Saman Kesh’s latest promo for Placebo, Loud Like Love, echoes his earlier Too Many Friends film that the Stink director created for the Brit band last year (see in Related Content).
The video again features the voice of American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis who reveals another unfortunate sequence of events – this time at a sexy swinger’s 1960s pool party. While abundant explanations are offered by Ellis at the end of the saga, an open-ended answer also allows the audience to deduce its own answers to the sexy poolside saga.
The promo was shot on location in Granada Hills, CA with the Phantom Flex camera to capture the slow-motion footage of the brief, but intense, five-second event.
We catch up with director on his latest project:
How did this video come about – it’s a sequel to the Too Many Friends video, did the idea to do another one come from the band?
The band and I always had the notion of a tryptic trilogy that dealt with social interactions across three times.
Is it difficult to do another video around the same theme? How do you keep the ideas fresh?
Too Many Friends was about the isolationist future we could possibly live in. In Loud Like Love, we show a time that was almost the exact opposite. In the late 60’s, it was a time of sexual revolution and almost “too much” interaction.
To keep the idea fresh from TMF, it was essentially about focusing deeper into our main characters and their relations to one another. On top of that, we wanted the feel of the video to be more invitational, poppy and overall “fun”, which would make sense with the time period.
How was it to work with Bret Easton Ellis again?
Bret is a champ. He has become the voice of these videos, and there isn’t a better person to really put the cherry on top our cake. The process was essentially like working with an actor, and Bret embodied the “unreliable narrator” with flying psychedelic colors!
What else are you working on at the moment?
I’m finishing up a spot I shot in India, and gearing up for a music video that may land us in an exotic country. I also have a couple of narrative offences brewing as well.

