Keith Schofield

From viral skirmishes with 80s porn to the random surrealism of his latest video for Charlotte Gainsbourg, Keith Schofield, the man behind some of the most talked-about promos and virals of recent years, is no stranger to controversy. But don't let anyone say he hasn't paid his dues, he tells David Knight.

Keith Schofield is really going places - if the furore surrounding his new video for Charlotte Gainsbourg is anything to go by.

The clip for Gainsbourg's Heaven Can Wait - also featuring Beck - is a gobsmacking array of weird non-sequiturs: a have-a-go hero in an attempted mugging, Goth youngsters running on a beach, a man in a SpongeBob costume being tackled by police, a man chased by a flying axe, a skateboard propped up on hamburgers. These vignettes - and many more - could have been taken from completely different videos or movies.

Heaven Can Wait was inspired by Schofield's archive of 'found photos' - randomly discovered amateur photographs that have odd, unexplainable features and no context. There are websites dedicated to them but it turns out that a couple of the 'found photos' re-created for the video were actually original works by a professional artist.

This led to the kind of web-based vitriol that can occur when a video director is considered important enough to be brought down a peg or two. Amid much positive comment, Schofield came under sustained fire on music video industry-favoured blog videos.antville.org for his alleged plagiarism - and was roundly characterised as the 'big shot' director, riding roughshod over the 'little guys'. Which, all in all, seems a little unfair on the guy.

It is true that Schofield's work over the past couple of years has been synonymous with comic originality, in the grand tradition of the big names of music video creativity - the likes of Jonze, Gondry and Dougal Wilson. Schofield's work radiates a visual wit that incorporates strong technical ideas and entertaining concepts. These include a couple of works known far and wide: his acclaimed video for The BPA's Toe Jam, where young people happily disrobe in a 70s-ish setting and make patterns with the black bars that appear to cover their modesty; and his Diesel viral SFW XXX, which transforms 80s pornography by painting more innocent activities over it. "I'd like to think that every ad person saw those videos," he says, on the phone from Los Angeles. "And I also want to point out that there's more than porn on the reel." Indeed. There is also his award-winning, technically ingenious video for Supergrass' Bad Blood; his controversial drug-making video for US indie band Wintergreen; and another recent work for the Justice remix of Lenny Kravitz's Let Love Rule, which beautifully re-imagines the end-credit sequence of an 80s movie and adds a unique comic twist.

Schofield's video treatments, available to view on his website, reveal an excellent and enthusiastic communicator of often complicated ideas. But for all that, his progress could hardly be described as either smooth or meteoric. He is an American director who got his first proper break in Europe and arguably enjoys a higher profile in Belgium than in the US. Someone of his talent probably deserves rather greater success than he has enjoyed thus far. As he says: "When I visualize the characterisation [of a 'big' director] I imagine myself sitting at a big desk with a cigar, wielding power over all the music video world. But that's not quite how it is."
He grew up in the Chicago suburb of Northbrook - the spiritual home of the 80s teen movie. "I went to the same high school that [writer-director] John Hughes went to and filmed a lot of scenes at," he explains. Having made films on Video 8 all through high school he progressed to NYU Film School, and began making videos for New York-area bands in 2000 and 2001. "I wasn't into cool music then," he claims. "It was all a leftover from watching MTV when Spike Jonze and Gondry were on all the time." But after relocating to Los Angeles following graduation he began to get noticed.

With his video for The Notwist's One With the Freaks - the story of an adventurous jellyfish who floats around LA - Schofield picked up a New Directors feature in this very publication.

That was in 2004, and shortly afterwards he met video director Ruben Fleischer (more recently director of hit movie Zombieland). "I edited one of Ruben's low-budget videos, and then he threw my first two real gigs my way." One of those was for LA hip-hop outfit One Block Radius, an on-street performance transformed by a back-and-forward scratching effect - an early example of his knack of capturing that ineffable 'why did no one think of that before?' quality.
Other low-budget videos followed, for the likes of DJ Format and Death Cab For Cutie, while he launched a parallel commercials career with the American offshoot of Belgian production company Caviar Films - and was successfully sold back to the Belgian market on the back of his low-budget videos.

Since his first ad for Belgian bank Axion, Schofield has periodically returned to Belgium to direct more spots, but it was the controversial 2007 video for Wintergreen's Can't Sit Still that gave critical impetus to his video directing career. The video was a science lesson on DIY drug-making, in which the band extract the chemicals from household items to create (and imbibe) 'Egyptian meth', 'Hillbilly Quaaludes' and hallucinogens. "It led to a screening at [London music video creativity night] BUG, which led to me doing the Supergrass video," he summarises.

For Supergrass' Bad Blood the camera locks on specific points during the band's performance in a pub - from the spool of a reel-to-reel tape to Gaz Coombes' hand on a guitar fretboard, a trick achieved by shooting on 35mm and transferring to HD, then tracking the action in post. The video ended up winning best rock video at the 2008 UK Music Video Awards, but Schofield says, "It wasn't until Supergrass that I started having a competitive [promo directing] career."
But then things took off. He signed to Streetgang Films for videos in the US and UK, and made his instantly-acclaimed monster viral hit for The BPA's Toe Jam, not long followed by his Diesel viral SFW XXX - made with The Viral Factory in London. Schofield reveals that Toe Jam was the first time he was inspired by a photo from his folder of funny found photos, and SFW XXX was inspired by the web-trend of porn images being painted over to make them 'Safe for Work'.

That was the breakthrough, but it was followed by a slight backlash. Following the Toe Jam video, Schofield made three more in very quick succession, for CSS, Ladyhawke and The Ting Tings. "I was almost getting single-bid," he recalls, "but I should've had a higher level of quality control. I did way too much stuff."

In fact, the CSS video for Move is a highly entertaining riff on false perspective photography. The Ting Tings video for Be the One, involving the band merging into and emerging from rear screen projections, is also engaging, but it required reshoots due to the technical problems it posed - and his Ladyhawke video never saw the light of day. "After that, everything cooled off and went back to normal," he says.

Indeed 2009 was largely about busily advancing his commercials career. He has now directed spots for McDonald's, Virgin Mobile, and, most distinctively, off-the-wall comedic ads for Jennie-O frozen turkeys and basketball franchise the Minnesota Timberwolves. He has also worked with The Viral Factory in London again, on spots for Skype and Samsung.

When shots talks to him, Schofield is just about to shoot an ad for a new Sony camera phone, and he reveals that this was an example of a straight conflict between doing an ad or a music video - and choosing the ad. "The video was going to be too challenging - and I've made that mistake before." But this music video fan is not about to give up on them, when clearly he has a lot more to give. "If I'm not working on a cool ad it's imperative that I get writing a good video idea," he insists. So after making a video for New York rapper Mims early in the year he has ended 2009 with those two new videos for Justice and Lenny Kravitz, and Charlotte Gainsbourg.

He says the concept for the 'end credits' in Let Love Rule, where we witness the final seconds of an 80s movie with a very Michael J Fox-type lead realising he's sharing screen time with an endless scroll of credits, was something he has wanted to do for a while. "And my first thought when I heard the song was that it sounded like the title song at the end of some cheesy 80s movie," he says.

When the location for the video changed from Paris to LA that sealed it, and Schofield's only regret was that he could not secure a star name for the lead role. "Elijah Wood really wanted to do it, and it was almost going to happen. The lead guy was great at doing the clichéd stuff and physical comedy - but Elijah Wood would have given us a genuine pop culture moment."

For the Charlotte Gainsbourg video he has created yet another 'how was that not done before?' idea. "It's a video where nothing is repeated, where every scene looks like it's taken from another video - so you can't fast-forward through it!" He shot the video over three days at a mansion in Granada Hills in LA, in order to get 50 random scenes, and he says, "I hope no one thinks it's pretentious."

He also defended himself over the online controversy that brewed around his inspiration for the video. "The bottom line is I assumed that the work I was referencing was not the work of an artist - and I never checked," he tells shots. "I've since reached out to him - William Hundley - and have included his name in the credits."

In fact, Schofield is more concerned by the fact that the record company did their own edit of the video, undermining the concept. "The idea is that scenes are never repeated, and they have thrown that idea out of the window. It's random - OK you can say that about my version, but at least that was deliberate!"

But as for the web criticism, he can put that into perspective: it's all part of the business, and ultimately, it all helps. "The internet can be a critical place, but the worst thing that can happen to a video is that nobody talks about it. And in fact, I'm happy how it turned out, and the positive response has been overwhelming. I'm in no way an overnight sensation of any sort," he finishes, "it's been a long, slow build up - about five, six years in the making. So whatever one thinks of where I'm at now, no one can complain that I didn't put in the time to get here."