An Interview With Joseph Khan - Page Two

7/2000

Q: What made you decide that making music videos was something you wanted to do?

A: I wanted to get into film, and I lived in Houston, Texas. There is absolutely no way to make a 100 million dollar movie like, sitting at home in Texas (laughs). So the only way I knew how to break through was to start really small and I thought music videos at the time were small enough for me to get my hands on, and start filming. I figured that if I made cool music videos, I could eventually go to Hollywood and make a big movie.

Q: So Hollywood was the #1 goal the whole time?

A: Yeah, definitely.

Q: As far as music videos are concerned, did you have any preferences for which artists you would direct?

A: I grew up listening to all the pop stuff. I was a huge fan of Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, Madonna, even George Michael – things like that. And the music videos that really influenced me were the early Propaganda music videos (i.e. David Fincher, Michael Bay, Dominic Sena, David Kellogg, David Lynch) Propaganda defined what the music video format was going to look like. There were some incredible videos by David Fincher that really opened my eyes to how artistic music videos could really be. When I first started out doing music videos – this was like back in 1988 when I attempted my first one – I was trying to pattern all my music videos after David Fincher. To this day, I am personally very much a pop director. My first love is the idea of a pop video – which means essentially that I don’t really like to make anything too pretentious. It’s gotta rock out. It’s gotta be funny. It’s gotta be cool. It’s just gotta be something that entertains me, and would personally make me stop flipping the channel.

Q: One of the things in particular that got me interested in your work was your use of special effects. With your movies, are you going to be pursuing this kind of thing too?

A: Yeah absolutely. My favorite filmmaker is Steven Spielberg and I went to NYU and would get into huge arguments with everybody [there] because everybody just hated him. And I don’t understand why to this day. I love special effects. It’s harder to do it in a music video only in that when you do a special effect in music videos, it’s just for the sake of doing a special effect. That’s why a lot of times when I look at my early ones – I cringe; I try to be more clever with the camera work now. When I go into feature films, all this knowledge I’m developing on a technical basis hopefully will apply on a storytelling level.

One of the movies I’m going to be doing possibly is the Transformers movie…

Q: Another one?

A: Well, not an animated one but a live action one. Which has actually been a passion of mine for like, many, many years. Like, my dream project would be to do a live action Transformers where the robots are CG (Computer Generated) and the people are real. I would totally redesign the Transformers to be more anime looking…and give it more of a Detroit metal-head feel, as supposed to a little kiddie thing. I want to make Transformers for adults, and I think the kids will watch. Sony is supposedly working on a deal…so we’ll see.

Q: Would you go with the originals or go with the Beast Wars?

A: I’d go with Generation 1.

Q: Good.

A: (laughs) I don’t understand the concept of Beast Wars. To me, there’s a certain simplicity behind the Transformers that’s cool. There’s a type of filmmaking that’s being lost right now because either you make your movies so infantile that only eight year-olds can watch them, or you make them adult and there’s no middle ground. You know, back in the early to mid 80s when Speilberg, Zemeckis and Lucas were at their prime, there were movies like Raiders Of the Lost Ark where people from like, 5 to 80 could watch. There was a certain feel where everybody could see it. It was intelligent enough for adults, yet still acceptable for kids and it was just fun all the way around.

So what I envision with the Transformers movie is to do it in a way where it’s sophisticated, but kids can still go see it. More importantly, there’s a certain level of violence that needs to be in it. One of the cool things about the first Transformers movie was that people actually died. Since they were robots you could get away with a lot more. Do you wanna hear my pitch for my Transformers trailer I’d release a year early?

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