Director Profile: Émile Sornin

Dizzee Rascal as a bewigged French aristo prancing around Versailles. A bearded baby riding out of its mother’s womb on a Harley. Dismembered body parts being played by humanoid apes. Just run-of-the-mill promo ideas for “a really French guy with long hair and a moustache.” David Knight takes a trip through the wild imagination of award-winning music video director Émile Sornin

Émile Sornin has a habit of sending webcam videos of himself to pop stars – sometimes with him singing their tracks. But no need to get alarmed. It is always for a good cause.

Sornin has emerged in the past couple of years as one of the most creative new directors working in music videos. He has made some of the most visually inventive and entertaining videos for some of the most exciting artists. But for him to explain the intricacies of a visual idea, especially to an English-speaking artist, it is far easier for this 29-year-old Frenchman to show than tell. And it’s his test videos that sell his ideas.

“Most of the time, my music videos are based around a trick, and sometimes it’s really difficult to explain to a band, and to the team – the DP, my producer – what I want to do,” says Sornin. “And my English is not very good, so there’s a better way to explain.”

So when he pitched for a Dizzee Rascal video last year, he created several gif-style loops of himself lip-syncing to Dizzee’s lyrics. Jules De Chateleux, his executive producer at Division in Paris, says that it was quite a sight. “Émile, a really French guy, with long hair and a moustache, on the webcam rapping Dizzee lyrics… Dizzee said ‘Just when I saw your head I knew I wanted to work with you.’”

Apes, Hell’s Angels and Z-movies

It has turned out to be an important decision for both of them. It led to Sornin directing the video for Dizzee’s I Don’t Need A Reason, which transforms Britain’s biggest hip-hop star into a Louis XVI-style monarch, and uses the looping FX trickery tested in the director’s webcam video.

Now, approximately a year later, Sornin is nearing completion on a new project with Dizzee. What’s more, this is not one new video, but two: a pop-promo double-bill that will exploit both the director’s and the rap star’s shared fascination with two cult film genres. The videos for Couple Of Stacks and Pagans are his take on the slasher-horror and Kung Fu genres respectively. Both are set in the heyday of the ‘Z-movie’, the 70s.

Though Sornin is a director who has already made a habit of tackling ambitious ideas on very moderate budgets and making them fly, it looks like these could be his most ambitious projects to date. And this is someone whose very first big directing project saw him make Australian band Cut Copy perform as dismembered body parts – in the hands of Planet of the Apes-style monkeys, who made a fake documentary depicting French outfit Naïve New Beaters as accident-prone Hells Angels, and then twisted a group of tough city dwellers into bizarre shapes for British indie band Alt-J.

An idea that really flies

Sornin has directed two more acclaimed videos that showcase another side of his talent, beyond his mastery of visual effects. For French duo Jamaica’s Two On Two, he conjured the strangely heartwarming tale of an obsessive fan of the band, who rebuilds his idols as robots, just to live the dream of being their singer.

And in the video for Disclosure’s Grab Her, he has created a gem of visual humour, setting and comic casting. At its heart is a hugely memorable central character: the insufferably smug, horribly sexist boss of a technology company at the dawn of the computer age, untroubled by his unique talent: everything he touches flies up in the air. Cue a stream of inventive sight gags involving ties, office supplies, wine and pee, all flying upwards, while the boss and his long-suffering team attempt to secure a deal with visiting Japanese businessmen.

The promo grabbed VFX nominations at the MTV Video Music Awards and UK Music Video Awards this year. But lauded as it is now, it took a long time to get made at all, according to Sornin: “I wrote this idea for a short movie three years ago,” he reveals. “We also proposed it for other bands, who turned it down.” It also turns out that Grab Her wasn’t commissioned in the conventional sense. Having heard the highly repetitive track on the radio, Sornin realised it could work with his existing idea. He added the track to the already-made test video and discovered it matched perfectly.

Division sent it to the band’s management. “They said ‘yes’ one hour later, and two hours later we were in production,” says De Chateleux, who adds that it’s “not a coincidence” that his director has now worked with some of the biggest British artists in hip-hop, dance and rock. Sornin’s comic influences have made him an excellent fit for these exciting British artists.

“I’m really into British humour – I’m a big fan of guys like Ricky Gervais and Monty Python,” Sornin confirms, before adding the Python-influenced French comedy collective Les Nuls (The Dummies), and the “burlesque” of the silent movie greats such as Chaplin, Keaton and Jacques Tati to his list of influences.

Bands don’t want to have fun

Growing up in the seaport of La Rochelle on France’s Atlantic coast in the 80s and 90s, Sornin started making movies as a youngster with his older brother – everything from stop-motion animations in Play-Doh to cartoonishly violent ninja action films.

“Of course I grew up with Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze,” he says. “One Christmas my brother gave me their The Work of the Director DVDs – I think that was the beginning of my will to become a director of music videos.”

The fact that Sornin himself was a talented musician and in a band also had something to do with it. As a teenager, he started to make videos for his friends’ bands. That continued when he moved to Paris in the mid-2000s to study editing and post production. A few years later, while working as a freelance visual effects artist at a small post house in Paris, he made a wildly energetic lo-fi video for a friend’s band called Sheraff (Fish & Chips) that piqued the interest of De Chateleux at Division – due to the video’s provocative first scene, which featured a bearded baby being born, riding a Harley Davidson out of his mother’s womb.

“It was really well done, really elegant,” declares De Chateleux. “Then Émile showed me all his 8mm ninja movies – where he had done the filming, the voices, the editing, everything – and they were really good. So we started talking about the future.”

Not long afterwards Sornin had prepared the test video that would get him started as a proper video director. “I had this idea with the hands, and the head being cut, but still working and playing instruments. Jules thought it was a really good idea, so we built a story around that.”

After a couple of false starts, this would eventually come to fruition as his video for Cut Copy’s Blink And You’ll Miss A Revolution, in which post-apocalyptic apes (resembling refugees from the original Planet Of The Apes movies) learn how to play rock music by discovering and reanimating the body parts of Cut Copy in a cave-set musical religious ceremony.

This was a complicated, difficult shoot – shot in a Parisian mushroom warehouse – and complicated post production, much of it, and the edit, done by Sornin himself. After this, he would rely on others for the post work, but as an FX-driven comedy narrative, it was also an unqualified success.  

“It was really hard, but I think it was a really good first music video for me,” he reflects. “Maybe it was too ambitious, but I learned so many things on that project.” He would also learn, after following up the Cut Copy video with months of having his treatments rejected, that the market for off-the-wall ideas in music videoland was nowhere near as large as he hoped it would be. “Most artists, singers or bands, don’t really like to be funny,” he says. “So sometimes it’s really hard to sell a crazy or a funny idea.”

The old-fashioned way

Fortunately, French rock band Naïve New Beaters had no problem being crazy, or funny. It was Sornin’s work with them, on the video for La Onda, and a series of teasers, that reinvigorated his career in 2012. In fact, the resulting video actually has the lo-fi aesthetic of much of his early work as a director, including the Sheraff video.

Framed as a low budget documentary, the Naïve New Beaters play rough-living Hell’s Angels showing off their dangerous fondness for Jackass-style stunts to the film crew, and inflicting eye-watering pain on each other. Shot on a couple of VHS cameras, it’s a hugely enjoyable romp with impressive stuntwork and the relentless abuse of lifesize dummies. The comic effects were all achieved the old-fashioned way, with judicious editing.

“It was perfect,” says Sornin. “It was really interesting to work with the singer David Boring, because he had a lot of ideas, and we had lot of references in common, the same humour. We became friends.”

La Onda was then followed by something quite different for Alt-J’s Fitzpleasure – an exercise in post production ingenuity for the idiosyncratic British rock band, where nothing is quite what it seems, or should be, among the residents of a giant Parisian housing complex. Ostensibly, it looks like a typical gritty urban video, but then the characters’ arms, legs and even eyelids twist and bend the wrong way, and all kinds of other weird stuff happens.

In fact, Fitzpleasure looks more like a diversion from the path that Sornin is actually taking – as an increasingly proficient director of comedy performances. In his video for I Don’t Need A Reason, he cast a range of larger-than-life characters – as well as plenty of good-looking girls – to fill the regal Dizzee’s royal court, shot in a chateau in the suburbs of Paris. Sornin says that, despite the demands of shooting over 50 set-ups in a day, Dizzee was a pleasure to work with. “He gave me a lot of solutions, a lot of funny ideas. And he always wants to see the take, and become more funny.”

As well as producing challenges such as having to include an artist’s performance, and make the brilliant effects work to serve the characters, the Disclosure video was a revelatory experience for Sornin. “I realised for the first time that what I really want to do is to direct people. It was the first time I thought ‘That’s what I want to do and I’m good at that.’ Disclosure was really the first time I said ‘Okay, I want to make some films.’”

He adds that the brilliant effects work in Grab Her included the sort of thing that was first employed by Georges Méliès over a century ago – usually involving string. De Chateleux is amused by the fact the video was nominated in the Best Visual Effects category at the MTV Awards this year, when “90 per cent is in-camera”.

One slasher and one ninja

The Jamaica video was a different story, certainly in terms of the FX. The robots were created in CGI, animated to match the duo’s actual performance. But again the FX serve the story of the obsessed fan, who has his own distinct believable character – “He’s a cute little boy – but a bit freaky,” says Sornin. “Not too much of a maniac, and not too friendly either.”

And now comes a veritable feast of Émile Sornin and Dizzee Rascal. Émile says he was initially inspired by the strange piano signature on Couple Of Stacks to create his idea for a blood-drenched slasher video. Dizzee was impressed, then announced he wanted to make two videos – and could he make two mini-horror movies? But Sornin didn’t think the idea would stretch to two videos. “A few days later, Émile called me at two in the morning,” recalls De Chateleux. “He said we should do one slasher video and one ninja video – linked together by a clear 60s, 70s cinematography style.”

The Couple Of Stacks video was released for Halloween, with the kung fu epic for Pagans arriving this November. “I was really happy to do this with Dizzee,” says Sornin. “To be honest, I don’t think we can sell those ideas for other artists.” And now they are talking about working together again – on Sornin’s first short film.

In fact, it promises to be a very busy year ahead for Émile Sornin. For not only is his star rising as a director, his musical career is also starting to take off. Sornin’s band, called Forever Pavot – a sort of one-man garage-psychedelic project – has now signed to a label, and will release a debut album next year. So does this multitalented man now need to choose between making films and making music?

Not if he can help it.

“Actually, my secret dream is to write music for cinema,” he says. “And I’m talking to a director about doing the music for his next film. But I love to direct videos and I love to write music, so I think one day I can mix both.”