Saoirse Ronan Goes Feral in Talking Heads’ ‘Psycho Killer’ Video: Director Mike Mills Says ‘I Don’t Know How She Didn’t Just Shrivel Up at the End’

The director of Talking Heads' 'Psycho Killer' video, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Mike Mills, talks about getting Saoirse Ronan's 'feral' performance.

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On the 50th anniversary of ‘ first live gig, a music video for “Psycho Killer” has finally been released … and if you know that Saoirse Ronan is starring, and that the prestige helmer is Oscar-nominated director Mike Mills (“C’mon C’mon”), you can probably guess that neither psychosis nor killing will be the actual theme of the visualization. But Ronan is still a “real live wire,” that much is certain, in a video that focuses on a psyche caught up in everyday frustrations and anxieties.

It was “an athletic performance,” Mills tells Variety of Ronan’s work on the two-day shoot earlier this year — clarifying: “an emotionally athletic performance. Saoirse could be totally feral and go so high, and then be so subtle and go there in a very real way with all those emotions. I still don’t quite get how she didn’t just shrivel up at the end.” And, Mills adds, “She reminds me of Buster Keaton… just an amazing silent film actress.”

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The video covers 13 days in the very repetitive life of a woman waking up and going to an unspecified job, where she experiences a range of emotions from indifference to sorrow to rage to, finally, a kind of peace — all of these moods going more or less unregistered by the other humans she interacts with.

“It was a two-day shoot, and it was very minimal financing,” Mills says. “It’s 13 days and each day gets a very strong emotional prompt that she followed through all those different iterations… Half the time was spent like, ‘OK, go change your clothes, come back, be incredibly angry and throw the chair. OK, go change your clothes, come back, cry.’ It really did feel athletic. She had guidelines, but it was a great ride because you just never knew what the fuck she was gonna do next. You’re only seeing a second or two seconds of each little scene, but there’s three minutes in there that we shot (of each bit). It was bonkers — so fun and so inventive, and she’s so generative of ideas and ways to be in an emotional state that felt really authentic and grounded. All the improvising that’s going on, things she’s saying that you don’t hear, the tip of the iceberg of what she did is what you see. It was so much fun to shoot.”

Mills has continued to do select music videos on top of his award-winning feature films since the ’90s, and “98% of them don’t have the band in them,” so the fact that Talking Heads were not about to reunite for the project didn’t represent anything unusual for his m.o. He got a request to submit a treatment, and, he humbly guesses, “I’m sure three or four or five other directors did.” He did have a possible leg up from the start: “I do know the Talking Heads a little bit because I did a movie called ’20th Century Women’ [the 2016 film for which he earned a best screenplay Oscar nomination] that had three or four Talking Heads songs and a whole Talking Heads kind of subplot where I needed to get their approval. And over the years I’ve met with David — we’re friendly and we’ve hung out — but I never dealt with the whole band, really. And having a relationship with David doesn’t mean you have a relationship with Talking Heads.

“So, they saw my treatment, they liked it, and we did a Zoom with all four of them, which was the most nerve-wracking thing for me. That record [‘Talking Heads 77,’ the group’s debut] is so hugely important to me — they’re my 14-, 15-year-old gods, and my. 59-year-old gods, to me, still. So I was completely nervous and baffled and honored that they liked my treatment right off the bat, I think because it wasn’t reducing the song.”

Indeed, the long-broken-up foursome, which has come back together in recent years at least for the sake of business purposes, issued a statement in conjunction with the release of the video, saying: “This video makes the song better. We  LOVE what this video is NOT – it’s not literal, creepy, bloody, physically violent or obvious.”

Says Mills, “It’s very Talking Heads to me, my treatment — it’s like a pattern, not a narrative. It’s dealing with all these hyper-intense emotions, but also in a very disassociative, strange way. And I remember Tina (Weymouth) saying, “Oh, your treatment reminds us of us, of all the things that we liked when we got started.’ I was like, well, yeah, because I’ve studied you for my whole life, you know? … When I hear that first record or ‘Remain in Light’ or anything, I find it’s asking me to be innovative. It’s asking me to rethink how you make things. It’s the sound of people trying to break the rules in interesting ways.”

Film director Mike Mills speaks onstage at the “C’mon C’mon” Q&A during the 24th SCAD Savannah Film Festival on October 27, 2021 in Savannah, Georgia. Getty Images

“At first I was really daunted: How am I ever gonna think of an idea for this song that I love so much for this band I love so much, and that iconic song? And then the idea just came to me fully formed in like one second. But then I was like, ‘Oh damn, who would do that?’ It’s a very demanding and hugely extroverted and virtuosic ask for a actor. But I do have a bunch of relationships with a bunch of different people, actors that we’re like, ‘Should we try something together?’ We like each other’s work. And Saoirse over the years has been one of those people that we meet every once in a while or chat. When this came up, we had happened to just be talking and so I j texted her back like, ‘Hey, have you heard of this band Talking Heads? Did you wanna be in this video?’ She’s a huge fan too and wrote me right back, ‘Of course, what are you talking about?’ It was just an ongoing connection that found a great outlet.”

Mills says not to look too hard for a narrative or even character arc in the video, though he did know he didn’t want to end on a distressed note for Ronan’s character.

“There’s a little bit of an increase of energy,” the director says, “but overall I was trying to show a pattern, not a narrative, and for things not to progress in one direction. So often after she’s feeling a very strong anger or love, she’ll go in the opposite direction in terms of the ordering of the days. I did want to end on some kind of feeling of self-acceptance, and that while she might seem like she’s the intense one or the crazy one in this world, I feel like she’s the only sane one — the only healthy one who’s actually having all of her emotions while the people around her don’t really respond in this kind of false normality. So I did want her to end the last day where she’s very at peace.”

There’s a “Groundhog Day” aspect to the video, although the interstitial sky shots offer some counterpoint to the work and domestic mundanity. “Human life is incredibly redundant, but also, the cycles of the earth and the moon and the sun are very redundant,” Mills points out. “There’s some pain or there’s some grief to that, and that’s not all easy when you layer capitalism on top of that, and jobs and structures and institutions and systems which kind of control behavior. That’s where it gets more spicy and more interesting. And that’s a place that the Talking Heads are often talking about, like, ‘I wouldn’t live there if you paid me to.’ You know, there’s often this dissociation from normality that’s going on in David’s lyrics, and I was trying to echo or be aligned with that in this video in a different way. … To be able to look at things that are very small and seemingly banal and locate and extract all the oppression or joy or power or subversive weirdness in these little things, that’s influenced all of my work.”

Probably no other major filmmaker has kept a hand in music videos as much as Mills has. Over the years he’s created videos for Air, Yoko Ono, Blonde Redhead, the Divine Comedy, Beth Orton, Martin Gore, Everything but the Girl and Moby, among others. Meanwhile, he’s gone even beyond that in his collaborations with musicians, doing record sleeves for Phish, Beastie Boys, Sonic Youth, They Might Be Giants, Sleater-Kinney and others. And in the case of the National, the collaboration went as full-scale as any collab could without actually joining the band.

Music videos were “my film school in the ‘90s — how I really learned how to be a director,” Mills says. “Most recently, I did a whole 23-minute film with the National, with (Oscar-winning actress) Alicia Vikander, and ended up doing the record cover and ended up being a co-producer on the record. We did a whole tour together. So when special projects come up, I really enjoy it because it’s kind of sacred ground for me, because it’s my film school. And music is sacred ground for me. Because I started off in bands, not as an artist or as a film director, and I still find music to be kind of the most inspiring thing for me as a human and as an artistic person. So when something like Talking Heads or the National or some band that’s really had a big impact on me comes up, it feels very special to get to play with their cosmos.”

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