Celebrated film, video and commercial director Samuel Bayer, discusses the difference between fine art and commercial art as he gives us an inside glimpse of his recent solo exhibition at ACE Gallery in Beverly Hills. 

Samuel exposes ideas, secrets and experiences about his time directing music videos, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana and “Zombie” by the Cranberries, as well as the fortuitous situation that lead him to this extraordinary crossover into the contemporary art world.

Featuring the art of Samuel Bayer

Directed, edited & scored by Jesse Meeker

Perhaps the most impressive thing about Samuel Bayer’s series of photographic “Triptychs,” recently on view at ACE Gallery Beverly Hills, is the complexity of the meditation on desire and representation that they can engender in a [male] viewer. These 16 12-foot studies of nude models, each one fragmented into three vertically arranged and slightly off-register divisions, comprise an uncanny portrait gallery, absolutely compelling in its juxtaposition of apparent physical presence and brilliantly realized artifice. Like the notorious 4th-century Aphrodite of Praxiteles, these women are simultaneously incarnate objects of male sexual desire and masters of that liminal zone that marks off the external physicality of the body from the internal subjectivity of the self, a situation they share, for example, with Manet’s Olympia as well as the antique goddess.

The installation itself, beautifully spaced around the gallery’s central exhibition space, gave something of the feeling of standing inside a strange and wonderful sacred space, perhaps a temple, where the image of the cult statue had been replaced and replicated by the monumental figures that functioned also as the enclosing colonnade. But it was the individual portraits themselves that exercised the real power: the power to structure, almost to enforce, a complex and ambivalently charged experience.

Samuel Bayer, Janelle #1, 2012

Monumental in size, each “Triptych” has also something of the look and feel of sculpture, as though the bodies might be cool to the touch, like marble, or smooth and slick like mahogany or ebony. And they seem to carry their weight with ease and grace, despite the potentially awkward lack of feet, a fragmentation that, in the overall pictorial scheme, makes much less difference than it might This is I think a clever formal choice related to the size and shape of the individual visual fields (in turn conditioned by the size of the photographic plates) as well as the decision to “open up” the transitional space between field and field—a decision that also sets up a nice back-and-forth between perceptions of fragmentation and integration, part(s) and whole.
The body types of Bayer’s models are quite varied. Their ethnicities are global in scope. Their “personalities” (at least in so far as we can read them from details of pose, poise, musculature, expression and overall self-presentation) are likewise strikingly distinct, although the artist has posed his subjects according to a few basic formulae, mostly more-or-less completely frontal, but subtly modulated from one model to the next. Taken as a group, they might be said to exemplify Albrecht Dürer’s famous admission that “God alone . . . knows the secret of absolute beauty.” They are all “beautiful,” and in that way all can be desired, but in turn they reveal the multiplicity, the fragmentation of that desire, and the protean nature(s) that desire’s objects can assume. (These observations perhaps in turn raise questions of sexual politics that are unfortunately beyond the scope of my brief here.)
But what really ties Bayer’s models all together, the one thing (aside from their evident nakedness) that all share is the “curious” fact of their shaved genitalia. This was the one aspect of the photos by which I was taken slightly aback, especially given it’s rather “in your face” position in the center of the lowest panel in each portrait. For me, this naked sexuality actually served as a spur to turn my attention upward, whether to escape an awkward and objectifying encounter or simply to avoid the public articulation of a very private gaze. One might, however, legitimately ask of these rather confrontational panels, “Why?”

Samuel Bayer, Kristina #1, 2012

I can think of at least a couple of possible answers beyond my own momentary embarrassment. First, the representation of public hair was “prohibited” by convention in work produced within the broadly classical tradition from antiquity until the 19th century and beyond. (For a beautiful contemporary example of such a work, see Sara VanDerBeek’s Roman Woman VII, a photo now on view in her exhibition at Metro Pictures in New York.) Second, the workaday utility of shaved genitals, airbrush artists notwithstanding, should become immediately evident to anyone who flips through a Victoria’s secret catalog, this year’s Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, the current issue of Maxim, or any high end fashion magazine like Vogue. Beyond that however, it has also become de rigueur in the world of porn. So the possible resonances are several, and to a certain extent contradictory. Perhaps best at this point simply to take a fairly “conservative” position: that the power of naked, raw sexuality is something embedded deep within us, almost as the ground from which grow both the kind of self-fashioning we see in Bayer’s model’s, and the kind of artifice that both enables and records those senses of self.
All of this, however, is only a preliminary to the articulation of a much more intimate, and historically resonant, set of relationships. Although all the models seem clearly to be professionals, denizens of the world of haute couture and runway fashion, (a world haunted also by the artist’s photographic touchstones Richard Avedon and Helmut Newton) Bayer presents the models with a kind of unsparing, unforgiving directness. Up-close and almost preternaturally personal, each model’s body presents an extraordinary physical topography, the object of an exploring, possessing and tactile gaze. Meanwhile, each face presents a unique personality: wary, intimate, delighted, assertive, powerful—and this personality animates the body as well, recuperating the objectification of the gaze with a living, warm and vibrant presence, but a presence carefully fashioned by means of a consummate artifice.
On the one hand, this artifice is clearly a matter of the individual model’s sense of self and skill at self-presentation. After all, these attractive young women live in a world where that kind of flawlessly artificed self-presentation is simply a fact of professional, and I suspect also (eventually) of personal life. So whether what we see is a pose of imagined innocence and feigned yet as-if naïve self-exposure, as in Janelle #01 (2012) or instead a pose that, whether consciously or not, echoes (although with a sly inversion of concealment and revelation) that of Praxiteles’ Aphrodite herself, as in Kristina #01(2012) what we get is quite literally a pose: a presence at once personal and coded, constructed and projected.
And this means, on the other hand, that every image, every representation of a living and self-sufficient presence, arises at least in part from a collaboration between model and artist. So every image establishes a relationship that plays out in experience at once between model and viewer, artist and critic. These relationships are inextricably linked, but hardly identical. I can differentiate between my response to Janelle’s wary yet utterly open faux-innocence, and my response to Bayer’s skill as an artist in (crafting and) capturing that self-projection. Still—if I did not find “Janelle” so achingly attractive, I might well find Bayer a less skillful photographer; I would certainly find him skillful in some different way.

Samuel Bayer, Installation shot, courtesy ACE gallery

Finally, as someone interested both personally and professionally in the history of visual culture, I must return briefly to what is arguably the most resonant image in the entire series: Kristina # 1. As a model, Kristina seems to have arrived at her pose as if by chance or simple physical reflex. And her self-presentation is interestingly ambivalent. Her expression is relaxed, at ease, in control; but her body itself seems, if not tense, then a little drawn in on itself. At the same time, the pose recalls without duplicating that of Aphrodite, as given originally in the version by the Greek sculptor Praxiteles that became normative for the presentation… of what, exactly? On the one hand, Aphrodite was, in simplest terms, the incarnation of male sexual desire, the ultimate available object. On the other, she was a dangerous and self-possessed goddess, both powerful and coy; and posed by Praxiteles with a skill designed simultaneously to reveal and conceal that power, to suggest rather than define the complexity of sexuality, the ambivalence of desire—and, as if in passing, the intricacy of my own relationship with “Kristina.” That relationship, of course, owes much as well to the skill of Samuel Bayer, whose work in this series of photographs engages those same complexities and those same ambivalences which mark the playing out of desire in life as well as in art.
ACE Gallery: Samuel Bayer: Diptychs and Triptychs, ran from March 3 to April 27, 2013; acegallery.net

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Visual artist, cinematographer and director Samuel Bayer has imprinted his vision on some of the most influential branding campaigns and music videos of our modern-­day culture. A trained painter, Bayer’s career exploded after the success of his very first promo – the iconic Smells Like Teen Spirit for Nirvana. By Simon Wakelin

Back directing spots through Serial Pictures after the success of his recent feature Nightmare on Elm Street, Samuel Bayer is in the midst of prepping for his next shoot when we meet – a Bank of America job through Hill Holliday, Boston. He is also busy showing his photography in the fine art world, opening his first solo exhibition at the esteemed Ace Gallery in Beverly Hills, California.

Entitled Diptychs and Triptychs, the exhibit features a collection of monumental female portraits standing 14 feet tall, each trisected into three equal parts to form a fascinating fragmentation of female beauty.

The work’s division of the female form recalls classical sculpture in the vein of Venus de Milo – modern women naked and devoid of glamorous trapping to unveil their timeless goddess form. Five years in the making, Bayer photographed more than 100 women on a large-­format camera to garner the 18 portraits currently on display. The show has already received critical acclaim, as the images are an antidote to modern culture’s tendency for dissecting and scrutinising women based purely on superficial qualities:

“The first thing to go were the clichés – porn silicone actresses, bimbo strippers, and women used to taking their clothes off,” explains Bayer on adjusting his femme cast. “I treated the project like casting on a film, looking for a certain type of face, a vulnerability, or an arrogance.”

It comes as no surprise that Bayer’s work continues to impress. A graduate from Manhattan’s renowned School of Visual Arts, his success began in the most unlikely of circumstances – as a dead broke and somewhat disillusioned artist living in LA. It was while taking an influential friend from Geffen Records to lunch one day that Bayer got more than he bargained for.

“I explained that I’d just spent my last dime on her lunch and needed a job,” he reveals. “The very next day I received a tape of a Nirvana song, asking if I’d like to direct it. Getting that gig was literally an act of God.”

With little time to prep, Bayer searched for a cinematographer but found none suitable to translate his vision. On instinct he decided to lens the work himself, and in doing so successfully created a dramatic, painterly video with themes recalling the work of Baroque artists such as Caravaggio and Velázquez.

“A mix of naivety, anger and ambition led me to make that decision,” recalls Bayer. “I just didn’t want to rely on someone else to create my vision. No other cinematographer would have made it look so raw, so gritty. It was very different from the music videos of the day.”

Bayer also reveals that his relationship with Cobain became strained when he decided not to perform.

“Kurt and I didn’t get along at all and he refused to sing,” says Bayer. “Meanwhile I’m shooting around him, focusing on the cheerleaders, the devoted fans and capturing the atmosphere until Kurt finally gave me a performance.”

Cobain was full of rage at this point, lip-­synching the song as Bayer filmed:

“I told Kurt not to come too close to the camera but of course he did,” laughs Bayer. “But those takes were full of such venom that it’s one of the best performances I’ve ever shot. When he puts his face into the camera at the end of the video he’s totally fucking with me – but it worked beautifully.”

Directing and DPing was an insightful experience for Bayer who, to this day, shoots all his own material.

“I realised what a powerful tool I had in my hands,” he explains. “You are connected to the image like nobody else. I seek accidents and try to capture them as they happen. I dream about haphazard moments because they mean everything to me. What my camera does is an integral part of my directing style.”

While Bayer appreciates modern lenses with amazing optics, he also shoots with glass that creates a more organic look whenever possible.

“I feel that there is a beauty to imperfection,” he says. “Panavision has developed a special set of lenses for me that emulate the feeling of film from the 1930s that I adore. The glass creates a beautiful, slightly fractured image because each lens isn’t sharp enough to hold everything in focus.

“But I am no Luddite,” he continues. “Those that bemoan digital remind me how Elvis was welcomed – a free spirit gyrating and singing rhythm and blues on The Ed Sullivan Show scolded by parents saying he signified the fall of Western civilisation.

“But Elvis was the beginning of a musical revolution. When it comes to technological revolution, you lose a lot of things along the way, but gain something in exchange. I am confident using digital because I was trained as an artist, taught colour theory and composition so can make my images look exactly the way I want them to.

“The problem is that the mystery of film goes out the window,” he feels. “It’s less organic, less subtle, less accidental – but you just have to find the power in the tool. At first it fucked me up not hearing that mag of film running through the camera. I’d flip a switch and wonder, ‘is it rolling?’

“I believe the magic of film also played a role in its downfall. You are out there with 20 rolls of precious nitrate ready to have it shipped via special airplane from the deepest, darkest jungles of Africa just to get it processed. So digital is liberating in so many ways.”

The early success of Smells Like Teen Spirit led to Bayer shooting a plethora of influential music videos for talented artists including The Rolling Stones, John Lee Hooker, Marilyn Manson, Metallica, The Cranberries, Aerosmith and Smashing Pumpkins. Then advertising came knocking at his door.

“Advertising in the 90s started looking at MTV for influences,” he says of finding his footing in adland. “I was really lucky to be in the right place at the right time.”

A bevy of commercial work for Coke, Pepsi, Nissan, Lexus, Mountain Dew, Packard Bell and others followed. Ads of note include If You Let Me Play for Nike through Wieden+Kennedy – a spot revealing a subtler edge on Bayer’s palette, featuring a montage of girls expressing their desire to play sports, notable at the time for its departure from talking-­sportsman spots.

“I remember casting sessions full of horribly precocious children and their stage parents,” says Bayer. “I turned to the agency at one point and said ‘Why not use real kids?’ My gut told me it was the right move. We did and it made all the difference. It made the spot look fresh, human, and very real.”

The commercial went on to collect an AICP Award for Best Direction, cementing Bayer’s status as a director capturing the essence of a brand’s identity. His love of shooting real people also continues to this day:

“They don’t go through rehearsed behaviour to appear ‘real’ on camera,” he outlines. “Always work with the best actors possible when you need them – but if it’s a role that requires a certain look, some warmth, a gesture or just a smile then work with real people. Don’t be afraid of it.”

Showstopper for Mountain Dew is yet another gem exemplifying a daring, irreverent and exhilarating streak that cuts a fierce trail through Bayer’s body of work.

It’s an entertaining, high-­octane Busby Berkeley-­inspired ad with X-­Games athletes performing circus style stunts amid highly rhythmic ‘Techno Bugsy’ music. The spot successfully attracted a diverse audience for PepsiCo beyond Mountain Dew’s regular epicenter of young teenage males, an audience taking a collective gulp of Mountain Dew’s message – that to ‘Do the Dew’ meant to experience a thrill-­ seeking, adventurous lifestyle beyond the product’s thirst-­quenching benefits.

“That was one from a golden age in advertising and I was lucky to be a part of it,” says Bayer on the time period. “The 90s was amazing. I’d make a music video with The Rolling Stones one day, then blow shit up on a commercial the next. I used to look at MTV and advertising, and see the best and the brightest create images that were better on TV than at the movies.”

Fast-­forward to more recent Bayer fare and powerful branding messages still spring to mind, specifically his recent two-­minute Super Bowl spot Born of Fire for Chrysler featuring Grammy Award-­winning rapper Eminem.

Born of Fire takes us around Detroit, seen in its decline after the current American recession. Stunning vistas of the city’s bleak landscape fill the screen as we tour the Motor City seated in a pristine Chrysler 200 – until Michigan native Eminem exits the vehicle to step inside Detroit’s ornate Fox Theatre. Inside, a gospel choir is practicing on stage. They stop singing as Eminem paces toward them, ending centre stage to address us directly in-­camera saying, “This is Motor City. This is what we do.”

The inspired work received multiple awards, including an Emmy and a Cannes gold Lion, and it brought Bayer back into advertising after what he says was a difficult time shooting his first feature, the aforementioned remake of Nightmare on Elm Street.

“That film changed me,” he says. “It made me come back to advertising with a fresh perspective. I appreciate this business like never before. We who work in the ad industry are lucky to earn money and come in and out of jobs in three weeks.”

Bayer is also counting his blessings and admits to have learned from his misguided past:

“I have gone from an embittered artist to a director who wants to create something of consequence,” he states. “Looking back at my successes I am grateful because I don’t forget that I had a lot of support behind me.”

Asked what motivates him today and Bayer immediately lights up, admitting that film fires up his passion every single day. It comes as no surprise to hear that Sam Peckinpah ranks highly on his list of directorial inspirations.

“I can watch any number of classics,” muses the cineaste. “If you want a film lesson go watch [Kurosawa’s] The Seven Samurai. It was a film influenced by [John Ford’s] The Searchers and successfully took the American Western and synthesised it with the legend of the samurai to create the first action movie. Then Peckinpah revolutionised the genre with The Wild Bunch using slow motion, grittiness and blood. To get inspired you go back to the masters who were pushing it to the limit. They understood the power of film.”

As for his infamous bad behaviour, it’s merely a thing of the past. Today he has leveled out to a fulfilling life as an artist that includes a career in commercials.

“The spectre of my bad behaviour occasionally haunts me,” he openly admits. “Once in a while people will say they hear I am difficult. Sure, back in the day I had enough drugs to kill an elephant, but today I’m middle-­aged with a wife and a new baby.”

When I meet with Bayer once more it’s onset a week later, directing on the spot for Bank of America. As his crew preps for the day it’s clear they have great respect for their director. Bayer notices me watching them, guiding me aside as we eye them in prep mode:

“No director can create effective work without a stellar crew,” he says, with genuine emotion. “It’s taken me 20 years to get mine in place and I don’t ever want to fuck that up. They make what I do possible because because they live, breathe and die for me. We always push things to the limit – and that’s the stuff I live for.”

Anheuser-Busch InBev has revealed its first plans for Super Bowl XLVII, reserving one 30-second slot to introduce Budweiser Black Crown, a crowdsourced golden amber lager that hits store shelves Jan. 21, two weeks before the Feb. 3 game.

The spot was shot in Los Angeles last month by Samuel Bayer of Serial Pictures, who also directed Chrysler’s Emmy-winning “Born of Fire” ad for the 2011 Super Bowl.

The marketer did not reveal any plot details for the spot, or say which agency produced it. Anomaly is Budweiser’s lead creative agency in the U.S.

The national ad campaign will also include outdoor, digital, radio and print, along with “interactive consumer programs” on Facebook and Twitter. It will also use the Twitter hashtag #tasteis.

A-B InBev has not revealed its other Super Bowl plans. The brewer typically reserves several minutes of airtime to pushing multiple brands. In 2012, it used agencies Anomaly, mcgarrybowen and Cannonball to promote Bud, Bud Light and Bud Light Platinum.

Budweiser Black Crown is the culmination of the yearlong “Project 12″ initiative, in which the brewer challenged its 12 brewmasters to envision “their own unique version of one of the world’s most iconic beers.” Six of the 12 recipes were brewed for national sampling. And after 25,000 tastings nationwide, Los Angeles brewmaster Bryan Sullivan’s recipe was chosen as the winner.

“People respond really well to Budweiser Black Crown, which has a little more body and color and a touch more hop character than our flagship Budweiser lager,” Sullivan said in a statement. “Budweiser Black Crown is a great beer, and it is a thrill for our whole brewing team to see it launch with a Super Bowl spot.”

“This is the beer that consistently drew the best feedback, and overwhelmingly so,” said Rob McCarthy, vice president of Budweiser. “We’ve set our sales-to-retailers date for Jan. 21, so we’re fully ready for sales on Super Bowl Sunday.”

BY TIM NUDD | AD WEEK 

photographs by Samuel Bayer | production design by Ernesto Molino y Vedia | makeup by Mercedes Errazuriz | hair by Gloria Rojas, Ximena San Martin, Monsterrat Niño, and Michael Kanyon model: Audra Marie

FROM TREATS MAGAZINE 

Even if his name isn’t instantly recognizable, there’s a very good chance you’re familiar with — and even downright love — Samuel Bayer‘s work. Ever heard of a little song called “Smells Like Teen Spirit”? Bayer directed the music video for the chart-topping, award-winning Nirvana tune. His résumé also boasts Green Day’s “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” Nightmare on Elm Street, and a bevy of other well-known titles. 

In addition to his prowess directing, Bayer is also a talented photographer — and now we get to witness it in the flesh! For the first time, his staggering 12-foot black-and-white nude triptychs (a fancy word for three-panel works of art) will be on display at Ace Gallery in Beverly Hills. Inspired by Helmut Netwon’s Big Nudes series and Nan Goldin’s video work, Bayer’s art explores the relationship between female empowerment and voyeurism. Plus, the intriguing pieces are in good company: Andy Warhol and David Oppenheimer are just some of the other artists on display at the gallery. 

BY ERIN FITZAPATRICK | REFINERY 29

Fuse News interview with Samuel Bayer. 

It’s 1992. MTV Video Music Awards ceremony. The Best Alternative Video award goes to Nirvana’sSmells Like Teen Spirit. This short story of a certain school concert gone berserk, filmed with anarchistic, independent, punk vibe, is now considered one of the most legendary music videos, and it continues to reveal a true wildness of heart in the subsequent generations of listeners. Made with simple, and yet powerful means, it was directed by a newcomer Samuel Bayer and mirrored the essence of both the song and the band that created it. In the following years Smells Like Teen Spiritmusic video gained a reputation of a truly genre-defining work of art, inspired countless young filmmakers, and made its author one of the most prominent music video directors in the rapidly growing industry. We are extremely proud that director and cinematographer Samuel Bayer will be the special guest of the 21st edition of the International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography CAMERIMAGE and will receive the Award for Outstanding Achievements in the Field of Music Videos. 

Samuel Bayer

(photo by John Clark)

What is interesting, the man responsible for one of the most imaginative and memorable music videos of the last two decades did not think at young age of becoming a filmmaker. However, since his earliest days he was absorbed by the process of image-making, and while still a teenager, he enrolled into the NYC School of Visual Arts to study painting. Soon he realized that a camera offers him more creative opportunities than a paintbrush and so he began to devote his life to film-making. Then Bayer has moved to Los Angeles where he has been working with the greatest and most demanding artists of the music industry, transferring their music and lyrics onto the visual language of a music video according to his artistic vision. He has collaborated with The Cranberries (Zombie), David Bowie (The Heart’s Filthy Lesson), Metallica (Until It Sleeps), The Rolling Stones (Anybody Seen My Baby?), Marilyn Manson (Disposable Teens), Lenny Kravitz (Black Velveteen), Aerosmith (Sunshine), Green Day(Wake Me Up When September Ends) and Justin Timberlake (What Goes Around… Comes Around), among many others. 

Nirvana “Smells Like Teen Spirit”

The Cranberries “Zombie”

Bayer approaches each new music video project as if it was his first, thus reclaiming the freshness and sharpness of thought and stimulating his own imagination. He likes to have a total control over the visual side of his work. Not only is he a prolific director but also a skilled and creative cinematographer. He always lights and photographs his own work, for which he has won a worldwide recognition. He considers finding a golden mean between his own vision and the best way to show the atmosphere, rhythm and tone of a given song as the most important aspect of his job. For him, a music video is not only a form of promotion but also a way of artistic expression. Numerous awards that he has received seem to confirm such an attitude. Among them were: MTV Music Video Award for Best Rock Video forMetallica’s Until It Sleeps, MTV Music Video Award for Best Cinematography and Best Rock Video of the Year for Green Day’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Emmy Award for Outstanding Commercial and Cannes Golden Lion for the Chrysler-ordered “Born of Fire”. For Bayer approaches commercials with same reverence as music videos – in his career he has worked for Packard Bell, Nike, Mountain Dew, Chrysler, Coke, Pepsi, Nissan and Lexus, among many others. 

“Let Me Play” Nike commercial

“Born of Fire” Chrysler commercial

Despite achieving a huge success in many fields of the entertainment industry, Samuel Bayer did not rest on his laurels, quite the contrary – he constantly looks for new challenges and means of artistic expression. Throughout his career, feature length films have always captivated Samuel. He has been attached to a wide variety of film projects and is currently developing a science fiction film, which he also wrote. In 2010 Bayer directed his first feature film, the remake of Nightmare on Elm Street, giving Rooney Mara, one of the brightest young movie stars of today, her first big role. Bayer is also a successful photographer – he already had two exhibitions of his work, named „Transitions” and „Diptychs and Triptychs”. Samuel Bayer will attend Camerimage Festival not only to collect his Award for Outstanding Achievements in the Field of Music Videos but also to meet with the Festival’s participants during the next installment of „Music Videos: The Master Class Series.” Samuel is also going to chair the Jury of the Music Videos Competition. 
 
21st Camerimage will be held in Bydgoszcz from the 16th through 23rd Nov More about Bydgoszcz can be found here: www.visitbydgoszcz.pl www.camerimage.pl

Adam opens the show with Jo Koy, who explains to Adam that he can never get a hold of his agent. Adam then creates an idea for a new app that talks to people while they have to wait on the other line. Adam also talks about his first day back at work on Catch a Contractor, and using The Matterhorn as a beacon on long road trips. Jo Koy then sings as Bung Lo Su, and Bald Bryan reviews the film Nebraska.

Director Samuel Bayer is in studio next, and Adam asks him about the differences between filming in black and white versus color. They also discuss the pros and cons of shooting on film versus using an HD camera. Later they chat about Sam’s directing experiences for artists like Nirvana and Blind Melon, and Adam asks him a few hypothetical questions. As the shows wraps up, Alison reads news stories about Paul Walker’s death, and Maria Bello coming out of the closet.

Check out the full interview here!

First times are hard, although for Samuel Bayer they would usually turn out to be quite lucky. When this year’s recipient of the Award for Outstanding Achievements in the Field of Music Videos decided to quit his career as a painter, he took out for lunch a person who could help him with his plan. He could afford to pay just for her meal, but he got his first commission; he had to shoot a music video for an unknown band from Seattle to a song with a rather strange title - Smells like Teen Spirit.

At Camerimage Festival Samuel Bayer made his debut as a lecturer. Did the first time turned out to be lucky again? 

Samuel Bayer’s Masterclass, photo by Wojciech Gruszczyński

Even though it was the last day of the festival, people were crowding in front of the room where Bayer was supposed to hold a master class. Nobody was more surprised by it than the filmmaker himself: “I had a couple of drinks before I came here because I was really scared. I thought there would be five people at most, which would be really bad for my ego.” 

 With his looks and his behavior he resembled a rock star, rather than a director and cinematographer with a staggering body of work. Although he wouldn’t admit his age, it was betrayed by the lack of familiarity with recent bands. “What’s the name of this band, Sugar Rose?” – he asked, meaning popular musicians from Iceland. On hearing the right answer, he just shook his head: “I’m like your father who doesn’t have a clue about anything.” 

Samuel Bayer used to work with the best, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that he was throwing anecdotes left and right. He told amused listeners that after taking too much acid the lead singer of Blind Melon tried to seduce…a cow, how he ruined Robbie Williams’career in the United States and about Mick Jagger’s untamed libido, who spent years chasing after a beauty who played in a music video to Anybody Seen My Baby. Her name was Angelina Jolie. “She was a completely unknown, twenty-two-year-old girl, I even saw her naked…what I was saying?” – he muttered plunging into pleasant memories. 

 He showed music videos that still make him proud after many years: Smells Like Teen Spirit and Anybody Seen My Baby, which were already mentioned before, Zombie by The Cranberries which was shot in Ireland, Until It Sleeps by Metallica, alluding to the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and Bullet with Butterfly Wings by The Smashing Pumpkins, inspired by Sebastião Selgado’s photographs, No Rain byBlind Melon, What Goes Around…Comes Around by Justin Timberlake and antiwar Wake Me Up When September Ends by Green Day. The last one holds a special place in his heart: “I’m friends with Sean Penn and with my friend Dave we went to maneuvers with him in the desert, and this really hardcore guy from SEAL team 6 which was training with him hated my guts. He thought I was some hippie kid and was really mean to me (…) Sean wrote me an email that he showed him this video on the last day when they were doing maneuvers and the guy started bawling like a baby.” 

Still from “Smells Like Teen Spirit”

Music has always played an important part in his life, he considers the opportunity to meet his heroes, get drunk with David Bowie, hang out with Johnny Lee Hooker and The Stones as the most wonderful thing in his career. “It has been amazing working with these guys. Jagger has never been on a subway system before and Keith Richards was smoking pot on set, he threw a joint down on the floor and my crew went leaping through the air. I don’t know if they were trying to get some pot or see what was keeping him alive.”  

Bayer wasn’t trying to hide that working with such strong personalities often meant that conflicts and even fights would break out on set. However, after so many years he is proud that he was fighting to save his vision at all costs: “I have my name on a horrible movie and I tell people that it was like a Stockholm syndrome. I wanted to please my captors, the producers, I was a really nice guy and at the end of the day I got screwed over because the movie sucks. And when I did music videos, I was arrogant enough and egotistical enough, but also strong enough as an artist that I never let them. You have to fight for what you want.” His collaboration with Nirvana, on which depended his whole career, turned out to be one of the worst experiences he has ever had. Nevertheless, he didn’t back down: “I look at this video now and I think it’s pure emotion, raw and nasty. The only advice I can give you guys is to fight for what you want, because no one is going to give it to you.” 

 On set he was always both a director and a cinematographer because, as he noted, he has to look through the lens himself. Images, not words, were always the most important. “When I see The Shining by Kubrick, this blood coming through the elevator, these twins at the end of the hallway – these are like music video images in a way. When I see certain images I don’t care about the story, I’m just so enamored with the visual. The last thing I ever want to know is what the lyrics were about. It’s the absolute last thing. Wake Me Up When September Ends is about Billy Joe Armstrong’s father dying, that’s really what it’s about. I came up with this idea to make it about the war.”

Still from “Zombie”

This year Bayer was the head of the Jury of the Music Videos Competition and he was impressed by what he saw: “I don’t really watch music videos anymore and I don’t really do them, I do commercials. I thought that s… was better that what we did back then, and I come from a generation where there was Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze, and Fincher was doing stuff, and Mark Romanek, so from a very competitive time in music videos.” Even though he still makes music videos from time to time (last year he made Payphone by Maroon 5), he considers that chapter of his life to be over: “The music has changed. I don’t hear a lot of stuff that I want to do videos for. I don’t want to do Katy Perry’s video, Justin Bieber’s video, One Direction video. It’s a young person’s game. I thing music videos should be done by young people, not by middle-aged people (…) I am proud of what I did, but I think my time is kind of over.” More than one person in the room felt regret on hearing these words. Not bad for the first time. 

Marta Bałaga | Camerimage

It’s not easy to quiet a room of over 300 people—especially when that room includes the likes of Piers Morgan, Bette Midler, Chelsea Handler, Sarah Silverman, and Emma Thompson. But on Saturday night, at the Sean Penn & Friends Help Haiti Home Gala sponsored by Giorgio Armani, when Anaelle Jean-Pierre, a 20-year-old Haitian and earthquake survivor stepped slowly onto the stage singing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” in a crystal clear a cappella voice, the ballroom at the Montage Beverly Hills was brought to silence. Elsa Pataky leaned in closer to husband Chris Hemsworth. At every table, guests sat, agape, with tears collecting in their eyes, wholly moved by the young woman on the stage. Gradually, Bono and a guitar-playing the Edge emerged from backstage, joining Jean-Pierre in the simple, poignant rendition, to the eventual applause of 300 people who rose to their feet clapping (and crying). “Amazing,” said Charlize Theron, standing in the hall outside after the performance. “Oh my gosh,” said Allison Williams, considering the song later in the evening. “I know a lot of the facts about this crisis, but her performance really gave them an emotional side.” The song was the undeniable highlight in an evening not short of them—from U.S. Ambassador to Haiti Pamela A. White’s impassioned and hilarious update of the progress made thanks to Penn’s organization J/P Haitian Relief Organization, to director Samuel Bayer’s moving portraits and documentary of life in the tent camps, to Hillary Clinton’s cameo (by video), and Chris Martin and Theron’s heated bidding war for a Banksy original (created just a few days prior to the event). That face-off was then dramatically topped by Piers Morgan and master of ceremonies Anderson Cooper (the latter egged on by Gwyneth Paltrow), duking it out through the auctioneer for a commissioned work by Jeff Koons composed of Sean Penn’s decommissioned firearms (formerly a gun collector, violence in America and in Haiti prompted Penn to repurpose his 67-piece gun collection, “to surrender cowardice and build beauty”). There was much to celebrate—since its creation, J/P HRO has relocated 60,000 people from camps into housing—but there’s still more work to be done—and guests pledged to fund home construction, prenatal care, community development, and relocation initiatives.  The evening ended with a performance by U2—the band’s first together in four years. Adam Scott, a huge U2 fan, was especially thrilled. “I have a podcast coming out around their next album,” he said, no irony involved. “It’s called ‘You Talkin U2 Me?’ ”

Meanwhile, across town, Linda Perry orchestrated an equally moving evening of music and charity at the 7th Annual Art of Elysium Heaven Gala at the Skirball Cultural Center. As the visionary for the evening, the incomparable rock musician, songwriter, and producer was charged with creating her version of “heaven on earth,” which in this case consisted of handmade natural wood tables and chairs inside the new massive 9,000-square-foot Guerin Pavilion, filled with light and a view of trees and greenery through the all-glass back wall.  

“Oh, lovely,” sighed Anna Kendrick as she entered the pavilion, where a large white fabric horn serving as an enormous speaker hung from the arched ceiling, and guests including Camilla Belle, Topher Grace, Elijah Wood, and Amy Smart were treated to a vegan dinner, courtesy of Perry’s brother, an Oregon-based chef, and a Marc Jacobs runway fashion show. The evening, which raised money to fund the charity’s mission of bringing artists, musicians, actors, and designers into hospitals to work with children battling serious medical conditions, came to a comedic halt when Perry suddenly spotted Johnny Deppseated beside Amber Heard and inadvertently let out one of the many four-letter words for which she is known. After regrouping, she explained she had dressed as Depp for Halloween. “If you want to exchange e-mails, I’ll show you the picture because I swear . . . I looked like you,” said the slightly starstruck leather bell-bottom-clad Perry before introducing the highlight of the evening: a series of captivating and beautiful musical performances. First came a recording of a communal Om incantation Perry made of friends, family, doctors, and children in the hospital, played on functional records that were built as simple centerpieces into the custom tables turned turntable art pieces, which were later auctioned off to the guests. “I want one for myself and one for the hospital for the kids,” said Kelly Osbourne, vowing to purchase two. Next up was a performance by the duo the Smokin Knights, with a song they wrote for one of the young hospital patients, followed by moving performances from the Section Quartet, Rain Phoenix, and then Evan Rachel Wood, who brought the crowd—including Justin Bartha, his pregnant new wife, Lia Smith, Kate Bosworth, and Michael Polish—to their feet. Perry took the stage for a song, accompanied by the West Los Angeles Children’s Choir, before she brought some of the children who work with the charity to join her for a tear-jerking rendition of her hit song “Beautiful.” A performance by Steven Tyler rounded out the evening that also honored Ali Larter and her husband Hayes MacArthur with the Spirit of Elysium Award for their years of volunteer service. Looking around the room at artist Shepard Fairey, painter and musician Mark Mothersbaugh, artist Dave Greco, and actors Jamie Bell, and Busy Philipps, Jennifer Howell, the founder of the Art of Elysium, summed up the evening thusly: “We are a family of artists, who all believe in the healing power of art.”

By Molly Creeden and Jessica Kanto | Vogue

Wise old heads, murder suspects and eternal lovers all feature in this week’s creative gems from adland.

It’s been a short working week here in the UK due to a long Bank Holiday weekend but that doesn’t mean the campaign launches, TV storylines and creative film competitions haven’t heated up. Time waits for no man and in this week’s creative round-up we scale the themes of age, eternal love, murder and mystery with a batch of newly-released work.

Dodge days

With old age comes a wise head. The people who feature in Samuel Bayer’s latest commercial to celebrate a century of Dodge have been there, done it and got the t-shirt when it comes to life experience, and the commercial cleverly intertwines their charismatic advice with shots of the car.

Former shots cover star, Bayer, works the script with style, extracting admirable performances from the elderly stars and subtly working in the car with the themes being explored. The essence of the spot is that you learn a lot in 100 years and it’s hard not to take note of the classy campaign.

 By Ryan Watson | Shots

Released at New York Auto Show, this Samuel Bayer directed effort celebrates Dodge’s 100th anniversary by celebrating people who have passed the century mark. What have they learned after 100 years?

Easy– Learn from your mistakes. Life is good. Be strong. Be bad. Live a little. Don’t always do what you’re told to do. Break the rules.Be a bad boy. And never, ever forget where you came from.
And when all else fails, get bailed out by the government and form a partnership with Italian car company Fiat.

Okay they didn’t mention that last part but you know.

I like how the advice and wisdom starts in a very earnest way and then ends with the people all but saying “Tell the world to go screw itself.”

Fun and inspiring.

 By KidSleepy | Adland

Move over, Ron Burgundy. Chrysler Group’s Dodge brand has a new viral video sensation.

It features not the buffoonery of a movie character but pearls of wisdom from earnest centenarians plus a tone that morphs quickly from touchy-feely to downright rebellious with one screech of a guitar.

“Wisdom,” an 80-second video marking Dodge’s 100th anniversary, is burning up the Web, generating more than 5.7 million views within 24 hours of its posting on April 17, according to online video analytics firm Visible Measures. Even Chrysler’s standout Super Bowl commercials didn’t achieve such striking results in their first day online.

It’s the latest in a series of viral hits that have emerged from the Chrysler-Fiat marketing shop in recent years, beginning with a 2011 Detroit-themed Super Bowl commercial that helped rebrand Chrysler — if not the U.S. auto industry itself — post-bankruptcy.

But while many of those hits came out of carefully planned ad campaigns backed by big budgets, videos such as “Wisdom” and one for the Fiat 500 Abarth called “Seduction,” later adapted for aSuper Bowl commercial, represent a different breed: small-scale, low-budget productions that the marketing shop uses to test the waters for unorthodox brand messages.

They are the product of a creative process that emphasizes experimentation and risk-taking without big spending, says Olivier Francois, chief marketing officer for Chrysler Group and Fiat. It relies on tossing even half-baked ideas into the public domain and using inexpensive social media to watch what happens.

“When you explore territories where, by definition, you have not been before and maybe not even the competition has been before, then you have to test a little bit what you do,” Francois said. “And that’s how we like to use social media, and YouTube in this case.”

By Ryan Beene | Automotive News

Michael Jackson’s latest video has premiered on Twitter.

The promo for “A Place With No Name” was tweeted overnight from the late pop star’s official account. A message tells Jackson’s 1.5 million followers, “It’s time! The first ever premiere of “A Place With No Name” right now on Twitter.”

The video was directed by Samuel Bayer, who shot the clips for Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Blind Melon’s “No Rain” and Justin Timberlake’s “What Goes Around… Comes Around,” among many others.

Bayer’s new work features a photogenic pair dancing and driving a Jeep through a desert. Outtakes from Jackson’s 1992 single “In The Closet” are inserted throughout the short film. The new pictures tell the story in the song; it’s the tale of a guy whose Jeep blows a flat on the highway, where he meets a woman who takes him to a utopia where “no people have pain.”

“A Place With No Name” is a remake of America’s “Horse With No Name,” which hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1972, when Jackson was 14 and just releasing his first solo album for Motown. Jackson reworked the arrangement and its lyrics during the Invincible sessions in 1998 with producer Dr. Freeze.

It’s lifted from Jackson’s hit posthumous album release Xscape (MJJ Music/Epic Records). The L.A. Reid-helmed set opened at No. 1 on the Official U.K. Albums chart in May, and it bowed at No. 2 on the Billboard 200. The album’s lead producer was Timbaland, with additional work courtesy of Rodney Jerkins, Stargate, Jerome “Jroc” Harmon and John McClain.

The video for “Love Never Felt So Good” — the first single taken from Xscape — also appeared in May.

By Lars Brandle | Billaboad

Ew! Adam Levine and his wife Behati Prinsloo got bloody while shooting Maroon 5′s dark and twisted new music video, “Animals.”

The video begins in a meat shop, where Levine’s character works as a cleaver-wielding butcher who has his eye on Prinsloo. He is seen casually walking behind her on a street, evading notice when Prinsloo suspects somebody is following her.
Levine stands outside in the pouring rain, peering up at Prinsloo’s window through a pair of unflattering thick-rimmed glasses. Inside her bedroom, Prinsloo sleeps — safe and sound — until Levine breaks in and cuddles beside her in bed.

Another part of the video shows Levine’s stalker character approaching Prinsloo in a club, only to be rejected, and later bedding her while blood trickles down from the ceiling.
The haunting scenes are set to lyrics like “Baby, I’m preying on you tonight / Hunt you down eat you alive / Just like animals…” with added verses: “Maybe you think that you can hide / I can smell your scent from miles / Just like animals.”
Levine and Prinsloo hinted at the (ahem!) bloody nature of the music video, when both parties shared a photo from the “Animal” set on Sept. 2. On Monday, Prinsloo wrote: “It’s out and its bloody, ready for Halloween.”

Samuel Bayer, who directed “Animals,” has previously worked on videos for songs like Justin Timberlake’s “What Goes Around… Comes Around” (2007), Green Day’s “American Idiot” (2004), and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (1991). The Nightmare on Elm Street director previously worked with Maroon 5 on their smash 2012 collaboration with Wiz Khalifa, “Payphone.”

By Ester Lee | US Weekly

During the past 20 years, Panavision has built a couple of lenses for me. I’m not a technical person, but I can talk to the Panavision folks about my thought processes— about why certain images look the way they do—and then the company develops the tools that allow me to emulate that quality. I think that’s an amazing thing for a company to do. What they do for me is priceless, something I could never replicate.

The annual buzz surrounding Super Bowl commercials is nearly as fevered as the anticipation of the Big Game. Loyal sponsors such as Budweiser, Doritos and various car companies have to get really creative to keep coming back year after year.

Popular athletes such as Michael Jordan and Mean Joe Green have made entertaining appearances in a variety of spots, but it seems — when looking back over the history of these ads — that actors willing to spoof themselves a bit make the most impact.
Sometimes, though, the right Super Bowl commercial — as was the case with an obscure 80-year-old actress named Clara Peller who famously asked “Where’s the beef?” in a Wendy’s ad — can make you a star.
Below are our picks for the Best Super Bowl commercials.

1. Eminem for Chrysler

While the camera pans over a scene of Midwestern misery — smokestacks pumping into a cloudy sky, the ominous Interstate overhead — a gravelly voice asks, “What does this city know about luxury? What does a town that’s been to hell and back know about the finer things in life?”
The man in the Chrysler commercial is talking about Detroit, the once-lustrous city that gave us everything from the auto industry to Diana Ross and the Supremes, but steadily slid until finally filing for bankruptcy in 2013.
When this artful music video aired during Super Bowl XLV (2011), Chrysler was a struggling company, having declared bankruptcy itself in 2009 earlier. To promote its model the Chrysler 200, and the city itself, the company spent about $9 million and hired director Samuel Bayer to create a gritty valentine to the city, spotlighting its classic buildings and even the Diego Rivera mural in the Detroit Institute of Arts.
About one minute in, Michigan native Eminem gets behind the wheel of a sleek Chrysler 200 to drive down Woodward Avenue while his Oscar-winning song, “Lose Yourself” plays in the background. He pulls up in front of the fabled Art Deco palace, the Fox Theatre, and walks up on stage where a choir sings. He turns to the camera and says, “This is the Motor City. And this is what we do.”

2. Monster.com

Super Bowl commercials don’t usually make social statements, but Monster.com’s “When I Grow Up” ad from 1999 could not have done a better job promoting the Web site’s employment service. And the message was driven home by a collection of children who looked into the camera and made deadpan comments about the futility many Americans find in the workplace.

3. Wendy’s, “Where’s the Beef?”

In this 1984 commercial comparing the relative worth and size of fast-food hamburgers, an 81-year-old actress named Clara Peller stared at the puny patties on fluffy buns offered by the competition and angrily demanded, “Where’s the beef?” Those three words became the catchphrase of the day, and Wendy’s sales jumped 31 percent, worldwide, in 1985.

4. Clydesdale Brotherhood

Probably the best beer commercial ever made. Budweiser pulled out all the stops in the 2013 ad, set to the plaintive bars of Stevie Nicks’ “Landslide.” In the footage, we see a horse trainer raising a Clydesdale from birth and grooming it for its place in the company stables.
The trainer goes to Chicago to see the Clydesdale march in a parade and wonders if the horse will remember him. Of course, the horse does, and before the trainer can drive away, the animal breaks free of the pack and has a heartfelt reunion in the middle of street. Hokey? Yeah. But it was an audience favorite.

5. Old Spice, “The Man Your Man could Smell Like”

“Hello, ladies,” says buff actor Isaiah Mustafa, clad only in a towel, having just stepped out of the shower. “Look at your man, now back at me. Sadly, he’s not me.” The thrust of the piece is that were any man to use Old Spice instead of “lady-smelling body wash” he could smell like the sexy guy in the commercial.
After the commercial aired on the Super Bowl, it went on to win the Grand Prix in June 2010 for film at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival and won the Emmy for Outstanding Commercial in 2010.

6. Apple, “1984”

The Macintosh computer was introduced to the world during Super Bowl XVIII and played off themes described in George Orwell’s novel “1984.” Directed by Ridley Scott on a budget of about $370,000, it has earned a place in the Clio Awards Hall of Fame. Advertising Age also placed “1984” on its list of the 50 greatest commercials.

7. Cedric the Entertainer for Bud LightThis

This 2001 ad is a scream. Cedric the Entertainer sits down on a couch in his lair with a beautiful young woman while some Barry White-flavored music is playing in the background. Just when things are about to get busy, she purrs, “Why don’t you get something to cool this fire down?”
Cedric repairs to the kitchen, grabs two cold Bud Lites from the fridge and, in his excitement, shakes them up and does a little dance. He returns to the seduction room and opens the bottle. The shaken-up beer sprays all over his date’s face. Filmed by Fusion Idea.

8. Honda, “Matthew’s Day Off”

Matthew Broderick is one of those actors that comes off best in small doses. And here in this Honda CR-V ad from 2012, he gleams. Gleefully spoofing his breakout role in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” Broderick calls his agent and says he’s too sick to work that day on a film.
He tools around Beverly Hills, rides a roller coaster, coughs on cue when the office calls him on his car phone, goes to the track and even chases children at LA’s Natural History Museum. A complete joy ride.

9. Farrah Fawcett/Joe Namath for Noxzema

A bit of nostalgia from the early 1970s. The primitive production values of this commercial scream “low-budget,” but it features two American icons in their prime. Jets quarterback Joe “Broadway Joe” Namath looks in the camera and says, “I’m gonna get creamed.”
OK, it’s a little high-school, but the pre-Seth Rogen moment is saved when beautiful Farrah Fawcett steps into the frame with a dollop of Noxzema shaving cream in her palm.

10. Audi, “Prom”

You can’t go to the prom without a date, right? You can if you drive an Audi S6. In this to-the-point ad from 2013, Audi proves that cars can do anything: cure the blues and give you the courage to kiss the prom queen.