Hell Yeah! It's Truman & Cooper on Their New Promo

Colonel Blimp directing team Truman & Cooper (AKA Anthony Jorge and Jonathan Cohen) were showcased as shots New Directors earlier in 2014 for their fantastic Son Lux promo. Now they're back again with a new music video for Rag n Bone Man's Hell Yeah, which is a brilliant piece of film with three scintilating performances and an unusal set.

Here Jorge [below left] and Cohan [below right] reveal the thinking behind the video and how it all nearly came apart when the location fell through... 

Did you immediately see how you wanted to approach the video once you’d heard the track?

Actually, we got the idea and we wrote the first script a couple of months ago, we were waiting for a good track to make it happen.

When we heard the song from Rag’ n' Bone Man we found it very powerful and we knew that this was the perfect song for the idea. 

What was it about the song that piqued your interest?

We loved that this was a track featuring two different style of music: soul music with Rory (Rag N BoneMan), and rap music with Vince Staples.

There is a lot power in the chorus of the track and it keeps a steady momentum in the verse which we thought would work perfectly with the movement of the car. You can tell the different parts of a story by following the different phases of the song. Also we loved Rory’s voice, it's really powerful.

The three main performances are very powerful; how did you find the actors and how difficult was that process?

We though that finding really good actors for that script would be long and difficult, but Paul [Weston] at Colonel Blimp connected us with a really good casting director. She completly understood what we wanted and came up with really great propositions.

The casting itself was pretty intense and the casting director [Anna Kennedy], ended up with quite a few bruises. I think we also weren't so popular in the office that day as the casting lasted all day and there was a lot of shouting and swearing while there was an agency meeting going on in the next room.

We found our three cast members though and were really happy but only actually saw them all together when they came to Paris for the shoot. We were so excited to see them next to each other for the first time. It was like our characters were finally real.

The set is very theatrical and mirrors films like Lars von Trier’s Dogville; why did you decide on this approach?

First we wrote the script without thinking about this concept. The first idea was to shoot it in real locations. But then we wanted to make something different from our last videos and add a concept to the story.

We wanted to really focus on the performances so we decided that we could have a minimalist set. We liked the idea of msking some kind of road movie that would take place in one single location with a car circling around a changing set. 

Do music videos still offer directors the most creative freedom, and how important do you think they are in gaining experience?

Yes, music videos still offer directors a lot of creative freedom. For us it can be quickest way make films we love. But so often now, the conditions aren't right. We were really luck because in this instance the commissioner, Laura [Clayton], really pushed for our idea and the label and the artist seemed to have a strong belief in us and let us do exactly what we wanted and that’s the best conditions to work under. It is really important to keep making music video because you can experiment with new things and evolve inyour style rather than always doing the same thing.

What was the most challenging part of this project?

On the creative side, the challenge was to manage to tell the story and make the concept understable in a short amount of time. Unlike our previous work, where we shoot a lot of things and really build the film during the edit, this time we had to plan a lot more, especially our transitions between the scenes. 

Our main challenge though was that we based the shoot in Paris because we knew the perfect location which was an old military airport. However the night before the shoot they suddenly told us we couldn't shoot there. Everyone was there ready to shoot, the talent, artist and label had come from London, the trucks were loaded but we had no location anymore.

After a very sleepless night,the next morning we still hadn't found anywhere we could shoot so we started to shoot inside the car, all the shots where you cant see out the windows. We were just cirlcling aournd the production company office. Eventually we managed to get back the authorisation to shoot in the airport so we rushed to it but we had lost seven hours of shoot which is a lot.

So, in the next two days we had to be very efficient to get all we needed. Because it's a narative we couldn't really drop any sequence, but thanks to our team and the very good performance of the cast we could get many shots in one single take and we managed to shoot everything in time. On top of this it also rained…a lot!

What are you working on next?

We are really looking forward to the next year and would love to make more commercials. We also have a couple of music video projects that we are trying to make happen. We recently also wrote a short film and are in the funding process with that.