September 21, 2005

Simple Plan Keep It Bleak For 'Crazy' Video

By James Montgomery (MTV.com)

You would think getting clocked in the head by a bottle would be all the stark reality Simple Plan frontman Pierre Bouvier could handle for a while.

But that's not the case. Less than one week after he took a bottle to the face while performing at the Ovation Music Festival in Stratford, Ontario, comes news that Bouvier and the rest of Simple Plan have shot a bleak, black-and-white video for the song "Crazy."

Filmed in Los Angeles, the "Crazy" clip reunites Simple Plan with director Marc Klasfeld, who helmed their ultra-serious "Untitled" video, and continues in the same somber vein. Scenes of real-life suffering -- a young man dying of AIDS, an anorexic girl, a soldier with missing limbs -- are all shot in austere monochrome, making, as Klasfeld writes in the treatment, "the gritty imagery seem beautiful ... like a coffee-table book brought to life."

The director hit the streets of L.A. to find subjects for the video, refusing to cast any actors and striving for "real faces ... no cookie-cutter Hollywood types." Those scenes will be intercut with a low-key performance by the bandmembers, who are all dressed in black and shot in a minimally lit room.

But it's not all sadness and suffering. Klasfeld hopes to infuse a sense of hope in the video by slowly breaking up the monochrome monotony. As the song reaches its crescendo, hints of color begin to appear on characters and in the band, subtly brightening up each frame. And by the time the song ends, the entire world has been changed to a full-color, Technicolor wonderland.

"It's a stark contrast from where we came from ... but one that people will remember," Klasfeld writes. "We'll leave the viewers with a message of hope."

And a message of hope was what the guys in Simple Plan were hoping to convey with the "Crazy" video. No matter how bad things get in people's lives, they said, things will always get better.

"The song is about all the things that are screwed up in the world, all the things that are messed up with people's lives." Bouvier said back in July. "[Drummer] Chuck [Comeau] comes up with all the treatments for the videos, and he's got some ideas kicking around. But we definitely want it to reflect all those bad things, but also the idea that things can get better, and they will."