With ‘Phantom Thread’ and ‘Before Sunrise’ Influences, the ‘Lotus Eater’ Music Video Allowed for Creative Freedom

Director Isaac Ravishankara and cinematographer Christian Sprenger tell IndieWire about getting to artistically stretch for Finneas' "Lotus Eater" music video.

As CG and AI video have become cheaper and more ubiquitous — and as the incentives of YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok algorithms all shape platform-specific formats — great music videos can sometimes feel like art in need of a home. Even as more and more of our media becomes visual, the temptation is high to move around filtered still images, pass camera effects back and forth through keyholes like a pet with the zoomies, employ bite-sized visual effects, and call it a day. 

But there’s room for so much more, and so much more creative freedom, inside the form. Director Isaac Ravishankara has now collaborated on three music videos with Finneas, all with the goal of feeling like “that best three-minute scene in a movie that you love,” Ravishankara told IndieWire. “You are able to take the vehicle of the form and make a scene from something bigger, a window into something bigger.”  

On the latest window that the director and the musician have created together, “Lotus Eater,” Ravishankara was also able to tempt Emmy-winning cinematographer Christian Sprenger to return to the world of music videos and create a throwback, extremely cinematic look for that best-scene-in-a-movie they were building. 

“We were really trying to lean into this very real, almost anti-pop music video feeling,” Sprenger told IndieWire. That meant shooting on 35mm and utilizing a lot of lenses, lights, and techniques that would’ve been as present on a set 40 years ago as today. “It references an older era. We’re not using a bunch of soft LED lighting, and we’re not exposing things digitally,” Sprenger said. 

The choices were all made to accentuate a timeless vibe, a party at an indeterminate rich person’s house in some liminal place between night and morning, inebriated and sober, loneliness and love. “There’s just this tiny little glimmer of a party happening, but you’re catching the tail end of it. So that’s where the darkness and heavy contrast and grittiness is coming from,” Sprenger said. “We’re leaning [into] orange firelight and the neon background and, outside, this kind of pre-dawn darkness and having this moment.” 

It’s an idea that arose out of Ravishankara and Finneas listening to the music on the latter’s album, “For Crying Out Loud,” as opposed to the normal process of a director pitching a concept to an artist, which then gets paired with a specific track. 

“When Billie [Eilish] does music videos these days, she’s visualizing it as [Finneas] makes a song and then she’s directing her own music videos. But he was saying that that’s not really his world or his interest. He wants someone else to bring their ideas to it,” Ravishankara said. “So the two initial ideas we had were something karaoke-esque in the lyrics and some sort of magical realism-type floating, him getting pulled around, which largely came from the melody where he has these sustained notes.” 

Both work pretty seamlessly within the trace-like logic of the “Lotus Eater” video, but are things that excited Sprenger precisely because they’re the kind of interesting, organic choices that would get noted to death if more producers were peering over their shoulders.

“I think [the music video process] is close to what we all aspire to, like classic auteur-cinema production.  Which is so rare and such a fleeting thing and so hard to find. But [in music videos] there really are only a few people who are creatively in charge of the project. And so long as the artist is on board with that, then it’s an idyllic creative process,” Sprenger said. “You really do have room to explore and experiment and take really big risks.” 

The risks may not even seem like risks to the casual viewer, either. Sprenger and Ravishankara both praised Finneas’ willingness to take on a kind of disheveled, awake-all-night look for the video, or even being willing to exist in a world that is super dark and vibey. “He really puts so much trust in me and the people that I bring into the fold to make something good, and then he shows up at various points in the process fully committed and then on set is just an amazing performer,” Ravishankara said. “I just really believe in him as an actor.” 

Part of the fun of the “Lotus Eater” video — and music videos in general — is the ability for collaborators to stuff it full of the things they love and believe in. Given the kind of out-of-time throwback setting, Ravishankara and Sprenger lovingly borrowed from sources as diverse as “Before Sunset” and “Phantom Thread” for the look and feel of the world and the connection built, in under three minutes, between Finneas and another partygoer. 

“Ty, our production designer, even brought the same color of balloons as that scene [from ‘Phantom Thread’] because I sent them that as a reference of, ‘Oh, this feels like it has a great after-the-party feel. You know, obviously much grander in that ballroom, but it still has that feeling of just two people in a world,” Ravishankara said. “The fun part about this video specifically was taking this idea of where the scene started, then ultimately, hopefully, landing the audience at this really nice and charming emotional ending.” 

The fact that “Lotus Eater” can do so in such a condensed time frame is equally a credit to the visual conceit, the music behind it, and the collaborative process. “When I was first coming up in my career, I always saw music videos as a place that everyone is starting, and then everyone is desperately trying to get out of to make money and work on bigger things or with big stars or whatever,” Sprenger said. “Now, a little bit later in my career, I look at music videos as — it’s not a place where you are making a ton of income, but you’re getting to creatively stretch out in ways you aren’t able to in a lot of other formats.”