Dave Meyers

It’s going really good. I think we’re really doing a strong update.

I’m shooting the kids in a trailer park. Our update includes a boyfriend and girlfriend instead of just one person. So we’re just shooting a scene in a trailer park where they’re looking for help as the Hitcher chases them down.

Right now I think we’re at video number nine or something like that.

Yeah. Obviously the song is very visual and inspires a lot of parody. So she sent me the song as soon as she finished it and gave me a month to come up with all kinds of scenarios. We’ve been very collaborative over the years so we put together the craziest treatment we could come up with. Then we ran into a little roadblock with the record label but once they saw the video combined with the song, they got all enthusiastic and ran with it. It was a long haul but it ended up being something that was really true to Pink and true to her perspectives on things. So it was a proud moment.

I don’t think that the video is attacking specific people. It’s making fun of trends that are popular and there are certainly people I’ve worked with who adhere to those trends. But it’s kind of the thing where everybody just plays along because at the end of the day, it’s a business.

Pink is an artist who dares to say the unsayable but it was never meant to attack anybody specifically. It was just meant to show how in the context of all these images, how stupid it all is. Not how stupid the people are but how stupid the desire to be like this is.

Yes and it’s a great place to be.

I don’t blank if I’m shooting. I’ll blank if they offer me something and I just don’t feel the music or don’t understand it or I’m too distracted with other things like commercials or a movie. Sometimes I hit that wall. But usually if they really want me what will happen is a manager or somebody will start brainstorming ideas and I might get attached to one and be like “Okay, I can run with that”. That’s happened before. There are a couple of record label execs that really understand how my mind works so I enjoy working with them. A recent example of that is Jeff Kwatinetz over at The Firm who is the manager of Korn, Kelly Clarkson, Snoop and everybody else. We did a Korn video and he was a great collaborator on that. He helped me break it down and do a whole Spinal Tap rip off.

It’s really broadened. I like all sorts of music now and I appreciate all sorts of artists. I appreciate the subtleties of instrumentation. I have a much broader appreciation for music. I really think that it’s going to play into my usage of it in film.

I’ve won like nine of them so there’s not much higher I can go with videos. I used to do 40 videos a year. Now I just do Missy Elliot, Pink and a couple of other artists that really like to push the envelope. Also the budgets have gone down because of the recession and all that stuff with downloading. So I’ve been focusing a lot on movies and commercials but when the right artists call with the right songs I’ll do it because a good song speaks to your emotions and it’s where I get a lot of my inspiration. So if I hear a track that I love, I just naturally want to make images to it even if there’s not much of a budget. Dave Matthews called me last year with this song American Baby and we did the video even though it was the cheapest video I had been offered in years. But since it was an amazing song I said “Fuck it, I’m going to shoot it myself.” The crew was just me and my producer. We traveled the country for three weeks and made this whole video. It was a great spiritual journey for me. So I keep an open mind and never really shut out any opportunity unless I can’t find my way through it.

It’s similar to commercials which has agencies and clients. Also artists have opinions just like actors do. But I like the whole landscape of movies much more. There’s more thought put into a movie by all those people you mentioned whereas videos are sometimes just fly by the seat of your pants and sometimes there’s a lot of people that are unfocused and don’t know what they want. Even the artist sometimes doesn’t. But with the movies you have a beginning place with a script and after that usually everybody’s on the same page or at least on this movie that I’m doing. That collaboration is something I’ve grown to appreciate. It’s like having friends that share the creative burden with you. I do the directing and do the producing and the studio does the studio stuff but it’s been a very collaborative and exciting process so far.

I have. That was actually how I got involved. I had never seen it and the producers wanted to work with me and I wanted to work with them so they asked me to watch that because they wanted to remake it. So I watched it and told them some of the plot holes that I didn’t like. I’m not saying it wasn’t a good movie but there were a few plot holes I don’t think would hold up in today’s society. They said, “Well we feel the same way so let’s fix them together”. A year later we got a script together that was ready to be shot and the studio to greenlight it and here I am.

No but we will have an improved truck scene where we go beyond the original. The finger in the French fries was minor to me. I felt with the whole Wendy’s lawsuit and all that stuff, it would play comical and unbelievable. It worked in the original but we’re trying to go a lot more real with this movie and make it something with real fear like how Jaws is with water.

We asked Rutger to do a cameo. But he said, and I agreed with him, that unless he was playing the Hitch, it wouldn’t be a good move for him. I would have loved to have him in here, but he respectfully declined and wished us good luck.

Sean Bean fell into the category of what we were looking for and what Rutger was back then. We were looking for that great character actor that has star potential but isn’t a star yet. We didn’t want somebody that was too overblown or too eccentric or too movie star but we didn’t want somebody that was fresh off the boat either. Sean has been a part of so many amazing movies and is one of those faces that everybody recognizes but don’t really know. So it was a chance to make him a star as well as capitalize on his amazingly subtle acting.

Movies tell a story whereas commercials and videos tend not to. Videos tend to sell lifestyle and although I’ve done a narrative, it’s still the lifestyle that people tend to take away from it. A movie is a much more exciting place to be. I’m trying to bring an emotional center to The Hitcher that I feel didn’t exist in the original. So you can love these kids and really root for them as they‘re dealing with the Hitcher.

I’m developing a movie called Witch Hunter with Arnold Kopelson and New Regency. That’s my version of Lord of the Rings. It’s set around the time of the witch hunts in Medieval Times. I came up with a pitch that was pretty big as far as the type of magic and phenomenal worlds and set pieces and action things. It got everybody excited so we’re writing that script right now. If it comes out good then we’ll do that but if not there are a lot of ideas floating in my head and a lot of scripts being sent my way.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

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