Lorde’s “Green Light” Director Grant Singer Reveals Story Behind the Video
Earlier today, Lorde debuted her new single “Green Light,” and its Grant Singer-directed new video. The song is from her upcoming album Melodrama, the highly anticipated follow-up to her 2013 debut Pure Heroine. In an interview with Zane Lowe, Lorde described the “Green Light” concept: “This is that drunk girl at the party dancing around crying about her ex-boyfriend who everyone thinks is a mess.” Singer spoke with Pitchfork from Los Angeles about working with Lorde on the video, getting to know her months before the shoot, shooting on 16mm film, and her ability to improvise.
Pitchfork: How did the video come about?
Grant Singer: Lorde and I got in contact a couple months ago and we had dinner in New York, and it was just like a general meeting I guess. This is before even there was any discussion about making a video together. We just wanted to meet and I was immediately so struck by… She’s just a beautiful person. Anyone who meets her knows that. And I was just so struck by her passion and how thoughtful and kind and sincere and incredible she was as a person. So yeah, I guess it all started with the meeting when we had dinner and then she sent me the song a few months after that, and that was it.
Did she offer you any visual reference points for the video?
Making a video is sort of like… I would actually describe it similarly to writing a song. It’s harder to describe writing a song, where you’re like “well, I wrote the chord and then this person did the drum beat and then,” you know. It’s very collaborative. So, we kind of came up with the concept together. After meeting her—I didn’t know for sure that I was going to make the video at that point—but I knew that if I did, there was a lot of pressure for me because I adore her as a person, and when you see the passion and the artistry in someone that you respect you kind of take that responsibility on your own as a director. It’s the first video that she’s made in a couple years, and you want to do a great job, not just for yourself but because you want to do the music justice and you want to do her justice and you don’t want to let her down. And I think that was at least my process: I wanted to make a great video, not just for me but really for her.
You mention this being her first video in a while, and she had a really striking visual presence when she debuted. Were there conversations on how to visually set this new project apart from the aesthetic she’d already established with Pure Heroine?
No, there were no conversations about anything that she’d done prior. It was really—at least for me—we started from scratch. We shot the video on 16mm film. Even as a music video in general—I would say most music videos are shot on Alexas or RED cameras or potentially 35mm—but rarely do you see someone who’s as big of an artist as Lorde shooting a video on 16. To me, 16mm film has a thickness to it, and it feels timeless to me. And that was really important: to not make it feel like a video made in 2017, but to me the quality of the film, the music video itself feels more timely, and that was definitely intentional, at least on my part.
Where did you shoot this?
I’m really glad that you mentioned that. So, we shot in an area of Los Angeles called MacArthur Park. It’s an area that’s kind of like no man’s land between downtown and Koreatown. We didn’t want it to feel like LA or New York or somewhere specific; we wanted it to kind of feel like it could be anywhere. And I like that you didn’t know where it was shot because that was intentional. We didn’t want it to feel like a certain city.
Lorde dancing is sort of a meme almost—her moves aren’t traditional, necessarily. Was she self-conscious about that at all while making the video?
I mean, I am obsessed with her performance in the video, and her dancing and everything. To me, she’s lost in the music, and personally when I see anything in music videos or when I think they look contrived or feel forced—when I watch the video, and I can only speak for myself, but I see her dancing and her vocal performance as completely interconnected and they’re like one and she loses herself in the music. I feel like that’s really important to even the filmmaking itself. A lot of the compositions and the shots and her performance, it all feels like one thing. To me the video feels very natural. When we were making—you know, this is a cliché saying—but when the stars align, everything just felt really right. The best thing you can hope for when you make a music video is you want the performance to feel alive, and when I watch the video I feel like she looks and she is alive and I love that about it.
I love when she takes the payphone off the hook for no reason.
Isn’t that great? I’ll be honest, I love that you noticed that because that’s all improvised. That’s all her. Most of the stuff that she does is all her in the moment. Because we were shooting on 16, you don’t have traditional video playback. You have a video tap, but I wasn’t really even looking at my monitor at that point. I didn’t even see that she did that until we got the film developed and that’s a really long shot in the video, and I was like “we can’t cut.” To me, those are magic moments in a video, and to cut out of that would be criminal. I love that whole moment. It’s all her. If you notice, it’s synchronized with the beat in the song, and it’s completely accidental so that was fun—when you get those sort of happy accidents to have musical moments.
It felt like the bathroom scene reminded us of Drake’s “Marvin’s Room” and the whipping the hair out of the car was a little bit like Beyonce’s Lemonade—but maybe not?
There were no references. Those were definitely not references for me. But everyone has their own interpretations.
What else do you hope people get out of this?
I would prefer to let Lorde herself to speak upon it, I don’t think it’s my place to do that. I feel like my job was just to make a good video, a really great video, and knowing how talented and brilliant she is and how important of an artist she is for our time, I just wanted to do her justice and the music justice, and that was really all my intention. That’s always my intention, specifically when I really care about the artist and their legacy and their music. All I want to do is serve them as the artist.
With music videos, I think this video benefitted from the fact that I got to know Lorde as a person and as an artist and as a friend, and when you’re directing it helps the communication and it helps being on the same page. So I think one of the strengths of the video probably comes from the fact that she and I got to know each other before shooting together. It wasn’t like we emailed twice or we texted three times and then I meet her for the first time on set. It wasn’t like that. I got to meet her as a person and that really helps when you’re making a music video. Because the familiarity helps, and honestly making this video was one of those times when even when we were shooting I just had a great feeling about it. I felt like we were making something really special. Everything just felt good. Everything just felt right.
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