Lever Guys From Whoops I Did It Again
As far every bit iconic music-video moments go, it's hard to overlook this one: An astronaut on Mars reaches down to the planet'due south sandy surface and uncovers a stone tile emblazoned with Britney Spears's face. The ground shakes, and the pop star descends from a platform in a flashy ruddy catsuit equally the track'due south stabbing synths prepare in. So, the music cuts out for a brief moment, as Spears delivers the opening line with a sarcastic snap: "I think I did it again."
This week, "Oops!… I Did It Over again" turns 20 years old — the Mars-set visual premiered on MTV on April 10, 2000. Information technology ushered in Spears'southward hotly anticipated second anthology era; her debut, …Baby One More Time (the girl loves an ellipsis), had taken the pop globe by tempest the yr prior, and Brit wasted no time crafting its follow-up. She had reunited with "Baby" producer Max Martin for another banging single, and this fourth dimension, the loneliness wasn't killing her. On "Oops," she is the ane toying with boys' hearts.
In honor of the video's 20th anniversary, MTV News spoke to its director, Nigel Dick, about how it came together and what its legacy is now. "Oops" marked the fourth video Dick helmed for Spears, following "...Baby One More than Time," "(Yous Drive Me) Crazy," and "Sometimes." But this was their most aggressive undertaking yet: an intergalactic ride with special furnishings and early-aughts quirks that established Spears every bit a pop icon-in-the-making.
MAKING MARS
"Oops!… I Did It Once again" became a stepping stone bridging the schoolgirl-gone-wild look from 1999'south "…Baby One More than Time" to the sweaty, python-wielding visage of 2001's "I'm A Slave four U." Here was Spears hinting at the direction she was headed past announcing that she's "not that innocent," though Dick doesn't call back it existence strategized as such.
"Very ofttimes, the characterization rings you up and says, 'Nosotros want to project this artist into a unlike age group at present.' To my retention, there was no discussion like that at all," Dick told MTV News. "It was quite merely, 'Britney's got a new single. Can y'all get on the phone with her? She's got a couple ideas.'"
The two had a brief chat, during which Spears laid out her vision: "'I want to be in a red suit, I desire to be on Mars, I want there to be a adept-looking spaceman, and I do not desire a rocket,'" Dick recalls her saying. "And the residuum was left upwards to me."
The video was shot over three days in March 2000, in Universal City, California. A crew from MTV's Making the Video was there to capture backside-the-scenes footage, and in a pre-shoot interview, Spears said, "The vocal is basically about a girl. All these guys fall in love with her, and she just tin't help it. When I meet a guy that I'chiliad seriously attracted to, I get butterflies in my tum, I get a total brain fart, and I don't know what to say."
One time the cameras started rolling, though, Spears was the opposite of the shy, bumbling girl she claimed to exist in existent life. As Dick told her in Making the Video, "This is Mars. You own Mars, you are the Queen of Mars. This is your city and these are your subjects. You're here to dazzle them." To practice that, she needed the perfect expect.
THE CATSUIT Crisis
Spears's skintight, red-hot catsuit was a point of contention in the 24 hours leading up to the video shoot — considering, as Dick explained, there was another, supposedly superior costume. "Nosotros had picked a gorgeous catsuit, which I loved," he said. "It was much softer material. It wasn't shiny. It was more feminine. And of grade, the problem now is that it's been supplanted past this rubber affair, or whatever the material was, which I felt was not very flattering."
Spears decided the day before the shoot that she wanted a different suit, and so she chosen on designer Michael Bush-league, who had famously created costumes for Michael Jackson throughout the '80s and '90s. Bush actually appears in Making the Video; he has a short conversation with Spears nearly the look she wants, and so promises he's going to pull an "all-nighter" to complete it.
That wasn't the just sartorial-axial dispute on fix. Spears's other notable outfit from the video is the white cropped turtleneck and asymmetrical skirt she wears while laying on a glowing, spinning circumvolve. Turns out, that all-white 'fit was another last-minute decision — Dick says that Spears initially wore a much more revealing ii-piece that he describes as a "cheap Vegas stripper outfit." And while it probably wouldn't exist besides risqué by 2020 standards, Dick notes that the "Oops!" video was filmed not long after Spears'south then-scandalous Rolling Stone photoshoot, which accompanied a 1999 cover story that invited readers into the underage star'southward "heart, mind, and bedroom" (the article opened with cringey descriptions of her "honeyed thigh" and "ample chest").
Taking that into consideration, Dick and Spears'southward team convinced her to reconsider. "We went back to Britney's trailer," Dick said, "and looked for something else, and we came up with what y'all're seeing in the video now."
THE MEN OF MARS
"Oops!" is, at heart, a cosmic crush story, and then of course there needed to be some dudes pining for the Queen of Mars'south centre. The video featured a gaggle of buff, shirtless guys operating mysterious levers in the background of Brit's lair — in one cute scene from Making the Video, the pop star giggles, "I don't know their names but they're hotties! I don't mind looking at them!"
The chief object of Spears's affection, though, was the astronaut played by Eli Swanson, an Abercrombie & Fitch-type model who was chosen by Dick and his team from a lineup of hopefuls. But he'south not fifty-fifty the existent star of the show, in the director's opinion.
"I like the guy in the control booth. I love the fact that he's real. He'southward not a super-hunky, spaceman type," Dick said of the Rivers Cuomo wait-alike who speaks to Swanson'southward astronaut through a headset. "Information technology's like, it's just another solar day on the chore at NASA. Yesterday, he was looking at the Backstreet Boys on Saturn, and today, he'due south got Britney on Mars. These are things you come up upward with and you're always frightened that the characterization is going to go, 'Meet that guy grooving at the desk-bound? Have him out.' But it all stayed in."
BRITNEY'South JACK-ROSE MOMENT
Swanson got his moment to smooth during the song's delightfully dated bridge: a quirky bit of dialogue in which Spears's boy toy gives her the "heart of the ocean" necklace from Titanic. "But I idea the former lady dropped it into the body of water in the end," Spears sweetly says. He answers, "Well, babe, I went downwards and got it for you lot." Her response to this impossibly acquired gift of the most symbolically romantic treasure of the late '90s? "Aw, you lot shouldn't have."
"I'd obviously heard the song earlier I spoke to Britney about what the video was going to be like," Dick remembers. "I said to her, 'Well, hang on, at that place'due south a bit in the middle nigh the Titanic? What are we going to exercise about that? Are we supposed to suddenly cut back to 1912?' And she said, 'Oh, you'll think of something.'
"So you lot throw together this little sequence and nobody e'er questioned it," he continued of Spears and Swanson's scene. "Everybody just said, 'Yeah. That'll work.' For me, I had no idea why that sequence was in the song at all, just it's lighthearted and doesn't take itself as well seriously."
OOPS!…
One of the biggest stories from the "Oops!" video, as Spears super-fans surely think, is the injury she sustained while shooting scenes in the all-white outfit. As legend goes, a piece of the photographic camera hovered above Spears fell on her head — though in that location are varying degrees of the seriousness of the injury, which Dick is happy to set directly.
"Firstly, nothing similar that should ever happen on set," he said. "I was extremely upset that in a scene similar that, where the gear is over Britney's head, that it was not properly secured. I don't believe I've always worked with that camera banana e'er once again.
"The second thing is, no, the camera did not fall on Britney," he continued. "If it had, that would take been the finish of my career. A part of the camera which fits on the very forepart, the matte box, was what fell on her because information technology was not properly secured. And it's still quite heavy; not to minimize the issue of information technology. It has threaded screws in the summit left and top right corners. I believe 1 of those hit her in the head."
Dick said that the medic on fix advised Spears to rest in her trailer for a couple hours, to make certain she didn't have a concussion. The crew powered downwards, but, "being a trooper," Dick said, "Britney came back and got on with the work."
STUNT-NEY
Wardrobe disagreements and pocket-size injury aside, Dick remembers the "Oops!" video as a fun three days, even when information technology came time for Spears to face her fears and hop into a harness for the spinning sequence. "That was a bit of a tense moment," Dick conceded. "You need time to practice with that stuff when yous're wearing the magic outfit and you lot've got a harness on under your red Mars arrange and whatnot."
Throughout it all, though, Dick describes Spears as a consummate professional and a passionate dancer who didn't slack when it came to executing choreographer Tina Landon's intense routine.
"She apposite for similar, v days. And it wasn't, 'Oh, we'll show upwardly at two in the afternoon, have a couple of lattes, and and so we'll do a scrap of dancing,'" Dick said. "They were there at x in the morning, and I would go and see a run-through at five at night. They looked like hell because they'd been sweating all twenty-four hour period, their hair is ratty, their T-shirts have stained. I mean, it's fucking difficult work. It's Olympic-level athletics at that stage."
Not merely that, only Spears did information technology all in that tight latex suit — and she apparently nevertheless remembers how tricky it was. In an Instagram post commemorating the 20th anniversary of the song's release final month, Spears shared a backside-the-scenes photo from the "Oops!" video on Instagram and wrote, "I remember that ruby conform was so freaking hot… but the trip the light fantastic was fun. And it made the shoot fly past!"
"OOPS!" LIVES ON
A few years dorsum, an uncut version of Spears's close-ups from the "Oops!" video started making the rounds on YouTube. One upload of the vid boasts over 23 million views, and information technology shows Spears performing the entirety of the song from but the waist upward. It may too be in the dictionary under "charisma."
"The thing yous have to remember is, yous tin't fake that," Dick said. "All the videos I did for her, I felt captured something magic about her. I think the beauty, in inverted commas, of Britney was that she truly was the girl next door. She evidently had this swell passion for dancing and she seemed so happy all the time, which is why I remember people loved her so much.
"People's perception of a video being charismatic, wonderful, whatever, comes later on," he connected. "Many times I've been asked on set, 'Are we making an award-winning, iconic video hither?' And my response is ever, 'I haven't got a fucking clue.' You do the best work you tin can on the twenty-four hours, and people's perception of it then develops, and all y'all can practise is sit back and watch."
"Oops!… I Did It Again" went on to become a TRL staple and earn four VMA nominations, while the vocal itself secured a coveted Grammy nod. Twenty years later, it's still a charisma-fueled, fan-favorite video that ushered Spears into the new millennium while capsulizing her growth as an artist and as a woman. That is just and so typically Brit.
Source: https://www.mtv.com/news/3162495/britney-spears-oops-i-did-it-again-video-turns-20-nigel-dick-interview/
0 Response to "Lever Guys From Whoops I Did It Again"
Postar um comentário