Special Thanks to Robin Jedlicka for this transcript!
Gus Van Sant:
"The idea had a lot of things going on in it. There was a subway that we had to find and one of the subway cars was supposed to be filled with water. There was a revolving white room that the guys had dreamt up and a lot of weird people to walk by in the subway with punk rockers, twins and businessmen riding in the subway cars. Hanson definitely was into the special effects in a big way and they wanted to play with the audiences mind a little bit with this video. So I called my producer, Danny Wolf, and we forged ahead to try and think up ways that we could accomplish all these idaes in one video. Danny called the cinematographer, Harris Sevides, who like the idea of doing a video for Hanson and jumped on board the "Weird" project.
Harris is famous as being one of the only cinematographers that Madonna likes to work with on her videos because Harris is so talented that he makes everyone look really good. Between Harris, Danny, and I we had worked on videos for David Bowie, Elton John, Madonna, Mariah Carey, REM, Michael Jackson, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. But Hanson was as challenging if not more than any of the others. We made a story board that the guys liked and began to build the white room which ended up to be a giant round Victorian room with a floor of lights that rolled on its side and was twenty five feet tall.
This was built by Tom Foden, who had designed and built the spaceship for Michael Jackson's "Scream" video. The painting on the wall of the white room was "The Judgement of Solomon" by an eighteenth century Italian painter named Tiepolo and was smooth so that Hanson could slide across it as the room revolved.
The entire spinning room was very weird to be inside of and not that easy to walk around in when it was spinning although Ike, Tay, and Zac pretty much mastered it right away and didn't have and accidents. There was one close call however when Tay forgot to jump down off of a ledge of a doorsill and when he finally did the room had revolved enough that he found himself perched atop what seemed like a giant skateboard ramp and had to jump down in the shot which looked very dangerous.
Another very tricky part of the video was having Hanson swim underwater and lip sync to the song at the same time. The guys had to wear weights so that they wouldn't float out of the shot. And they had to hold their breath for a whole verse while they swam toward the camera. Ike, Tay, and Zac pulled it off without any gulps of water. After it began to air around the world, Mercury Records told us that "Weird" had become a number one play request on MTV- right up there with Puff Daddy and Madonna which made me happy, and Hanson happy too."
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