Calvin Klein’s underwear ad racked up so much discussion.

 *   68,948 Tweets
 *   +70% Sentiment
 *   56 Score

5. Taco Bell
Thanks to “Viva Young,” a Spanish take on fun.’s “We Are Young,” Taco Bell scored a buzz boom.

 *   56,578 Tweets
 *   +81% Sentiment
 *   53 Score

6. Doritos
No major synchs, but Doritos’ Crash the Super Bowl paid off for one of the heaviest pre-Super Bowl social media campaigns.

 *   48,599 Tweets
 *   +78% Sentiment
 *   44 Score

7. Budweiser
Not only did Stevie Nicks’ “Landslide” score the big placement in Budweiser’s Clydesdale ad, but Budweiser Black Crown also featured Soho Dolls’ “Stripper” and Peter Bjorn & John’s “Second Chance.”

 *   50,022 Tweets
 *   +66% Sentiment
 *   38 Score

8. Pepsi
The soda giant aired a middling spot for Pepsi Next, but we’re guessing the majority of its Twitter activity came from its sponsorship of Beyonce’s Half Time performance.

 *   54,748 Tweets
 *   +54% Sentiment
 *   34 Score

9. Hyundai
Not only did Hyundai score the night’s first post-kickoff ad with the Flaming Lips, the automaker also featured Quiet Riot’s “Bang Your Head” in another ad.

 *   33,429 Tweets
 *   +67% Sentiment
 *   26 Score

10. Oreo
No music from Oreo’s humorous spot, but also the night’s fastest, most clever uses of social media to react to the unexpected blackout.

 *   22,330 Tweets
 *   +74% Sentiment
 *   19 Score

Billboard.com

EXHIBTION ON VIEW FROM
MARCH 3, 2013 THROUGH APRIL 27, 2013

Depicting the human body has been among the primary preoccupations and achievements of artists for millennia. Drawing inspiration from historic precedents in painting, sculpture, photography and film history, for the past twenty years Samuel Bayer has produced still photographs alongside his innumerable award-winning music videos, film and commercials. Bayer has evolved an aesthetic of gritty rawness, a now emblematic style that has typified his music videos since his groundbreaking first with Nirvana in 1991. The culmination of his recent photography is a large-scale series of black and white photographic nude portraits, being exhibited for the first time at Ace Gallery Beverly Hills.

A series of sixteen nudes, shot in three sections with a large-format 4” x 5” camera in the studio against a simple white backdrop, envision larger-than-life contemporary studies of young women, tackling the time-immemorial subject of the nude. They are accompanied by two diptychs of faces in extreme close-up, eyes open, eyes closed; the features and cool gaze of his subjects reveal every freckle, line and follicle. Face; eyes, hair – features become a landscape to traverse as our eye wanders human terrain.

These are models and individuals Bayer has worked with and known over the past decade, becoming living archetypes in the colossal scale of ancient goddesses looming above a viewer at over 14ft. As contemporary studies of the female form, these women would not have existed in the mid-twentieth century prior to the sexual revolution of the 1960s when artists began to reconsider the body as a politicized terrain and explored issues of gender, identity, and sexuality manifest in photographers such as Diane Arbus, Robert Mapplethorpe, Larry Clark, Hannah Wilke, Nan Goldin and Cynthia MacAdams.

In Bayer’s new series, we see an ongoing biological and sociological evolution. Posed frontally and exposed, they might be perceived as vulnerable on a smaller scale, however the straight gaze and the enlarged scale creates an intimation of a earapproaching new race of superwomen quietly waiting in the wings. A viewer is surrounded by these unadorned figures, provoking possible intimidation in their directness, uncompromised by faux modesty. Women have changed, transformed and advanced since Artemisia Gentileschi’s confrontation with the male gaze.

Bayer does not objectify his models in a way that Herb Ritts “saw parts of the body’s surface in precisionist terms, often adding mud, skin paint, sand, and other materials to sensually emphasize the follicles and pores of the epidermis,” verging on scopophilic fixation with the exaggeratedly buff gym-engineered body.

Yves St. Laurent, always attracted to the androgynous and strong woman and the first couturier to use black models in 1962 has said: “I always found my style through women. That’s what makes my vitality and strength: I lean on a woman’s body, on the way she moves… the way she stands.”2 sculptor Robert Graham has consistently used this agile, frontally posed female form and in the mid 1980s created monumental sculptures of which. He produced a giant nude, twice human size in 1984. Helmut Newton photographed a portrait of Graham with his giant nude; while Newton began his nude studies relatively late in career in 1980 saying “Women are much stronger than men – in every possible way. I truly believe that. I’m a big admirer of women.” As religious symbolism and reference has become irrelevant to contemporary consumer society, the female form evokes millennia of pre-patriarchal goddess worship, the archetype of Venus or Isis, transcending religions. American photographer Cynthia MacAdams pioneered and defined the ‘goddess movement’ in Emergence the new woman on her own terms in photography from the 1970 and 1980s – with fiercely independent women role models – portraiture and nudes including Jane Fonda, Kate Millett, Gloria Steinem, Laurie Anderson, and Patty Smith. In contrast to Helmut Newton’s fetishism, the subject of gender in society was dramatically changing; Bruce Weber was to evolve a new masculinity and homoeroticism in commercial photography. Newton and subsequently Bayer, visualize women as they are today; women who take the lead and have presence, who take pride in “the resplendence and vitality of their bodies, bodies over which they themselves have sole command”; the liberated woman full of health and vigor – fit, capable and strong.

Bayer’s women are in no need of props, backdrops, adornment and decoration. Fashion becomes fast obsolete while the nude transcends time. Commercial and fashion photography are intrinsically coercive, propelling sales of magazines and products. As commissioned work imposes restrictions, the parameters of a creative eye with a progressive view are challenged in creating images of society and of the role that women play in it. Bayer’s nude portraits in this exhibition are not reliant on using the powers of seduction and the desires they awaken – the subliminal attraction of fashion and image-making. Unlike Newton, Bayer’s nudes are devoid of glamorous trappings.

Bayer’s intimidating, larger than life women echo a theme which emerged since the late 1970s – of portraying emancipated women for the first time in history able to control their own sexuality – which had hitherto been inseparably bound up with motherhood. As the taboos of Judaeo-Christian morality collapsed, a celebration of the human body has reconnected to the glorious nudes of antiquity. An interplay of genres as nude photograph can be fashion and/or art and vice versa became the norm of particularly West Coast photographers – embodied in Herb Ritts or specifically Robert Mapplethorpe’s first female body builder Lisa Lions. The new muscular females contrast Bruce Weber’s passive males, seemingly available, which in the early 80s raised controversy about sexual empowerment and what defined masculinity in the late twentieth century. Quarter of a century later, a new generation of women have a birth right of independence and self-determination unknown to previous generations, to rebuke objectification. As Helmet Newton envisaged in A World Without Men –jettisoning the sexist status quo, uncompromising; – is this the next evolutionary step for a new world order? While various artists and writers chart collective cultural and evolutionary decline, Bayer and other artists and photographers give us an evolutionary snap-shot of positive strength and evolution of the human race where strength and beauty can be found in self- confidence and self-determination, regardless of ethnicity or background, while beauty resides with equal potency in both genders, and gender itself is mutable. Here we might also see the marked cultural difference of American women’s grooming – gym-buff, articulated muscularity and hairless bodies. As with Herb Ritts, Bayer’s commercials and music videos evidence the cross-over’s and cross-pollination intrinsic to LA culture at its most influential – hybridizing music world talent, celebrity, style, body beautiful – aesthetic and image-making unique to LA.

Reminiscent of Helmut Newton’s celebrated series Big Nudes and Sie Kommen (1981, Naked and Dressed), the scale of each distinctive young woman defies potential objectification; looking unequivocally, directly into the camera lens and by extension boldly confronting a viewer. There is little chance for voyeurism. They are unified despite their differences, in their hairless bodies – clearly stating their sex. A new generation of women, assertively full-frontal posture in a stance undermining the traditional pose of the female nude in an averted gaze (insinuating modesty yet aware of being object of a male gaze). Autonomous and independent, they also stand in the unified solidarity of an Amazonian tribe, or future superwomen, aware of their potent presence and sure future. The Western world has maintained the nude as a fetishistic subject beyond being an aesthetic object, and since the 20th century, has been increasingly commercialized in selling products and merchandise, not to mention the underbelly of Los Angeles in its vulgar porn industry. In cultures across the world, the body is both sacred, ritualistic, a container of spiritual energy and the embodiment of divine creation, linking humans to the Divine. Controversial, female and male nude depictions in photography have provoked impassioned discussion about sin, sexuality, cultural identity, and canons of beauty, especially when the medium is photography, with its inherent accuracy and specificity, as the Metropolitan Museum of Art articulated in the recent 2012 exhibition History of the Nude in Photography in Naked before the Camera.

Drawing on both a history of sculptural nudes in the classical tradition, and with his camera, simultaneously contemporizing this tradition, Bayer’s work can be seen in the context within the history of portrait photographers. In the early 20th century, Alfred Stieglitz and his gallery 291 Gallery introduced the medium of photography as fine art to the public, with Eugène Atget as another early role model. Soon Man Ray vastly expanded the possibilities of photography, not merely with his commercial work as a portrait and fashion photographer, but with experimental techniques. With portraits of the cultural luminaries of his day from Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, to his close friends Picasso and Max Ernst, Man Ray’s influence could be reflected in a sense, in the contemporary image-making of Samuel Bayer. Both cross-pollinating photography and film between artistic and commercial realms, and in our contemporary media-saturated landscape, Bayer’s widespread and profound influence in pop culture from directing breakthrough independent rock music videos.

While the nude as subject is timeless, does Bayer challenge stereotypes of beauty and obsession with youth? While fashion magazines and Hollywood continue to perpetuate and typecast the young and thin, perhaps with these representations of young women confident in their bodies (noticeably without silicon-implanted breasts) provides an antidote to the vulgarity of pornography and the explicit images that bombard us relentlessly. From the plastic surgeried, talentless bimbos of reality television to whom privacy and silence are alien; to billboards for the paradoxically titled “gentleman’s clubs” to the back pages of the local newspaper sporting cheap prostitutes; images of over-sexualized vixens have become so prevalent as to become the tawdry norm. This series of nudes by Samuel Bayer addresses all these histories and aesthetics with a savvy and profound insight into image-making and presents his alternative view.

Samuel Bayer was born in upstate New York in 1965 and grew up in Syracuse, New York. He graduated from New York City’s School of Visual Arts in 1987 with a degree in Fine Arts. At the age of 26, Bayer set out to Los Angeles to begin his career as a music video director and he went on to direct over 200 music videos with the likes of The Rolling Stones, Greenday, John Lee Hooker, Marilyn Manson, Metallica, Smashing Pumpkins, David Bowie, Aerosmith, and Lenny Kravitz. Bayer won an Emmy for the 2011 Super Bowl commercial for Chrysler, Born of Fire featuring Eminem; Bayer’s commercials are represented in the permanent film/video collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Known for his music videos for the Strokes, Green Day and Nirvana, Bayer has penetrated the fine art world with “Diptychs & Triptychs,” on view at ACE Gallery in Beverly Hills through April 27.

Walk into Samuel Bayer’s solo exhibition at Beverly Hills’ ACE Gallery and you’ll find yourself surrounded. Sixteen women, each 12 feet tall and entirely confident despite their stark nudity, stare quietly from the four walls of the gallery’s main room. The initial effect is overwhelming, and as Bayer admits, “almost a little bit spooky.”

Yet this is his intention, “to strip the girls of any artifice,” providing an alternative view of womanhood. In Hollywood, where Bayer recognizes that women are constantly “dissected and scrutinized” based on superficial qualifications, the showing makes a bold statement.  But after more than two decades of working in the industry, he’s hardly a stranger to making statements. 

Bayer attended New York City’s School of Visual Arts, starting his career as a painter over 20 years ago before pursuing music video production. “Nobody wanted to buy my paintings,” he laughs, when asked about the sudden career change. 

Soon after the transition, he found himself directing iconic music videos for the likes of Nirvana (“Smells Like Teen Spirit,” 1991) and Blind Melon (“No Rain,” 1992). In later years, Bayer collaborated with Hole, the Smashing Pumpkins, and the Strokes, among others; his most recent music video production was Green Day’s “Kill the DJ” in 2012. 

He progressed into the commercial video arena in 1996, creating award-winning advertisements for major brands including Nike, Mountain Dew and Chrysler. 

The feature film A Nightmare on Elm Street, a retelling of Wes Craven’s 1984 horror classic of the same name starring Rooney Mara in her first major role, followed in 2010, though Bayer is reluctant to associate with the project, which he was reportedly coaxed into directing by the film’s producer, Michael Bay. “I don’t see the movie that I made as necessarily mine, even though it has my name on it,” Bayer explains, confiding that he “found making a movie a very difficult experience.”

By comparison, developing the exhibition has been a relatively seamless operation. Inspired by a conversation with his late father during which he expressed his intense desire to display his work, Bayer began preparing the showing five years ago. 

Meanwhile, he presented his first solo exhibition, “Transitions,” at Siren Studios in Hollywood in 2011. The installation included stills and video footage of butterflies in various stages of growth.

He treated “Diptychs & Triptychs” as a film project more than anything else, holding open castings for hundreds of models before eventually narrowing the pool down to 18 finalists. The girls, now ordained as members of “a sort of tribe,” often held poses against a simple white backdrop for up to two hours during marathon shoots. Bayer then transformed their black-and-white images, shot with a 4″ x 5″ camera, into a series of 6-foot-tall diptychs and 12-foot-tall triptychs in what was a deeply personal process, one that afforded him the benefit of complete creative control.

Inspired by his two favorite photographers, Richard Avedon and Helmut Newton, Bayer now is experimenting with fashion photography, and recently completed a run of editorial shoots with Treats! Magazine. Avedon’s 1985 release In the American West, a collection of black-and-white portraits of rural subjects, particularly influences his photographic work. 

Still, Bayer’s foray into fine art may not suggest a permanent departure from video. He remains undoubtedly passionate about filmmaking, and would love to direct another feature film, though this time under different conditions than his last. He has a project in development, tentatively titled Amongst Mortals and in partnership with production company Anonymous Content (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), which he describes as “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in an old folks’ home.”

For now, the exhibition remains Bayer’s chief priority, “the most important thing” in his life. When asked to elaborate, Bayer pauses.  “A lot of times my music videos and commercials don’t really last,” he says. “Maybe the photos will last.”

“Diptychs & Triptychs” will be on on view through April 27 at ACE Gallery, 9430 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, 310.858.9090, www.acegallery.net.

“I always used to say that, maybe I didn’t become successful as a painter, but my images were seen by lots and lots of people,” muses filmmaker Samuel Bayer over the phone. He is not exaggerating. Between his music videos for Justin Timberlake, The Rolling Stones, Green Day and The Strokes, and his Super Bowl commercials for Chrysler and Budweiser, most Americans are familiar with Bayer’s art, whether they realize it or not.



Trained as a painter, Bayer stormed onto MTV in the early 1990s. His first music video was for Nirvana’s breakout single, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (1991). By the end of 1992, Bayer had directed music videos for the likes of Ozzy Osbourne, Iron Maiden, The Ramones, Blind Melon, Johnny Lee Hooker, and The Jesus and Mary Chain. Bayer’s videos provided a powerful mix of musicians performing in a smoky haze cut with arresting, often black and white images. Think of Dolores O’Riordan covered in gold paint, tied to a cross, surrounded by gold Cupids with bows and arrows, interspersed with IRA graffiti and dirty children roaming the desolate Belfast streets in The Cranberries’ “Zombie.” Or Billy Corgan surrounded by dust-covered Diamond miners in the Smashing Pumpkin’s “Bullet with Butterfly Wings.” Or Courtney Love, raw after Kurt Cobain’s death, playing acoustic guitar on a striped mattress as a Cobain-resembling child comes into the room in Hole’s “Doll Parts” video. To say that Bayer’s images helped shape the aesthetic of the early ’90s is not a stretch.



Now 48, Bayer has retired from music videos, concentrating instead on commercials, feature films (he made his directorial debut in 2010 and has another film in the works), and photography. His latest exhibition of photography, 16 towering triptychs of nude women and two diptychs of female faces, is currently on show at Ace Gallery in Beverly Hills.




EMMA BROWN: What was the first music video that made you feel like, “Maybe I can do this, too”?



SAMUEL BAYER: I think it was Peter Gabriel, “Shock the Monkey.” Makes my memory kick in. Peter Gabriel’s “Shock the Monkey” is like a Werner Herzog film, it’s just weird.



BROWN: You started out as a painter.



BAYER: Yeah, I went to the School of Visual Arts. I was a painter. I was in New York around the time of Basquiat and Keith Haring and all those guys. That’s originally what I wanted to be, but nobody liked my work. [laughs]



BROWN: Do you still paint?



BAYER: I don’t. I think we all go through times in our lives when we decide, “I’m going to try something else.” I tried filmmaking instead of painting, and I think I enjoyed it more. So I don’t paint anymore.

BROWN: When you started making music videos, did you see it as an entry point into making feature films?



BAYER: You know, I think I was just interested in making money. [laughs] I went from being a starving artist to a guy that was actually getting paid to make artwork, so I was just happy to be getting paid. 

[Now] I’ve got a movie in development with the company that did Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Winter’s Bone, called Anonymous Content. It’s a really cool script, it’s character driven. I like to call it One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in an old folks’ home. That will be my next project. That’s what I’m really passionate about.



BROWN: The first music video you directed was Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” I heard Kurt Cobain was pretty difficult on set. Was that very intimidating?



BAYER: It was actually really exciting. I think the reason I got Nirvana is because it wasn’t exactly a high-profile project in the record company. When I did the video, the things that were at the top of the US charts were M.C. Hammer, Guns N’ Roses, Metallica. I don’t think anybody really thought that this punk band from Seattle was going to sell so many records or become such a cultural phenomenon. I think the reason I got the job is because they were looking for hungry artists to maybe cut their teeth on it and do something different. Even though I thought the band was amazing, I had no idea it was going to blow up the way it did.



BROWN: When you sign on to make a music video, does the artist present their idea to you, or do you listen to the song and present your ideas to the artist? How involved is the artist in deciding what they want in their music video?



BAYER: When you actually get successful, if you became a recognized director, people would let you come up with an idea for a video and they would let you do it. At the time, Kurt had an idea to do a rebellion at a high school. He wanted it to look like Rock ‘n’ Roll High School (1979) by the Ramones, mixed with a movie that Matt Dillon did called Over the Edge(1979). I heard him say that and came up with something very dark and gritty. Most of the time, when you get some recognition, you’re allowed to come up with the ideas. ["Smells Like Teen Spirit"] was much more my interpretation of what Kurt Cobain’s idea was.



BROWN: When did you start getting recognized? Was there a certain moment when things changed for you in terms of how much creative control you were given?



BAYER: After Nirvana came out, I did a video for Blind Melon called “No Rain” that was kind of the antithesis of Nirvana. If Nirvana was kind of dark and gritty, then Blind Melon wasThe Wizard of Oz. It was like beautiful Technicolor—really pretty to look at—and left you with a really warm feeling in your heart. After I did those two projects, things seemed to really take off for me; I was offered a lot of work. The ’90s were a fun time for me—I got to work with all my heroes. I got to work with David Bowie and the Rolling Stones and John Lee Hooker before he died. I was like a kid in a candy store.

I think music can define our lives. Working with Mick [Jagger] and Keith [Richards] and talking to the guys that wrote the soundtrack of my youth was kind of cool. It’s interesting when we meet our heroes; sometimes they really let us down, and sometimes we realize that they’re just other human beings like us, with the same drama and fears and everything else going into their lives. I’ve worked with lots of people at different stages of their careers—going up, going down. Some people I’ve worked with I would never want to work with again, and some people would probably say they never want to work with me again. But all in all, it was definitely cool. When I worked with Bowie [on "The Heart's Filthy Lesson"],Interview magazine came down to the set and printed a bunch of stuff from the shoot. That was one of my favorite people. Working with Bowie was amazing. I wish they were all like that.



BROWN: Is there anyone aside from David Bowie that you’d really want to work with again?



BAYER: I never saw anything like what happened with Nirvana. It’s been a long, long time, but I would’ve liked to work with Kurt Cobain again.



BROWN: You worked with Courtney Love on Hole’s “Doll Parts” video. 



BAYER: Yeah, I worked with Courtney six months after Kurt committed suicide, and that was a very heavy experience.



BROWN: Especially with that song, which is about him.

BAYER: Yeah, and we cast a little boy to play a young Kurt Cobain. Just knowing he was dead, and his daughter was there. It was very sobering and intense.



BROWN: You’ve mentioned that you no longer direct a lot of music videos, but you made “Payphone” (2012) with Maroon 5 fairly recently. What made you decide to take on that project?



BAYER: I think it was the fact that I got on the phone with Adam Levine and we talked about using machine guns, maybe a car chase and a hot model. How can I say no to that? That was just fun, I really loved him. We really went big; we talked about doing something that felt like a movie and not like a music video. I think Adam would make a great action star. He was very good.



BROWN: Do music videos have bigger budgets now than when you started in the early ’90s?



BAYER: I think the budgets have dropped dramatically. For me, doing music videos is like going to film school—I learned on set. If I was a young director starting off, there’s so many tools at your disposal now to do things relatively inexpensively that it’s a great time to learn your chops and do some cool music videos. If I started all over again, I’d still be doing music videos, I’d just be doing them very differently. With what you’re able to do on your home computer, as far as effects go; with how you can shoot film in HD now, and make it really beautiful. It’s very difficult for me to do them now, but for young kids out there that love music and want to tackle a different art form—and I do think music video is an art form—that’s a very cool thing to do.



BROWN: Do you ever shoot in HD?



BAYER: I just started shooting in HD pretty religiously about six months ago. The technology has changed so beautifully. I shot the Maroon 5 video in HD, and I think it looks like film. I’ve changed with the times, too. I hope film never dies; I will continue to shoot on it, but I do shoot HD now.



BROWN: What aspects of film do you particularly value and want to recreate in HD?



BAYER: One of my favorite music videos I did is this video for Garbage called “Stupid Girl,” where I actually took the film negative and put it in my bathtub, stuck it in the ocean, burnt cigarettes on it. I did the same thing with Green Day’s “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” It’s film; it’s organic, it’s tactile, and you can touch it. There are things that you could do with film that you could never do with HD. There’s a warmth and an organic quality—almost a handmade quality—that goes into film. Film will always have a bit more of a humanistic feeling to it.



BROWN: Do you need to like the music of the artists you’re directing, or does it not matter?



BAYER: No, I really gotta like it, man. It makes a big difference to like the music. I really did like the Maroon 5 song. I did a handful of music videos in the past decade. I really liked Green Day a lot, and really enjoyed working with them. Did a great song with Justin Timberlake, “What Goes Around Comes Around,” and we put Scarlett Johansson in the video and I really loved the song. You’ve got to dig the music. You’ve got to—or why do it?

BROWN: And you had Angelina Jolie in your Rolling Stone video, “Anybody Seen My Baby?”



BAYER: Yeah, I just read an article that Mick was chasing Angelina around for three years after that video. I thought that was really funny. It was just one of the cool things about all the years I spent doing it, I got to put the 22-year-old Angelina Jolie in a music video. If you talk to some New Yorkers, they might remember a girl in her underwear running down the street on Fifth Avenue, and that was Angelina Jolie.



BROWN: Do you play any instruments? Did you have a band as a teenager?



BAYER: I like posing with a guitar better than I can play the guitar, so I think I found the right field. [But] I’ve spent enough time with rock stars to tell you that the best thing in life to be is a rock star. [laughs]



BROWN: How does your approach to commercials differ from your approach to music videos?



BAYER: They’re very different disciplines. Music videos are so incredibly relevant, but I don’t think they’re relevant on broadcast television anymore. I think they’re much more about the power of the Internet. The stakes in advertising is a very different game. There’s a lot of money involved and a lot of pressure. I miss the freedom and the rock-’n'-roll spirit of doing music videos, but I did this commercial for the Super Bowl with Eminem and Chrysler called “Born of Fire,” which won an Emmy and a Gold Lion at Cannes. It was sort of a beautiful fusion of advertising and music video. It was a really cool phenomenon that doesn’t happen very often.



BROWN: I also wanted to ask you about your gallery show in LA. How did you decide which girl should be triptychs and who should be diptychs?



BAYER: [laughs] Some girls have faces that are perfect for diptychs and some girls have bodies that are perfect for triptychs. It took me five years to launch this whole show. We treated it like a feature film—we did casting sessions. That’s the way I had to find my girls. There’s a very deliberate look that I’m looking for to be a triptych or a diptych. It’s not necessarily the most beautiful girl in the room; it’s about being beautiful on the inside too.



BROWN: But they are all beautiful on the outside.



BAYER: They’re all pretty. But I was looking for an inner spirit that transcends the film negative. It’s interesting you talk about beauty, because really what this show is somewhat about is about stripping away—all the women are filmed without clothing, without makeup, hair. There’s a real kind of nakedness to this show—not just physically but also emotionally. I sound pretentious saying all this crap, but it’s true.

What I think came from my years as a painter, I love Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus or Raphael’s work with nudes. I’m very influenced by what Helmut Newton did with women. There is something about the classic female form in an idealized fashion, and I really wanted to pay homage to. There is certainly a physical beauty that was important to put on the film negative and capture, and also part of how the human form has been idealized through hundreds of years of art history. It was important for me to make that connection.



BROWN: How did the original idea begin five years ago?



BAYER: I think I drew a picture of a girl on a napkin at a bar and started folding the napkin up. I started thinking about dissecting the human form: these could make singularly beautiful images—if it was torso or the hips or her head—and they could be standalone images. But if I put them together, it could also form a pretty piece of work. I think that’s where all cool ideas come from—a happy accident. Then it was all about executing the idea. If you had told me that it would take five years to do the images, I might’ve crumpled up the napkin and said just forget it. But it was something I  got really passionate about doing.



BROWN: Are you ever going to rearrange them?



BAYER: [laughs] If people buy the photographs and rearrange them, they can. I think that’ll be up to somebody else. Nobody’s ever asked me that.



BROWN: I heard that one of the billboards for your show was stolen.



BAYER: Yeah. When I was told the billboard got stolen, it made me feel like I really arrived; things are pretty cool and happening if you can get a billboard to get stolen. I was kind of shocked, [but] it also made me smile. I think it’s pretty funny.

I remember, when I went to the School of Visual Arts, Keith Haring had tagged the lockers up in the lunchroom. We all came in one day and all the lockers were missing, somebody came into the school and took them. You want people to want your stuff. And if they’ve got to steal it, hey, that’s cool. It’s nice to be wanted.

SAMUEL BAYER’S “DIPTYCHS AND TRIPTYCHS” ARE ON VIEW AT ACE GALLERY BEVERLY HILLS THROUGH APRIL 27. FOR MORE INFORMATION VISIT BAYER’SWEBSITE.