In a new interesting interview director Melina Matsoukas talks working with Ludacris, Rihanna, Solange and Beyonce.
Point blank, we dig Melina Matsoukas. She’s the homegirl, the ace-boon-coon if you will. Here at Honey, we’re pretty particular about who we let in. We’ll bust out the Vaseline if chicks start talking reckless. The 29-year old has a little more than 40 videos under her belt in only four years. She’s worked with Ludacris, Solange, Alicia Keys and Beyoncé. The New York native stays in high demand because of her creativity, her chameleon-like approach to every video she directs and her ability to bring a song to life.
Melina sat down with Honey for some girl talk and chatted about how she maneuvered her way through the business, the advice she’d give to females wanting to enter her field and how she helped Bey quiet all the haters that were telling her to lay down and get preggers.
Round these parts, Melina is our girl. It’s just what it is.
Honey Magazine: Why do you only go by Melina? Why don’t you go by your last name as well?
Melina Matsoukas: I’m actually going by both now. It’s one of those things that have to be translated onto whatever the network that my stuff is being played on. But it definitely started out that way, where I liked the one name Melina thing when I was doing videos, and then Melina Matsoukas when I was doing film and commercials. Then I kind of let that go, maybe in the past eight months. But I guess people are so used to seeing Melina that even when I write it in the credits Melina Matsoukas, it still just becomes Melina when I see it on T.V.Okay, so why did you decide to get involved with film?
Well, I went to NYU and I was already big into photography from high school. I was studying math when I started. I was always kind of a good student — good at everything, but never really passionate about anything — and then I started meeting some of the film students and learning about the film program at NYU, which is a really a great program. My parents are both really political and vocal and progressive kind of people. I grew up in a very progressive kind of way where I wanted to say something, make change, affect people and change the world, so when I got to NYU and began meeting all the film students and learning about the film program, I felt it was the greatest way to speak out and make change. So, I took a film course to make sure I liked it, and I loved it. And then I enrolled in the film program and that’s how it started.When did you decide you wanted to do music videos?
I obviously grew up in music because I’m from New York and music was always huge. Film and music together were both my passion and it just seemed like an ideal way. Music videos in so many ways can be so creative and experimental and I think more so than in any other filmmaking genre. With videos, you can kind of do whatever you want, so that’s what kind of drew me to that. I always kind of wanted to start out in music videos, and I still do. I always want to do music videos regardless of where my career takes me. It’s definitely my passion.I read somewhere that Ludacris’ “Money Maker” was your breakthrough video. How did you feel when you finally got to work with Ludacris at the time?
He was so sweet. I had done some other smaller videos and met him. That opportunity came up and it was so last minute and crazy and such a huge opportunity for me at the time and I was so crazy and super nervous. It was ridiculous. We were all in Miami at the time.You were nervous?
Yeah! I had never done something with that much money and effort and all that stuff and everything is riding on me. Everyone was looking at me like ‘You don’t have the experience to be doing this.’ It was hard and a lot of pressure and even today I get nervous when I have to shoot something sometimes. I work better when I’m nervous about something, so I kind of enjoy that. I don’t enjoy the feeling, but I like to be nervous. When I’m too confident about something, I feel like it’s not going to lead to any goodness (laughs). Nothing good is going to come out of me being too cocky. Yeah, so I was down there. I was a nervous wreck, and he was just really sweet. He was really great, and he helped me through it without even knowing he was helping me through it by being collaborative. He takes direction really well. He’s really easy to work with.Speaking of working with people, you’ve worked with Rihanna, Solo. You’ve done a whole bunch of videos with Beyonce. What’s it like working with those three? Do you brace yourselves for attitudes or is that not even the case?
Not with them. Definitely, there have been some other people with attitudes that we won’t name. But with those three, especially now that I’ve worked with them and I’m good friends with Solange and Beyonce and we’ve done so much stuff together, it’s almost like we’re family. It’s like working with your family, and we have fun. It’s collaborative. We bounce ideas off of each other and it’s no attitude at all. Even with Rihanna, she’s definitely really smart with her ideas and creative and she gets it. I think that’s the thing with all of those three. I have very similar taste, so we’re able to collaborate on ideas. And it’s not like a competition or we’re battling each other, and that makes it fun.How do you deal with people who do bring attitudes?
I don’t really do that. I don’t feed into it. If that’s the approach they’re going to take then I feel like I got bamboozled into the situation. I’ll just do my job, be as straight forward as possible and get out of it. Like I’ll do it, make it work, hopefully it’ll come out great and not work with them again. I don’t really need to or want to work with anyone that doesn’t want to work with me.Do you ever remember being intimidated by entering into such a male-dominated arena?
Definitely. The whole crew is usually male. My producers are sometimes women, but I tend to work with a lot of men. And I’m a young woman, and I’m a woman of color, so if they’re not sexist, they might be racist, or ageist. My approach was to really hoan my craft and really know what the hell I was talking about, and as long as I can speak from a educated place than no one could question me. That’s why I educated myself. I went to NYU and got my masters at AFI [American Film Institute]. I’m not afraid to ask questions, and I obviously don’t feel like I’ll ever stop learning, because I think when you do, that’s when you’re work becomes stagnant. Yeah, it was intimidating, but the best weapon I could give myself was to educate myself about what I’m doing.How was the video shoot with Alicia Keys and Beyoncé in Brazil?
That was amazing and really hard, not because of them at all. Just being in Brazil and I was kind of expecting like a third-world place so we could go down there and steal everything, and shooting would be easy. But it was very by the book, we had to get permits and the crew had union’s rules and all that technical stuff that makes shooting not really fun, and it was like 87 million degrees and we were outside (laughs). But it was such an amazing experience to be there with the people and we were in the favelas and we were under the stars, so we really got a lot of love and support from the people. But there was also a lot of corruption too. We had to hire a certain amount of cops, too. Somebody that was like a liaison between security with their people and our people started getting cocky and rude to the cop and there was almost this crazy shoot out fight. It all happened at the end scene when I’m shooting this big carnival parade. We’re just starting to shoot it, and the [fight] is all happening behind me. I don’t even know this is happening, and then I get people starting to come up to me saying “This is the last take. We’ve got to get them out of here. This is starting to get scary.” Then it got a little sketchy, so the cops pretty much quit. [They] left with all the barricades that were pretty much holding all the people back, and the people kind of like bum rushed our set. It was kind of an ordeal. I felt like it was that scene from City of God where I thought someone was about to die.Are you doing any exciting projects right now?
We just shot Rihanna’s “Rockstar 101” video like a week or two ago. It was really cool. I’m really happy with it, although I haven’t really heard back from her because she’s on tour. I hope she loves it as much as me.Is Slash going to be in the video?
I can’t tell these things. But there’s a huge surprise in the video in regards to Slash. I think you’ll like that.For Beyoncé’s “Why Don’t You Love Me” video, whose idea was it to dub Beyoncé “B. B. Homemaker”?
(Laughs) As the project developed and progressed, new ideas started to come up. She came up with the name. As I was editing, she was like ‘Let’s do a “Leave It To Beaver” type intro’ and I edited that together. I started looking at all these shows and they all have those voiceovers. I loved in “Leave It To Beaver” [that] they would announce the actress’ names and then at the end they would say ‘The Beaver.’ Then I said, ‘Oh, you should be The Beaver’ and Beyoncé was like ‘No, Melina. I can’t be The Beaver’ (laughs). Then I was like let’s come up with like a cool name, and just off the top of her head she was like “I don’t know, B.B. Homemaker.”How long did it take to shoot?
We shot for one day and prepped for like two or three weeks. It was just really chill. When we came back from Brazil shooting the other project, she said she was thinking about doing this video for a song she had and it was number one on the dance charts at some point. She said her and Solange wrote it. So it was nice because it all just came together. She really loved the whole Bette Paige idea. That’s where it kind of started. Then Bettie Page turned into Susie Homemaker slash frustrated housewife and we just decided to throw all that together.Was it her idea to dust off the 8.9 million Grammys?
(Laughs) That was her idea. Then I was like ‘Well, let’s do the life of Bettie Paige, like how she would live her life back then.’ Then it became Beyoncé-slash-Bettie goes hood kind of (laughs). She also kind of wanted to play off of everyone telling her to sit down and go have babies and be a housewife. You know, just having fun with it. Then she was like ‘Hmm, now might be a good moment where I can dust off some Grammys.’ I was like ‘I love it!’ so that’s when she dusts off her Grammys.Were those all her Grammys?
Actually, they were hers, Destiny’s Child’s, and Jay’s. Yeah, it was a lot of Grammys. Everyone on set was taking picture of the Grammys.Where was the video shot?
It was shot in L.A. on Mount Olympus. Actually, we found this house that was owned by a 95-year-old man. And I believe he was Dorothy Dandridge’s either agent or PR person. He’s a white man, but he really had all this stuff in his house that had to do with the Blues. He was really on the forefront. He had this wall of fame and he was just really interesting. The cars that were in the video were his. It kind of all magically came together.What advice would you give to females wanting your success?
I think anyone, woman or male, wanting success you have to work hard, put your ego aside, you have to educate yourself and you have to not give up. But, and I think I said this before in another Honey interview, I think especially with film, you really have to humble yourself to start. You might do things you don’t want to do, or feel like your too overqualified to do, but that’s how you learn and get far. So when you start to get good at something people notice and you start to move forward, but you can’t give up. Hopefully you’ll meet the right people and you show them the right work you’ve accumulated and that’s how you get there.Source
