Alex Metric & Steve Angello: Open Your Eyes

Brit comedian and actor Peter Serafinowicz dabbles in music videos again, this time reviving Rocky and starring as the man himself in this promo for Alex Metric & Steve Angello's track Open Your Eyes featuring Ian Brown.

After his directorial debut last year, the promo for Hot Chip’s I Feel Better, you might have thought Peter Serafinowicz’s next project could only go in one direction on the crazy scale – down. You were wrong.

For his second time at the helm, the multi-talented English actor, comedian, writer, composer, voice artist and occasional director has made a wonderfully insane video for Alex Metric and Steve Angello’s track, Open Your Eyes, that crashes together Rocky, Robocop and Star Wars in a celebration of Stallone, convincing special effects, and 70s and 80s cinema. Why?
“I suppose I just thought ‘Rocky vs. ED-209’ would be a link I’d click. I just worked backwards from that.”

The video, produced by Colonel Blimp, is loosely (and we’re talking looser than John Goodman’s jeans on Paris Hilton’s hips) based on Rocky, with Serafinowicz convincingly playing the protagonist who decides to take a shot at boxing champ ED-210 (based on the murderous robot ED-209 from Robocop), eventually defeating his foe to win the title before having his head literally punched off his shoulders. Clearly Serafinowicz is a fan of that era of cinema. “I grew up with the Rocky films. Stallone is a hero of mine,” he says. “I read that he wrote the script
of Rocky in just three days! He’s fascinating.”

Serafinowicz, who voiced the character Darth Maul in Star Wars Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace, also praises Robocop, largely for its effects, which were all done in-camera or with stop-motion on blue screen. “I think that having physical objects in the shot always looks more realistic than CG. Like in the original Star Wars, you believe the rubber-masked aliens in the Cantina bar. In The Phantom Menace, you just know Jar Jar Binks isn’t real. (Thank fuck.) I’d love to direct a sci-fi film and not use any CG at all. Maybe I should start a Lars Von Trier-style Dogme movement for sci-fi movies.”

The video is littered with countless in-jokes and references, some that point to the original films (like Rocky eating iron filings and punching fridges) and some that are just bizarre, like the appearance of the flying spherical Jedi training droid from Star Wars Episode IV, A New Hope. “I always loved that zappy little ball. I used to wonder if it had consciousness, feelings, desires. Sometimes I think the same about
ants or slugs. ‘What are that slug’s ambitions...?’”

As for his own ambitions, Serafinowicz is keen to take the helm again. “I want to direct a feature film and I’m in the (long) process of setting that up. That would be my dream.” However, when asked which side of the camera he ideally prefers to be on, the actor replies, “the outside”. So perhaps he’s not ready to leave comedy behind just yet.?JL