Breakout

About

The music video for ‘Breakout’ was centred around ‘Me, Myself & Irene’, a slapstick comedy movie starring Jim Carrey and Renee Zellweger which was set for release in the summer of 2000. The band had agreed to include the song in the movie soundtrack and were asked to create a music video which incorporated characters from the film. “We were all Jim Carrey fans so we thought why not”, explained Grohl.

The premise of the movie involved Carrey’s character having a split personality and this concept was mirrored in the music video, directed by Emmett and Brendan Malloy, known in the industry as The Malloys. In the video Dave would play the character who is shown initially to be a shy, quiet man who is easily pushed over before eventually the other side of his personality comes to the forefront.

Principal photography took place at Mission Drive-In in Montclair, CA on April 21^st, 2000. As the entire video was to be set at night, the characters in the video going to a movie drive-in to see ‘Me, Myself & Irene’, shooting did not begin until approximately 8pm. The first scenes to be shot were of Dave’s character arriving at the drive-in with his date for the night, played by actress from the movie Traylor Howard. After the two met Traylor joked that she had never heard of the band before being asked to take part in the shoot and had been erroneously calling them “Foo Foo Fighters”. Taylor, Chris and Nate would sneak into the movie in the trunk of their car, joined by Taylors then real-life girlfriend Mimi Jakobson.

Next up around 12:30am was a short performance scene on a stage to mimic a real concert, many extras portraying fans in the crowd, some of them asked to stage dive.

Shooting continued through the night with scenes of Dave and Traylor inside the car as well as scenes featuring another actor from the movie, Tony Cox, who would swoop in and take Dave’s place with Traylor. This was to lead to the ‘other’ side of Dave coming out, with scenes of his transition from nerd to confident screaming vocals on top of the car with the clock nearing 5am before production finally ended for the day.

Everyone returned at 6pm the next evening to record the remaining scenes for the video away from the Drive-In itself. Up first was what would be the scene of the video featuring Dave and Traylor driving to the movie theatre. Taking on a cameo role in this scene was Dave’s mother, playing an irate driver who flips the bird at Dave’s character for driving at 15mph, something she later admitted she had never done before.

A nearby neighbourhood was used to film the very first shots for the video, Dave driving to Traylor’s house to pick her up for their date. These scenes involved a dog called Marty, trained by Victoria Vopni. The dog was trained to run and grab/hump Dave’s leg forcing him to comically push the dog off him, escalating to slapping the dog which naturally utilised a prop rather than the real dog.

The final scenes to be shot were back at the Drive-In, inside the café and entertainment building with shooting deemed complete at just after 6am. Editing took place in Culver City, California on April 25^th with the video getting its world premiere after an MTV Making The Video episode in June 2000.

This was the first music video to feature Chris Shiflett, the guitarist having joined the band a couple of months after shooting of the ‘Learn To Fly’ video.