Beastie Boys

Beastie Boys
a.k.a. The Beastie Boys

Member Adam Yauch Rocks the Mike About Their New Video Anthology
Although he has worn as many names -- including Hornblower, MCA, and Adam Yoggin -- as he has juggled projects, there is one consistent trait to Adam Yauch's work: innovation. He's perhaps best known as one-third of the radical, outlandish rap coalition called the Beastie Boys, the groundbreakers in free associative wordplay who once lyrically hog-tied, for example, Judaism, Harry Truman, J. D. Salinger, and Mario Andretti while proposing a sequel to Putney Swope. He has also dabbled in album art and video directing, and championed social causes (Free Tibet). The group's newest DVD, The Beastie Boys Video Anthology, put out by the reliably thorough Criterion label, is packed with a mini-universe of special features. Barnes & Noble.com editor Donald Gray recently chatted with Yauch about the true extent of the astonishing Anthology disc.

Barnes & Noble.com: Who put this DVD project together? Was it initiated by the Beastie Boys, the record company, or Criterion?

Adam Yauch: We did it. The idea came up because we were doing the music anthology Sounds of Science, and we thought, let's do a video anthology on DVD at the same time. So we put together a lot of photographs, storyboards, extra footage, and remixes. Then we were at the point where we were looking for somebody with a lot of experience putting DVDs together, and someone I knew recommended Criterion. They really did help us actualize it better than anyone else could have. They have a tremendous knowledge about how all of that stuff works. They really care about the work that they do, and they spend the time to do it right. The other great people who worked on the disc were the guys at Metropolis.

B&N.com: Did Metropolis design those incredible, animated menus?

AY: No, they contributed on more of a technical level, making it all work. My friend Bill MacMullen created the look of the menus. I worked alongside him. Criterion helped us come up with the exact way that everything should interact, and then the two of us designed menus that had all the necessary buttons. Once we got it all together, we delivered the menu designs, tapes, music, video, and stills to Metropolis, and they did the authoring and compression -- essentially creating the actual discs from the stuff we gave them.

B&N.com: How did "Nathaniel Hornblower" come into existence?

AY: Well, he was born in Switzerland in 1928, and.... [laughs] No. I was doing some photography and design work, and at times I'd just leave the credits for those things blank. At some point, I decided that it would be cool to just come up with a weird name to use for myself and carry that through to other projects, like when I started directing videos.

B&N.com: Is that part of the Beasties' continual "do-it-yourself" philosophy?

AY: Yeah, pretty much. We all just enjoy making stuff, working. I went to Quaker school and didn't learn to read or write very well. But I learned how to screw around with visuals. I'm very fond of fooling around and seeing what I can come up with. I started out with still photography in high school and then did a little bit of filmmaking in college -- super 8, video cameras.

B&N.com: I love the Tokyo subway footage on "Intergalactic." The people look so bewildered as you're walking through.

AY: Yeah, we did some fun stuff: shots of people getting on and off the train, done time-lapse style like in Koyaanisqatsi; shots of us goofing around in the subway while people tried not to stare. We shot all that footage the same way we do our stuff here in the states -- "kamikaze" style. We went over with just a cameraman and an assistant, and our producer was running sound. Then, we drove around Tokyo in a van, picking up visuals here and there, with the help of our location scout. We did the robot stuff later on, in Long Island City, on a soundstage.

B&N.com: How do you approach directing when you're in the shots? Do you have a stand-in, or is it more freewheeling than that?

AY: It depends on each project and the specific movement required. "Intergalactic" involved a lip-synch, so most of the camerawork was improvised on the spot. We'd say, "Let's do a take walking down this block." Or we'd go into some store with our camera and hope we didn't get arrested during the shoot.

B&N.com: Do you have a regular cameraman?

AY: Now and then, I operate the camera myself. When I choose a cameraman, I do it to check the technical side. So I'll get someone who knows his stuff really well. I'm not that knowledgeable about exposure numbers.

B&N.com: "Body Movin' " is one of my favorites, being a big Mario Bava fan. When did you get turned on to his work enough to make it part of that video?

AY: I found out about Danger: Diabolik from Evan Bernard, the video director. The idea came up at a time when I was immersed in action-adventure movies from that period, the mid-'60s. I noticed that they kept on doing this thing where they'd shoot whole scenes with stuntmen in long shot, then later insert close-ups of the stars on the sets with fake backdrops or rear projection. I thought it would be an interesting thing to take an old movie, use only the establishing long shots, shoot our own close-ups, then cut it all together. We ended up doing it with Bava's Danger: Diabolik, though we added things from a few different films -- some Matt Helm stuff is in there, too. It was very tightly storyboarded, because we had to match the shots to the original films.

B&N.com: So someone works regularly with you on storyboards?

AY: For most of them, we wing it. There's only two that had enough of a storyline to warrant help: "Intergalactic" and "Body Movin'." Otherwise, I usually just give a crude set of framings myself. Some of those drawings are on the disc, too.

B&N.com: Can you talk about your "Shadrach" video -- it looks like you took live action and animated over it?

AY: It's called "rotoscoping." There are different techniques of doing it now, but we did it the old-fashioned way. We shot on video, and then transferred the edited piece onto film, so that we would have the individual frames to work with. "Shadrach" was shot with multiple video cameras; we used these crazy surveillance cameras that were attached to the ends of sticks. That's why the camera movement is so wild -- it's also exaggerated by the fact that the cameras had wide-angle fish-eye lenses. We just took every fifth frame or so, projected those frames down onto a cel and traced them.

B&N.com: That's the real lo-fi method. Nowadays, they use an electronic drawing pad.

AY: Ours was done totally analog. It came down to each frame being hand-painted by about 20 or 25 artists. That's why every five seconds, the color style jumps. You can tell when it shifts from pastel to acrylic. We'd been discussing doing animation for a video, and Adam Horowitz didn't want to just do a cartoon. That's how the rotoscope idea came into it. A friend of mine, Joe Horn, pulled out this LeRoy Neiman book and said, "Well, why don't we do something like that?"

B&N.com: How was it working with Spike Jonze on "Sabotage"?

AY: Spike was a friend of ours, and he turned out to be a perfect collaborator. "Sabotage" came out of Adam Horowitz's idea to do a photo session of us as undercover cops -- sitting in a car, eating donuts, on a stakeout. Once we put on the undercover cop outfits, we got the idea to just go on and make a video that way, sort of like a mix between Kojak and Mannix.

B&N.com: "Three MCs and One DJ" is a great video built on a simple idea. Could you talk a little about the making of that one?

AY: The idea was to keep it really low budget -- just set up some video cameras and perform. We recorded it all live, with four cameras and an eight-track recorder going. Mixmaster Mike is really doing a lot; he's a big part of why it works so well, if it does. I don't think that one ever played on MTV, since it kind of flopped as a single.

B&N.com: It was good to see the entire "Robot vs. Octopus Monster Saga" in "Intergalactic." Were you a big Ultraman and Johnny Socko fan when you were young? Or is it more Godzilla?

AY: It's probably more Godzilla. That came out of the way the video was storyboarded. We had some fun with that. Once the lip-synch section was in place, there wasn't any room for the battle-of-the-monsters part of the story. We had to cut it from the video. So this "continuation of the saga" is a DVD exclusive.

B&N.com: Who played the funky robot?

AY: That's one of the guys from the Rock Steady Crew.

B&N.com: Is "Alive" your back-in-New York video?

AY: I guess some of the ideas in that one were influenced by the old Banana Splits shows -- with the primary-color costumes and us driving around in the tiny, all-terrain vehicles. It was shot in New York because that's where we happen to be now, that's all.

B&N.com: How did you find the stuff to put on this disc? It seems like a monumental task to organize all of it. Had you been saving things for years?

AY: A lot of the old material was hiding in the Capitol Records vaults. Some of it was very hard to find. For instance, I would have liked to re-telecine "Shake Your Rump," and I think it would have looked much sharper. But we couldn't find the film or the original telecine tapes. There's a lot that we couldn't find at all.

B&N.com: Were the a capella versions of the songs that are included on this DVD previously available?

AY: Sometimes -- like on the back of a 12-inch single. But, most of them, no.

B&N.com: Who are some of the people who did remixes especially for the disc?

AY: The Prunes did one for "Pass the Mic." Basically, anything that you see from Paul's Boutique was newly done for the DVD: "Shake Your Rump," "Hey, Ladies," "Shadrach," "Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun."

B&N.com: There's all sorts of links to nonprofit web sites on the disc, too.

AY: In a way, that's one of the more important things about the project. Lately, I've been feeling kind of silly talking about all the other elements of the disc. I'm really psyched that we could do something to benefit other people. There's a link for USTC (U.S. Tibet Committee) and one for Students for a Free Tibet. They're all there to prompt people who are interested to get more involved.

December 12, 2000