Charlotte Gainsbourg and Beck fans cast off Craigslist float lifelessly in “Heaven Can Wait”.

A casual surf through director Keith Schofield’s Tumblr page reveals nine guys all named Ed Hardy, a photo of a high school play in Hollywood, a disgruntled-looking hairless bear and a mysteriously large lump of flesh in Sydney, Australia.

Had French songstress Charlotte Gainsbourg asked the 30-year-old to direct a music video for “Heaven Can Wait”, a duet with Beck, in November rather than this past summer, she might have found herself in the middle of each aforementioned scenario.

As it stands, Schofield surrounds Gainsbourg and Beck with series of elusive, cascading music video money shots that play like a live-action Tumblr page, full of meaning but devoid of context. Among them: an awkward dinner party, an astronaut with a head made of pancakes, a pair of goth kids running romantically on a beach, a skateboard propped up by hamburgers and police officer tackling a man in a Spongebob costume. Each micro-vignette is styled as an ‘a-ha’ reveal from a larger story, but before viewers have time to process what they’re seeing, Schofield moves on to the next scene.

Most of Gainsbourg’s previous videos are low on concept but heavy on beauty and performance footage. For “Heaven Can Wait”, the lead single off the forthcoming Beck-produced album IRM, she wanted to do something completely different.

The concept comes from the random imagery Schofield encounters on websites such FFFFound! and blogging platform Tumblr. “I thought the best video in the world would be one where you just cut to a different, crazy scene,” he says.

For inspiration, the director, who is best known for his BPA video “Toe Jam” and Diesel’s SFW porn viral, dug into his archive of funny photography.

“I basically have this huge folder of all these found photos and when I get a song in, I’ll play the track and I’ll look through these pictures and see if any thing sticks,” he says. “I’ll be reading something randomly and see a funny picture and throw it in the folder. The whole thing with found photos is that they’re funny because there’s no context to them. You look at a funny picture and go, ‘what’s the scene about?’ And you draw your own conclusions.”

Schofield intersperses odd situations with awkward and melancholy moments.

Schofield shot the video’s 50 scenes in three days in and around an old mansion in Granada Hills, California. He spent one day shooting Gainsbourg and Beck in 22 scenes and two days shooting the remaining 28. He had planned to schedule a fourth day but after editing a rough cut, he found that exactly 50 bizarre moments filled out the video nicely.

Though most of the obscure photos Schofield wanted to reinterpret are cute, kitschy, retro and awkward family portraits, he didn’t want the video to feel goofy. So the action doesn’t seem totally ridiculous, he chose to film in slow motion. “The first thing is I didn’t want it to feel pretentious,” he says. “With the slow motion, everything gets taken down a notch.”

Though the track is brisk and upbeat,  he directed the leads to appear melancholy, awkward and distraught in order to infuse all the silliness with an unseemly undercurrent. His favorite shot of Gainsbourg is when she appears on the verge of tears, her head resting on a man’s shoulder. “We tried to play up this ongoing haunting, sad quality,” he says. “If she was smiling and goofing off, it would take away some of the contrast.”

After the shoot day with Gainsbourg and Beck, the production broke for a week, giving Schofield more time to brainstorm more mini-vignettes and gather props. He’d start by scouting locations and figure out how to fill it in with ideas. Most of the action was filmed in an ornately tacky mansion with amenities that included a tennis court flanked by statues of Michelangelo’s David.

Since the house already looked art directed, he concentrated on props, instructing the production designers to gather as many weird ones as they could find. He ended up with a mix of thrift store finds and high-end production gear.

For the bathroom scene in which Gainsbourg casually applies makeup while a man in a gorilla mask watches from the tub, for example, he borrowed the mask from a director friend who’d used it in a music video. “We couldn’t afford that if we wanted to buy it,” he says.

Schofield put a call for extras on Craigslist and cast key elderly people and children through the usual channels. The general dress code for the cool-looking hipsters who replied to the Craigslist ad was “ugly retro ‘90s”.

In an appropriately random turn of events, Beck became fascinated with Shannon Thule, an extra from the bar scene, because he resembled comedian Will Ferrell. He took a few photos of the man and the two struck up a conversation. A month later, Beck posted a lengthy interview on his website about Thule’s “experiences living life as Will Ferrell’s doppelganger and growing up around the world”.

For more insight into the making of “Heaven Can Wait”, check out Keith Schofield’s treatment here.

To watch the director’s cut of the video, head to the Screening Room.

www.caviarcontent.com

www.elnino.tv