DILLY GENT: When Jon told me the idea in the café, I was going, “This might be your first cheap video!” I thought you could just attach a camera to the bonnet of the car, get a guy running, some petrol, fire. But no. The idea was really straightforward, but the production was a monster.

The running actor was flown in from Hungary. He wasn’t local. And he kept getting a cramp and having to have some horrible injections put into his leg so he could keep running.

SEAN BROUGHTON: The actor burned his thumb quite badly having done many, many takes of lighting that book of matches with one hand behind his back. He walked out with a fairly disfigured thumb by the end of the shoot.

DILLY GENT: The car looked like a futuristic robot. That in itself was probably half the budget. And then Thom wore a little khaki-green T-shirt under a leather jacket—and we had a whole truck full of khaki-green T-shirts for him to choose from.

Details , September 1997 [4]

THOM YORKE: This video alone would cost us a really nice house somewhere. [4]

SEAN BROUGHTON: Jon wanted to have the fire chase the car at the end of the video, and as effects supervisor, I had to figure out a way for that to happen. We couldn’t really have a quarter mile of fire chasing this car because you’d light one end and it would burn the full distance in a few seconds and probably set fire to the car and blow it up.

So we actually shot the fire in a dark shed with a locked-off camera during the shoot, about a half mile away from where Thom was. Then we had to actually track that fire into the shot. We had about 100 cones that were covered with a reflective tape, and we put two down on each side of the road for a quarter of a mile. The angle of the cones were such that when the car headlights shone onto them, the tape would glow, and we used those cones in order to track each section of fire into the roadway. There were people looking at us like we were mad: “Why are there people struggling to carry 30 boxes of cones into the countryside? What the hell are you doing? Why can’t you do it another way?”

We worked all night on it. At about one o’clock in the morning, Jon turned up, having not seen any part of the fire, and sat there in silence and watched it for the first time. He just went, “Nailed it.” That was it. It was a good feeling.

DILLY GENT: At the time, Thom really looked a bit like an alien. He was just changing his hair; you can see his scalp. And the lighting was beautiful. With anyone else directing, it would have just been a bloke in the back of the car, but they made him look like this otherworldly human being. With Glazer’s work, you just want to grab each frame and put it on your wall. Nothing will ever be dated about that video.