Pitchfork: Why did you choose to work with Grant on this project?

Skrillex: To be honest, I’ve worked with a lot of great directors, but I feel Grant is someone that I am able to communicate with. It’s strange—some directors are really talented but they can be so precious when it comes to letting you be a part of it. Grant and I mesh so well on a creative level that we just came up with the concepts together, all the treatment and all the art direction that I brought to him: movies like The Cell and The Neverending Story and old science fiction films. He was just so happy to work side-by-side together, where some other people would rather do their own thing. Obviously he’s never done a bad video and he really has an awesome vision and like I said he just let me be super creative in this process. Same with "Burial", so that’s why I chose him.

Pitchfork: Why did it take six months to make?

Skrillex: A lot of it was just treatment. Fantasy is so hard to do when it comes to making it look good compared to something that’s a documentary or hyper-realism. When you only have a certain amount of money, shit’s gonna look really corny. Going back and forth from the budget, what we had and pulling favors—there’s a lot in that process, and it comes with factoring in your resources.

It didn’t start out as a fantasy at first. It started out a little bit more like The Shining; a woman running from someone through a house. It kept morphing and morphing, and we kept sitting on it. I think that’s what makes it special. We didn’t have a deadline where we had to put it out in a week. Sometimes a song can take up to a year to write, and because I waited that year and waited to work on it that day, it came up that extra 50 percent. We treated it like it was just an art piece that we took our time doing, and it really felt right on the treatment. If we would’ve done it back then we would have settled for what we first had and it wouldn’t have been as spectacular.

Pitchfork: Traditionally, you don’t appear in your videos. Why is that?

Skrillex: When you hear the song, it’s so dramatic. In my head, it needed something as dramatic, and I think I would just distract from that in this case. Whenever I am in my videos, it’s rare. A lot of it is, they feel more live and hyper-realist, like I was saying before, rather than fantasy. People would just be like, “Oh, Skrillex is acting in this video,” and it wouldn’t work as well.