The brief was an open creative. The only request was that it needed to be slightly subversive/off the wall and re-reconnect with the artist underground’s origins.

To me the song (‘chemical’) was really about an unbearably intense attraction that turns into an obsession, which felt right away like a very fertile ground inspiration-wise. One thing I loved about it were the words being repeated again and again as an obsession that matters more than everything else, with lyrics that sounded like dialogue/story-telling. « It feels way too chemical », « I’m confused », « I want you »….You had to use it within the narrative. Also how the music feels is always the most powerful drive and to me this felt like the ultimate music video song musically-speaking with the on a loop repetitive rhythm beating like a heart just connecting perfectly with the intense attraction idea.

So the obsession idea directly and immediately came out from the first hearing. Then there was this idea of a « chemical » drive which made me thought: in our collective psyche, is there anything more chemically loyal than a dog? Then « what if the absolute purest incarnation of loyalty was driven, not by choice, but chemically, to disloyalty? »

I wanted to come with a sad comedy which would also be a funny drama. Picturing D (the main character) like a tender loser, a gentle harmless big boy, kinda doomed to be unfaithful in his thoughts no matter how cheating is against his very own nature but still trying to fight that felt like the right way to achieve that. The dog figure embodies this extremely strong faithfulness symbolic plus it carries the most powerful emotions both touching and amusing.

To create D’s world the main thing to me and my long-time production designer is always the need not to locate the story, in time or in space. We mixed inspirations from various countries for urbanism, props and languages to create the dirty underground multicultural world that we envisioned and wanted to explore. Tried to have the most fun with it. Because, if you’re gonna create a small world where your main character is a big anthropomorphic Boxer, you might wanna just do that.

This absolutely needed to be done 100% practically. Our character’s face, the world he lives in, everything. We needed to feel him, to feel the texture of its underground world and how real this was. So we indeed did it all practically , shot 16mm with a handheld-vérité style so it could feel more real and properly give life to our character.

The budget for MK was really low compared to the idea and the means needed to make it happen, 80k€. The foundation of the film was of course this dog head that we had to design, make and test which took approximately 7 weeks.

We had 8 weeks of preparation. Because the second key element of the video was of course the sets. we were in a context where places had been closed for several weeks because of Covid. It was our biggest battle and when we see the result and our entourage asks us about the location, we are rather proud of it. 

The world he lives in was also a challenge to create, budget wise plus the fact that we had to shoot in Paris but wanted it to be multicultural. Our character’s work place was created from scratch and not worked around an existing place.

- more than 500 000 Views on youtube

- a lot of press coverage (Billboard, creative week, shots...) and appear on best list for music videos.