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.