Nori Niven

I always compared it to like that scene in Conan the Barbarian where he has to push that rock in a circle for like 10 years before he becomes a grown man, you know, when he's all strong.

Because you shoot a million feet of film and either you fail or you come out of it stronger.

Somehow I wound up on a panel for music videos at Panavision in Dallas.

And I'm like 20 years old.

And one of the guys on the panel said, hey, I've got these karaoke videos.

You want to come shoot some of them?

And I would shoot anything.

I mean, I love shooting film.

And the idea of shooting music videos sounded really fun.

And of course I said yes.

They wanted stories.

So I remember they really wanted a narrative weave.

They wanted a beginning, a middle, and an end.

They really wanted you to stick to the storyline of the song.

I remember mostly in the early days, you're just getting stuff shoved at you.

We had a stage, and in order to shoot on the stage, we had to shoot like four in one day, literally not sleeping and trying to shoot in 24 hours.

It was just stupid.

And why?

Because we had a soundstage.

We shot on black and white, on reversal film stocks.