Hollow Man

Director Gary Thomas talks us through Crush's promo for music giants R.E.M.

"We first spoke to Michael Stipe at the end of February. He wanted a video that was frantic and dense and not overly polished or fretted over. Michael has great instincts about what visuals are right for the song, but really allowed us to run with the clip.

When we first started talking to Michael about the meaning behind the lyrics, the song really struck a chord with us. We all fear losing who we are or getting so far down a path, either in career or personally, that we can’t get back. We wanted to build on that as our theme. The idea of isolation, the universality of that and to see how that moment of realization, the explosion of understanding changes your path.

From there we took a page from R.E.M.’s approach to writing and recording the new record. We wanted to take the “punk” aesthetic and represent it for 2008. We wanted to see the Hollow Man as a person (or in our case three people), as a digital avatar, or as a roughly drawn representation. We wanted the lyrics to stand out front, plain and confronting without losing their layers of meaning. We felt that the moment of understanding needed to feel like an explosion, and that dictated the rush of images, punctuated by moments of clarity (the falling man).

We used every toy in the building, shot footage in Stephanie (our producer’s) apartment, in our grubby stairwell, just generally got back to a place where all creative people start and then slowly get away from, to try to make pictures work like music."