Dawn Shadforth::'Boards

It’s very important when female directors get notoriety for their work, even more so when it is well earned.
For Dawn Shadforth, she earned her credibility a long, long time ago.
Working with the likes of Bjork, Peaches, Iggy Pop & Kylie Minogue, she has transformed a generation a video goers almost effortlessly. Well…maybe not effortlessly, but when viewing her work, she possesses the capability of executing a simple idea into a visual stunner.

‘Boards latest issue has an interview with the quirky director.
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RSA's Dawn Shadforth moves from electronic music to the macabre

It's the rare music video director who can say they've inspired a book, but Little Minx/Black Dog/RSA's Dawn Shadforth belongs to that exclusive club. Shadforth's future-obsessed 1999 promo for Kylie Minogue's "Can't Get You Out My Head" was so suggestive and idea-rich that it provided the source material for Words & Music, a sprawling 2004 tome on music and hyperconsumption by British journalist Paul Morley.

Shadforth hasn't read the book yet, but as someone who never consciously set out to become a director, the mere notion of it must be a headspinner. A student at Sheffield Hallam University in the early '90s, she studied sculpture and rubbed elbows with future directorial stars like Chris Cunningham and Ne-O before deciding she didn't want to make a career of fine art. Instead, she took to the camera, cutting her teeth on a series of early documentaries for the electronic music label Warp as well as a handful of promos for members of Sheffield's fertile underground. The rest, as they say, is history. In the decade since, she's helmed videos for the likes of Kylie, Björk, Oasis and The Streets, and parlayed that success into a healthy commercial reel. With work for Renault, Toyota, Halifax and Nike Women heading up the list, Shadforth's profile is stronger than ever. We caught up with the refreshed director mere days after her return from a trip to India and picked her brain on the current state of music video, the industry's lack of female directors and why horror is an ideal feature film training ground.

I stumbled into music videos. It just seemed like a logical place for me to be working, coming from a fine arts background and being around a lot of music at that time. Sheffield had a really vibrant underground music scene, and still does, with people like the Arctic Monkeys coming out of there now. It was a very exciting and liberating place to be because it had a bit of a renegade attitude, not being in London, being on the periphery. And there's an element of electronica that is about abstraction, so it was a very natural place to go.

When I first moved to London I was with a very small production company, and then I made a video for a band called All Seeing I. It was one of those fantastic moments of synchronicity - they were friends of mine, so they insisted I make the video, and it was a Top 10 hit, so that gave me the springboard to go around and meet more established companies. I was friends with Chris [Cunningham] and he was at RSA/Black Dog, so it seemed like a logical place to be.

[After] the All Seeing I video, I very quickly went from a budget of £12,000 to a large American commission, which was, again, fantastic and scary. That was my first big budget job. If I knew now what I didn't know then, I would have been even more scared. At the time, I didn't realize how ambitious the idea that I'd pitched was, but that's one of the fantastic advantages of being young and naïve.

I know there was a time when there was sort of a palpable sense [of excitement] about music videos. I don't feel that myself very often any more, and that's obviously a reflection of where the music industry is... Now, there are [promos] that have a great idea and cost nothing, like that genius OK Go video where they're on the treadmills, but you couldn't say the same about the work of people like Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze and Jonathan Glazer. They're amazing artists who are also capable of making great work for less money, but that was a golden age, and I don't know whether there will be another one.

I do think about if and how a video might be broadcast now. I think it probably has affected the decisions of which videos I've decided to make recently. There are places like YouTube, but it just looks so shit. Hopefully with high quality downloads, that will [change]. You toil to create something that looks amazing or that has an aesthetic. Things like The Streets and Plan B were much more to do with working on a level that was about ideas.

I've got a couple of horror ideas in development, one that's further along the line than the other. Horror's a good place to start as a first-time feature film director; there's often a chance to get a degree of subtext and talk about issues that you wouldn't normally be able to in a regular commercial form.

There is a shortage of female directors. You can't argue with the numbers. I definitely feel it more in commercials than in music videos. In music video, everyone sort of knows each other, and out of a lot of my contemporaries there's quite a few heavy-hitters; Sophie Muller is a really good friend of mine, and there's Floria Sigismondi and Diane Martel. There's more of a balance with the people who are making the decisions about who's being commissioned - maybe that's got something to do with it.

I think I'm a bit of a tomboy, but at the same time I like shoes and frocks. I like the fact that [people] see things like electronic music, horror films and athletics in my background because a lot of times I do get associated with glamor and fashion and sexy imagery. That's great, but there's also a geek [in me] as well, so I suppose that all reflects the different sides of my personality.

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