"Over two days I build 14 sets, and then we literally make things up, We plan all the characters, but everything that happens on screen he improvises. Essentially his persona is the story. Eminem is a method actor - so when he comes on as a Dallas Cowboy he is a Dallas Cowboy football player for the 45 minutes or so that he's in the uniform.”
Notably, in the era of declining promo budgets Kahn has maintained the production values on these videos and others. He says he can "squeak by with some of the decent budgets out there,” but he can also cope with the smaller budgets, so long as the record companies give him something back in return - trust. “I'm just a better filmmaker than I used to be,” he remarks, “I shoot what I want to shoot. and now they don't make me waste my time shooting stuff I'm not going to use. Well, the good commissioners let me do that." Even more impressively, he reveals: "I don't storyboard anything – I see it all in my head, all the shots. |
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With Womanizer I had three days of prep and two days of shooting. If I storyboarded I'd be doing nothing but that, and I have so many other things to do, That's where trust comes in.” And contrary to what you might think from watching Womanizer, or his similarly turbo' driven, comedy-narrative video for Katy Perry's Waking Up in Vegas, Kahn now relies less on post production, not more, "When budgets started falling I realised there were two ways I could go - Intensify the post side, or try to go more organic in how I shoot stuff. It wasn't a dllflcult choice - I like working with real people and real sets.”
Kahn spent part of his childhood in Iialy but was mostly raised in the suburbs of Houston, where, despite his parents' best efforts, he grew up a pop-culture junkie, Steven Spielberg-worshipper and part of the first teenage MTV generation in the 80s. |
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