Best Of You

About

For the first music video for Foo Fighters fifth studio album the band selected the treatment of American film director, writer and producer Mark Pellington. Mark had previously directed a trio of feature length movies as well as several music videos and short films including Single Video Theory, a documentary centred around production of Pearl Jam’s album ‘Yield’, in 1998.

Dave Grohl was equal parts intrigued and confused by the treatment that Pellington submitted – “I remember reading the treatment for that and thinking this is insane. I think he called it a tone poem. It was completely nuts. He was so into it.” Attempting to make further sense of the concept, Dave noted that Mark took “his interpretation of the song, and he’s doing performance footage, and then adding other footage that he’s shot, intercutting that, to emphasise certain lines in the song, either a lyric or an emotion”.

In a ‘Making the Video’ special shown on MTV direction Pellington explained how he decides on whether to write a treatment, and how this one set off his creative juices - “Usually when I get a track, it’s like a light switch. It either goes on or it doesn’t. This one It just went on, the emotion and the energy just poured out of me”.

Principle photography began at the former Linda Vista Community Hospital in Los Angeles on April 26^th, 2005. Opened in the 1920s it closed in 1991 due to financial issues and afterwards became a popular filming location in LA for a variety of productions including Addams Family Values in 1993 and episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and ER.

The first day of the shoot was without the band, Mark shooting stock footage in and around the hospital. Some of the shots were just with scenery whilst others involved uncredited actors, including a young girl in a nearby play park.

Day two was the first with the band on set, first shooting traditional mimed performance footage on the roof of the hospital where a white stage had been constructed followed by shots inside the hospital basement later in the day. The walls of the basement had been heavily gratified over the years of abandonment which was used as a backdrop for several shots.

The penultimate shot of the day featured uncredited actors wearing dark wetsuits covered in small lights, wandering the hospital hallways. “The light guys are a metaphor for the inevitability of our demise” explained Pellington, perhaps confusing adding “Or symbolic of the future. They could be anything”.

The final shots just before 7pm on the second evening of production were “portrait” shots inside the hospital, each member staring directly into a camera lens without instruments and instructed to “release the emotion of the song, non-rocking” by the director.

The final edit of the video featured a fast-paced mixture of the footage shot, switching between the performance footage, footage shot inside the hospital as well as Mark’s abstract non-band footage shot on day one of production. On top of that, further abstract stock footage was added including a monkey screaming, a waterfall and crash test dummies. The footage of extras in wetsuits with lights was not used in the final edit.

“It’s essentially a collage” explained Pellington. “When you make a collage, you take disparate elements and meld them into one statement. There’s no narrative of this”

Filming was wrapped in two days, and the video saw its premiere in May 2005.