AG Rojas: Keeping it Real

Here are just a few of the searingly memorable tableaux to have emerged from the fertile imagination of AG Rojas in recent months:

A young boy having his face tattooed; a child dancing on a derelict site with friends, then flying 40 feet into the air; Jack White locked in a car that’s set alight by a young, blue-faced version of himself; a transvestite prostitute stopping on the way back from the school run to administer a blow job; the same transvestite prostitute in a fight to the death with his vengeful ‘john’ in a single, five-minute Steadicam shot.

If you have seen AG Rojas’s videos for Spiritualized’s Hey Jane, and for Jack White’s Sixteen Saltines, you will be familiar with these imperishable images – and much more besides. Hey Jane is an intense urban drama for an epic nine-minute track; Jack White’s Sixteen Saltines is the jump-off point for random, shocking Lord of the Flies-style feral behaviour, with added FX.

A fresh body of work

And whether the imagery he creates is grimly realistic or bizarrely surreal, Rojas’s fluid, intimate directing style makes it visceral. With his crucial use of locations, natural or practical light, handheld camerawork on lightweight cameras, and preference for street-casting, he is a fiercely modern, resourceful director. Or, as he puts it: “I make it really difficult for myself. Everything I write involves a lot of different locations and actors. I like to create expansive situations.”

His success in achieving his ambitious ideas is making Rojas one of the most highly regarded young directors working in music videos (and he is shortlisted for the best new director award at this year’s UK Music Video Awards in November). But he is already making the leap from music videos to commercials. In the past few months he has shot ads for adidas and O2, with more on the way soon – including another for O2, and one for Swisscom.

In Make Moves, for adidas via Caviar Content, he depicts the lives of four Australian adidas-obsessed friends organising a cool club night in Manhattan. And in The Circle – his ad for a tie-in between O2 mobile and Nike, out of agency VCCP – numerous everyday vignettes are choreographed to have a different version of the O2 blue circle combined with different Nike goods.

At just 25 years old, the Los Angeles-based Rojas already has an impressive body of work – and is seemingly always on the move to a new city to shoot: Atlanta for Spiritualized, small-town Tennessee for Jack White, New York for adidas. When we talk to him, while at home in LA, he is about to head to South Africa to shoot a PSA for (ex-supermodel) Christy Turlington’s charity Every Mother Counts. His directing career to date is also looking quite like a journey of discovery… “Everywhere I go I’m an outsider,” he says. “I like to explore new places and to meet people – and for some reason filmmaking gives you a weird confidence to go into people’s homes. I’m really comfortable with that.” His perceived outsider status, and “tough skin” as he calls it, arguably stems from a fast-tracked education that meant he had to deal with older kids at a young age – together with his single-minded ambition to be a filmmaker.

AG (which stands for Andreas Gonzalez) was born in Barcelona in Spain, but he moved to Los Angeles with his parents at eight years old. He was clearly a very bright spark – he graduated from high school at just 15. And he says: “I always wanted to direct.” He then enrolled into the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena when he was only 17 – which did not go well at all. “I was just a little punk, and I dropped out after a year and a half,” he reveals. But his nascent filmmaking talent had  already taken hold, with him shooting gigs of his musician friends on the LA hardcore punk scene.

Gross out at the skate park

He then decided to concentrate on making music videos. He started working at Streetgang Films – home to the likes of Vincent Haycock, Paul Minor and Andreas Nilsson – where he gained invaluable experience for about three years. Later, he joined Caviar in LA as a treatment designer – which remains his production company home to this day in the US, and now in the UK, too.

“I owe a lot to some really good directors being my friends,” he says. “They really helped me, which I guess is rare in music videos.” And his first music video as a director for Jeremy Enigk’s Mind Idea, a cinematic take on a skate video featuring a group of young African-American skaters, got him noticed. It also led him, a few months later, to making the Earl Sweatshirt video – and his first serious brush with controversy. The promo for a member of the up-and-coming LA-based hip-hop collective Odd Future (ostensibly led by rapper Tyler the Creator) is like a sort of Blair Witch Project of hip-hop videos. Shot like a home video, on fish-eye lenses, it records the grisly results of the group’s ill-advised experiments with a home-brewed liquid narcotic – followed by a horrific trip to the skatepark. As noses start bleeding and teeth drop out, it is gut-wrenchingly realistic… and squirmingly funny.

Shooting through the hip

“I thought it would be cool if it seemed like the kids had shot the video themselves – and they did shoot most of it, while I shot the more important bits,” Rojas explains. “But actually Tyler didn’t like it – he thought it was going to be beautifully cinematic like the Jeremy Enigk video for some reason – even though they were shooting on their own cameras.”

Odd Future initially declined to release the video, but when Rojas posted it online himself to immediate acclaim, they quickly U-turned, effectively sealing their maverick reputation as a result. “I think the track has so much to do with it,” says Rojas. “The fact it’s so sincere in its depravity made it work.” But if it helped set the tone for Tyler the Creator and Odd Future’s subsequent outrageous videos, he argues that his own career path took an unexpected turn. “I thought I’d be making videos for indie bands like Animal Collective, but it didn’t really go that way.” For some reason, he says, leftfield artists have not bought into his more leftfield ideas – at least until earlier this year. Instead, Rojas found himself engaged by British record labels to make pop videos for the likes of Chase & Status and Emeli Sandé.

It started with notable contributions to other directors’ work – Jamie-James Medina’s video for Gil Scott Heron and Jamie XX’s I’ll Take Care of You, and Vincent Haycock’s hugely popular video for Calvin Harris’s Bounce, where in both cases Rojas was credited as co-director. Then in early summer 2011 he was awarded the Chase & Status with Tinie Tempah video for Hitz – shooting in New York just a day and a half after the job was confirmed. And he managed to turn it into a thrilling tear-up, involving the band members, local DJs and street-cast Brooklyn kids. “That was my first big music video, and it was a baptism by fire,” he says. “So everything after that has actually been really easy!” It was smartly followed by the video for Emeli Sandé’s Daddy, a gritty and emotional family drama, a narrative with the edge of authenticity – and probably his most watched video in the past 12 months.

Casting from the street

Rojas confirms that casting real people over actors is important for him – but only works, he says, if you spend enough time to bond with your performers. “I think the fact something works comes mostly out of not taking advantage of these people. I do get to know them, we find out about each other’s lives. The characters always feel comfortable, they don’t feel out of place.”

He also clearly abhors overplanning the actual shoot. “I don’t usually storyboard on music videos at all,” he reveals. “I’ll usually set up the scene, and then figure out how I want to present it when I’m there, once I’ve seen how actors are reacting to each other and their environment. That can be scary for some people, but I think that’s the most fun part, accepting that spontaneity. The best moments come out of that.”

Ironically, when it came to making the Hey Jane video earlier this year, he had so little prep time, he went the traditional casting route to find his transvestite character – but then cast the actor’s own child to play his son, due to the importance of his role (at the climax of the video, the little boy shoots his dad’s assailant). “The first thing that I came up with was the idea of a transvestite involved in a five-minute fight scene – and then I crafted the story around that,” he explains. Shooting for three days in Atlanta, he says he felt it was “a risk” making a piece with very fast-moving exposition in its first four minutes, and then one scene, captured in one blockbuster Steadicam shot, for the last five. Contrary to his usual way of shooting, he spent over a day mapping out the fight scene in the video with his DP and regular collaborator Michael Ragen.

Here’s looking at you, kids

“People bring their own issues with the video. Some people say they are kind of disturbed by it. So long as you don’t turn it off because you’re bored. If you’re severely affected by it and you turn it off, that’s fine.”

Rojas was shooting the Spiritualized video when he was asked to pitch on Jack White’s Sixteen Saltines. “The first thing that came to me was the scene of the kid doing pull ups on the upside down chair, and chugging cough syrup. That’s where all the other vignettes started. I wanted to create an entire world where that shot would seem normal.”

Flying to Nashville, Jack White’s home town, straight after finishing Spiritualized to prep the video, he shot in a small town called Springfield, 30 minutes from Nashville. “I flew out a friend of mine who would go to skate parks and coffee shops and different places and find kids,” says Rojas, giving insight into the process of prepping 15 different scenes of youthful anarchy in the space of a week. Then on the two-and-a-half-day shoot, he explains how his team corralled a busload of school kids to dance in their post-industrial location – and he persuaded a small child to stand in a cherry picker flying 40 feet in the air. “I just asked the kids who was the craziest dancer, and a little kid stood up and started dancing. I said would you be scared to get on this rig and go up in there? He said ‘no’. So we put him on it, and he went up.” It’s seat of the pants stuff – but that clearly is the Rojas way with music videos. He admits that this is a harder trick to pull off with commercials – and commercials are now taking up more of his time.

His big break with ads came with a campaign for Nokia last year, where he effectively came to the rescue of fellow Caviar director Keith Schofield on location in Thailand. “Keith was shooting four commercials in a week. They needed someone to go out with him and shoot the last one,” Rojas explains. Then he won the adidas job for Make Moves earlier this year, followed by O2’s The Circle. He reveals that his next O2 ad, promoting their Priority Tickets offer, features MOR crooner Michael Bublé. “They thought I’d be a good match with Michael Bublé!” he laughs, confident that his credibility is not taking too much of a hit. “We shot it in LA, at the Shrine. The idea of the spot is that he’s getting ready for the show, going through the corridors back stage. And hopefully he looks cool.”

The shorts route to a feature

In fact, he says he really enjoys the commercial process – even its less creative aspects. “I take a pretty uncompromising position with music videos because the budgets are usually so low. My view is, if you don’t want to do my idea, I don’t have to do the video. With commercials I only take 75 per cent of that kind of asshole vibe, then I’ll compromise on certain things.” But he admits his frustration in dealing with the slower speed of filming on larger commercial productions. “I’m usually pacing while things are being set up. I don’t like waiting.”

By contrast, Rojas’s latest video for indie-rockers Purity Ring was shot in just over a day – as opposed to the three- or four-day shoot he’s used to even for music videos. And it’s a development of ideas used in both the Jack White and Spiritualized videos – surreal vignettes, this time captured in long takes. “We did four one-minute Steadicam shots, all following different characters,” he explains.

The bigger picture for him is, he says, having the chance to apply his directing style to features. He already has one short film on the festival circuit – the expressionist Crown, which came out of his relationship with a group of LA skate kids, and could have been a more cinematic and very weird video for Odd Future. A second short film, Dread, is now completed and awaiting release.

“I’m going to start developing a feature next year,” he confirms. “I want to translate my aesthetic, but also the way that we work.” Which not only seems possible, or even just likely – with his talent and determination, it is more or less inevitable.