You were born in Dubai and grew up in Weston-super-Mare. Were you brought up in a particularly creative environment? And how do think your background influenced your filmic language?

My Dad is a graphic designer and my Mum’s background is in interior design – so I’ve always been surrounded by creative goings on at home.

During my early teens, my mum worked doing all the visual merchandising for a garden centre and she used to do THE BEST Christmas displays in the foyer of the building. I think that was probably the first time I was exposed to spacial design like that – or at least became aware of it and its potential. Throughout college I was sure I wanted to do something similar – not make Santa’s grotto or anything – but make art that filled physical space.

A lot of my ideas stem from thinking about the physicality of space and objects. My Dad has collected and curated tat his whole life; from crude toys to dodgy tourist bunk to questionable produce packaging, if it’s naff I’ll likely have an affinity towards it and an unyielding desire to possess it.

Did you always intend to direct films?

 Not really. When I left uni I was working in art departments and I thought that was what I was going to do primarily, and mess around with making films on the side. Before that, I was into acting and art and photography. I loved watching films and was into fantasy stuff mostly.

For a good while I thought photography was my calling and I used to spend day after day walking around London filling SD cards of silly things I saw. Looking back now I wasn’t very good but I did have fun and it taught me a lot about framing real spaces / locations.

I didn’t really consider the possibility of directing till I was in my early 20’s at university. I applied for some arts council money in my third year through the funding scheme Stop Play Record and made my first short film ‘A Roof Over Their Heads’ which was later picked up by Channel 4’s Random Acts.

And from that first short film, where you dressed the family in paper mache heads, your eye for the absurd runs like a surreal, witty thread through your music videos for Idles, Apre, Marika Hackman, Sad Night Dynamite, Bree Runway and these two latest stand-out films for Declan McKenna.

Thanks! Yep. I’ve always been into the concept of absurdism and how it can be wielded in ways that can be both poignant and funny. Creating stuff that’s cloaked in ambiguity is quite important to me – I’m really excited by multi-faceted responses to art, stuff that provokes even a tiny bit of response or process to unlock its intention. A slippery message = an excited Will. P.S. I hate Banksy.

Let’s start with the latest The Key To Life On Earth for Declan McKenna where you teamed him up with his doppelganger, End of the Fucking World star Alex Lawther, and not one frame is wasted on unravelling the story of “mundanity and hostility”.

Sure, so for this vid we were really leaning into a big internet meme that’s plagued Declan for ages. His likeness has always been compared to Alex Lawther’s – and the comment section has been persistent in underlining that fact.

Declan called me up and said that he’d got Alex lined up for the next vid and his only ambition for it was to have the two of them having a fight – something like the Peter Griffin and Chicken feud on Family Guy perhaps?

So I took that, went away, fleshed it out a bit and thought about how we can use the two of them on screen in a playful and engaging way that taps into their history/ relationship and is ultimately a chunky crowd pleaser.

I was thinking about if all those comments that people had written over the years could manifest into a person – like a digital age incantation – A bit like that old spooky urban myth you’d get told as a kid that if you look in a mirror at night and said “Candy man” three times – he would appear behind you and kill you?

The narrative itself is very loosely inspired by the Edgar Allan Poe short story William Wilson, where the protagonist stabs his doppelgänger at a Venetian masquerade ball (hence the cockroach fancy dress scrap that takes place at the end of our film).

You used vfx to a much greater extent in your earlier film for Declan McKenna Beautiful Faces than you had previously. What was behind your decision to depart from your normal live action and has this opened up new narrative possibilities for you?

Oh massively so. I don’t really see it as a departure to be honest – it’s something I’ve been interested in exploring for ages. I’m super into video games and world building and I am actually shocked it’s taken me this long to start playing with cgi. I met Alfie (Dwyer, @ze.zima) on instagram and had been quietly following his work, like a viper, waiting for the right project to come along where I could strike into his DM’s and BEG him to work with me. He said yes. 💍

Some incoming cringe for you… I used to make digital collages back in le day which were supposed to be the building blocks of ideas for films – but then I got a job at Waterstones and I played a bit too much World of Warcraft and never actually learned how to use the software to develop them any further.

Your film for London-based producer duo Sad Night Dynamite is stunningly shot and completely captivating in a surreal way as if they are interconnecting stories with more to be revealed. Explain more please.

Thanks! Huge shout out to mega babe Igor Smitka for his unmistakable skills there.

This was the first thing that SND had ever put out and they were super conscious of the grand design of the project as a whole, constantly referencing ‘the arc’.

The instrumentals themselves are quite experimental in the sense that they hint at what’s to come later down the line: referencing particular musical phrases or hooks that will appear on future singles etc. And that was something we were keen to explore in the visual too, that the piece felt like it was part of something larger – scraps of a fading fever dream, pieced back together.

Was Idles’ Colossus, which you directed, produced and edited, your breakthrough film?

Yes it definitely was! It was the first music vid I ever made in fact. I was granted some £ to make a music vid from an Arts Council funded scheme called Stop Play Record – and needed to find some music for it! I used to be in a band when I was younger and we’d played a couple of shows with Idles so I knew the singer Joe a bit, I had him on Facebook and dropped him a message saying I’ve got £3k to make a movie and he sent me their soon-to-be-released second album and said pick a song! Back of the net.

All of your films have a distinctive tone and art direction. Do you collaborate with a designer or do you visualise in detail with storyboards?

I don’t really collaborate with any individual specifically in regards to art direction. I guess I usually have quite a strong hand in the approach to design – I often think about physical space very early on when I’m writing – sometimes a whole idea can stem from something silly I want to do with a set for example. I storyboard pretty much everything as I’m also quite hot on framing and, though dodgy as heck, my storyboards can be super useful in illustrating how I want to approach shooting a certain set build or space.

You’re currently focussing on music videos but are there other genres you’d like to explore?

Oddly enough yes. I was miserably two days away from shooting my first commercial for Skittles when the lockdown came into place and the shoot got understandably pulled. I’m really hoping that once we’ve resumed normal procedures we can pick the project up again as we’d had loads of amazing prosthetics made for it.

Aside from moving into commercials I’m working with Blink on developing some longer form stuff which I’ve been able to sink some serious hours into with all the free time I have not been making commercials for Skittles.

I also have a few weird long-term goals that I think I should probably start entertaining soon: One thing I’ve always wanted to do is shoot a series of super super short live-action films that would replace the usual bowling alley animations, and have an invite only presentation of them whilst people bowled. I also really want to design a ghost train and also make a video game.

How are you spending your days WFH and is there anything in particular that you’re finding inspiring to watch, read, listen to?

I’m playing lots of video games, painting, waiting and cooking. I had a pretty busy start to the year, so it’s been quite a healthy pause for me. I’ve subscribed to an arts & culture streaming service called Marquee TV, so I’ve “been going to the theatre” a lot with my housemates – last night it was RSC’s Richard II.

LINKS:

Blink

@willhooper__