One Direction are donned up in all sorts of disguises in their brand-new video for “Best Song Ever.” And while it’s their alter egos — based on all the one might find floating around L.A. — that may grab a few headlines, the video’s director, Ben Winston, says the video is really about something else.
He says the visual is really about celebrating who the guys are, while also paying homage to their August 30 film release, “This Is Us.” “The film that we’ve made ‘This Is Us’ is really the boys’ story, and it’s not trying to make them anything they’re not. And that’s what’s incredible about One Direction, I think, is that they are a boy band that break all the rules and always do what they want to do,” Winston told MTV News on Monday (July 22), the same day that the video premiered, which takes fans inside a terrible pitch meeting with the fivesome, where they face off against their Hollywood-based alter egos.
“And part of loving One Direction is sort of understanding they are their own men and they do what they want to do at all times,” Winston continued. “They dance if they want to dance. They’ll sing the tunes [they want]. They’ll dress however they want to dress and that, I guess, is sort of a part of the video.”
So while the studio executives try to make 1D into something they’re not, including trying to get them dolled up in leather costumes and do dance routines, the video sets out to remind everyone that 1D doesn’t change for anyone.
“Therefore they actually put the DVD into the exec’s DVD [player], show them some clips [of] ‘This Is Us’ and, in the end, just graffiti a picture of them looking cool, looking normal, looking how we would find them every day. And the punch line, of course, is this is us; don’t try and make us anybody that we’re not. We are who we are and we’re never going to change for anybody.”
But, Winston wanted to send that message with a bit of a wink and a nod at the studio system and the folks that make it work, including marketing guys and studio executives.
“Obviously it’s accompanying the film, so part of the idea, I guess, was we would take characters who they may have met in Hollywood and who they may have sort of had interactions with. Of course, it’s a spoof ’cause no one at the studio working on this movie would ever act anything like that,” he said. “But that was the idea behind it, really to take stereotypical characters [and play on that].”
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