Ray Tintori's face tattooed on the arm of genetic neurobiologist Ben Ewen-Campen.

Lo-fi technology meets pop surrealism in the world of Ray Tintori, a 25-year-old director best known for his kaleidoscopic collaborations with glam pop band MGMT.

Tintori was born into a film family in New York. His mother is a script supervisor and his father was an editor, so he spent much of his childhood wandering film sets. When applying for college, Tintori knew he wanted to direct but wondered if film school would leave him with a narrow perspective on life, one informed by theory rather than worldly experience. When it comes to directing, his ethos is to “jump in face first.”

“At a certain point I decided that we should make films in a way so that the experience of making them teaches us more about the world,” he says.

After graduation, he moved to New Orleans and signed with Partizan in  2008. His profile in the video world has mirrored MGMT’s meteoric rise in music thanks to three memorable videos: the interactive Jodorovsky homage “Time to Pretend”, the psychedelic jungle rave-up “Electric Feel” and finally “Kids”, an ambitious, part-animated nod to ’80s latex movie monsters.

The work has earned Tintori a spot not only on our list, but on NME’s list of 50 “Innovators Pushing Music Forward”. Another fan is Spike Jonze, who’s tapped him to direct a film based on Shane Jones’ novel Light Boxes.

How have your first projects shaped you as a director?
When I was making my thesis film in college there was a big element of that film that was about evangelical mysticism, so I spent a lot of time attending religious services in the town around my school. I was a sociology major in college so I had experience doing the kind of field research where you blend into a crowd and discreetly take notes on everything that’s going on. There were people speaking in tongues and just wild stuff going on and a lot of the dialogue and concepts in that film come directly from the things I saw.

What was the best part of making “Kids”?
I was able to have my entire art crew working in a shop in New Orleans for a month before the shoot designing and creating those monster puppets. That amount of pre-production is almost unheard of on a music video these days, which I think is a real shame because it doesn’t even really cost that much more in the end. But it means that instead of just scrambling to prep something in three days and throwing money at every problem, you can actually stretch the budget you’re given and work really methodically on a project until you have something unique and inventive that you can really be proud of.

Name a contemporary filmmaker or visual artist that you admire. Why?
I’ve been watching a lot of Todd Haynes stuff recently. I was lucky enough to interview him after a screening of I’m Not There, which was a huge thrill. I love the way his films bring together all these different pieces of art and history and sort of secular mythology and synthesize them into films that are really visceral and emotional while also being political and thoroughly surreal.

What’s with this tattoo photo?
The bottom face is me. The arm belongs to Ben Ewen-Campen, a genetic neurobiologist and one of our dearest friends. His dance moves in the Electric Feel video were objected to by MTV censors because they were “too sexy”.Q

www.partizan.com

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