Imagine you're an acclaimed musician with four albums under your belt and several directing credits to your name. Then, imagine that people call your brother—sure, he's the cinematographer you work with, but you're the director—to ask him to make them a video in your style.
"They're like, 'Can you make us a Grimes video?'" says Claire Boucher (Grimes is her stage name) of the inquiries directed to her brother, Mac. "He's like, 'She directs the videos.' No one has ever called me about a directing job. Women just don't get those calls, I think."
Sexist ridiculousness permeates the film industry, says the Canadian artist—from being objectified ("Every time I've been in a situation where someone else edited, there's always a butt shot or something")—and that's part of the reason she took a pared-down approach to The Acid Reign Chronicles, seven music videos that Boucher created with her brother and a fellow musician, Hana.
"They are guerrilla style vids," Boucher wrote on Twitter when she released the music videos. "So there was no crew, makeup, cameras, lights. Just us and a phone, so maybe don't expect anything too fancy."
Music videos aren't just a marketing add-on for Boucher; they're a vital part of the art she wants to share with the world. "A really powerful music video or powerful visual to me is some of my favorite art, period," she tells ELLE.com over Skype. We discuss Beyoncé's Lemonade as an example of music and film enhancing each other immeasurably: "It just adds so much more depth to the music."
Shooting on an iPhone during Boucher's European tour earlier this year, the team captured an ecstatic array of sights to accompany songs by both Grimes and Hana. The fleetness and flexibility of such a small team and simple equipment appealed to Boucher on several levels. "I was just really exhausted from doing a bunch of 'real' videos...You know, when you have gaffers and lights and, like, thirty people working on something, and you're just organizing and sending emails," she says. "You don't really get to improvise or have any creative freedom by the time you are actually shooting."
Having that kind of freedom during this shoot led to a measure of fearlessness, enabling the trio to experiment and improvise. "Like, 'Okay, I'm going to try a really fucking weird thing right now and it might be really stupid,'" Boucher says. "I think you're going to get a more interesting product if you're not worried about trying things."
Why shoot on an iPhone, though? Boucher says there were several benefits: "It's really easy to carry, it's light. You can take it out anywhere. It's honestly so easy to work with." On the production side, the iPhone yielded smaller files, which meant a faster editing process.
Needless to say, electing for a stripped-back shoot also led to some drawbacks. Not having large speakers on set, for example, meant that some of the lip-syncing ended up a little "sketchy" since Boucher couldn't hear the track clearly. And other imperfections are easy to spot. "There's certainly parts where it's super dark and it's really grainy and I'm like, Ugh!" she says.
She had a hand in every aspect of the filmmaking, from location scouting to styling. Breathtaking shots of verdant mountains in Montreux, Switzerland, and Wales' Chepstow Castle, built in the 11th century, punctuate the videos. While the locations might be European, Boucher says that her interest in these spectacular vistas derived from the location-oriented nature of Bollywood movies, and how they translate the world around us to create an "ethereal, super gorgeous vibe." Dancers Alyson Van and Linda Davis, who tour with Boucher and are "incredibly essential to the show," improvised new choreography for the short films.
As for styling, the clothes Boucher and Hana wear in The Acid Reign Chronicles are all fluid movement and soft textures. "It's pretty much all stuff from the show," Boucher says. "We each have a suitcase that we live out of for two months." But they weren't exactly working with a limited sartorial palette. The looks include metallic Venetian-style masks, Picnic at Hanging Rock-style white dresses, and garments borrowed from Stella McCartney and Schiaparelli.
Boucher looks carefree throughout The Acid Reign Chronicles, despite suffering from stage fright. "I really feel quite uncomfortable being in front of a camera and performing," Boucher says. But being in charge of the filmmaking process helped immensely with that: "It's good to make your own music videos because you can tightly control everything." At one point during the video for Grimes' song "World Princess Part II," Boucher and Hana start goofing around with umbrellas—first, on a bridge, then, inside some kind of fort—and it looks like pure fun. They look like women who know they're in charge, and they look like they love it.
