From Fiona Apple's ["Criminal"](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFOzayDpWoI ""Criminal"" ) to Tyler, the Creator's ["Yonkers"](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSbZidsgMfw ""Yonkers"" ), great music videos are bursts of sound and vision that leave an indelible impression. Director's Cut is a Pitchfork News feature in which we chat with music video directors about their creations. The men and women behind the camera are often overlooked in today's YouTube era, but this feature aims to highlight their hard work while showcasing the best videos currently linking around the internet. A little behind-the-scenes dirt couldn't hurt, too.

Tom Scharpling is a longtime fixture on New York's comedy scene and the host of the cult WFMU radio program "The Best Show". Last year, he directed his first video, for Ted Leo and the Pharmacists' "Bottled in Cork", viciously parodying the idea of a punk-rock Broadway musical and making heavy use of a cast of comedy figures. (Read our Director's Cut interview for that video here.) And for his follow-up, Scharpling ups the ante even more, turning the New Pornographers' "Moves" into an extended trailer for the most cliche-heavy, debauched rock-star biopic imaginable.

The cast is absolutely packed with comedy names and indie actors, many of them playing actual New Pornographers. Paul Rudd, Bill Hader, Ted Leo, Kevin Corrigan, Horatio Sanz, Julie Klausner, Wyatt Cenac, John Hodgman, Todd Barry, John Oliver, Donald Glover, and others show up, usually engaged in some socially despicable action or other. At the center of everything is Superchunk/Mountain Goats drummer/Scharpling comedy partner Jon Wurster, who turns in a manic, over-the-top performance as New Pornographers leader Carl Newman-- or some excess-addicted alternate-universe version of Newman, at least.

We once again talked to Scharpling-- who is currently planning more videos with Titus Andronicus and Superchunk-- about his New Pornos clip. Watch the video and read the Q&A below:

The New Pornographers: "Moves" [Director: Tom Scharpling]

Pitchfork: How did you get all of these actors and comedians to be in the video?

Tom Scharpling: Well, when the New Pornographers' management asked me to do "Moves", they wanted to put the band in the video. But they were on tour and it just wasn't viable for me to try to go to Iowa City and shoot them for four hours before they had a show that night. So I thought, "How can we turn them not being in it into an asset? What if we did a movie trailer for a nonexistent biopic and got actors to play everybody?" So that's what I pitched.

I just said: "I'm going to get names to be in this thing"-- hoping I could get names in this thing. It was a little bit of a leap on my part-- and their part-- but I started beating the bushes, and people started coming on board. I was like, "My God, I'm doing it." Just getting people like Horatio Sanz and Kevin Corrigan and Wyatt Cenac to give me a couple of days was mind-boggling. The gambit payed off.

The goal was that, if you were to watch this biopic, it'd be the worst thing you'd ever seen. It's a bad movie trailer. It's sloppily made and inaccurate, and the story doesn't track, and the people mostly don't look anything like the people in the band.

Pitchfork: I don't know. I'd watch that movie if it existed.

TS: I would watch it in a second, too. But it would not be a good movie. It would be pure garbage, and you'd just have fun laughing at it.