Into the Library with Floria Sigismondi
In October 2024, the director Floria Sigismondi received the UK MVAs’ highest honour, the Icon Award. With a career spanning three decades, Floria’s outstanding achievements include top honours at awards shows in the US, UK, Europe and Canada, including multiple 'Video of the Year' wins. To call her work ‘iconic’ barely scratches the surface of the culture-defining work she continues to make and the glass ceiling she's broken, again and again, as a woman director disrupting the boys’ club early in her career.
Floria’s body of work spans art, still photography, film and TV. She wrote and directed the coming-of-age biographical feature ‘The Runaways,’ starring Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning and the supernatural horror ‘The Turning.’ She’s directed episodes for acclaimed TV shows like ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ and ‘American Gods,’ and commercial campaigns for Gucci, Thierry Mugler, Absolute, Meta, Bulgari and many more. Photographs from her three monographs have been exhibited alongside Cindy Sherman, Vanessa Beecroft, and Joel-Peter Witkin.
Known for her striking aesthetic and personal style, Floria has also appeared in front of the camera, as a captivating editorial subject and as a performance artist in her own film and photography.
While her work across genres features actors such as Tilda Swinton, Nicole Kidman, Daniel Kaluuya, Marion Cotillard, Kristen Stewart and Timothée Chalamet – it’s in the realm of music videos where her visionary ideas and influence are most profoundly felt.
From the start, Floria has eschewed cliché music video tropes and offered artists the reward of deeply creative collaborations. She’s made bold, meticulously crafted worlds for artists like Rihanna, Björk, Dua Lipa, The White Stripes, The Cure, Christina Aguilera, Sigur Ros, and Justin Timberlake. Two of her videos for David Bowie (‘Little Wonder’ and ‘Dead Man Walking’) have a permanent spot in New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Her latest work was the viral sensation ‘Unholy’ by Sam Smith and Kim Petras, a salacious and sensuous story of desire, and betrayal, garnering five MTV Music Video Award nominations including Best Director and Video of the Year.
LBB’s Zhenya Tsenzharyk sat down with Floria to discuss her personal favourite music videos from across her illustrious career and the stories behind crafting some of the music industry’s most singular visuals.
Marilyn Manson – The Beautiful People (1996)
Manson saw a video I had directed for the Canadian band, Harem Scarem, that was inspired by German expressionism and featured my whole family playing these theatrical characters. To get the very contrasty look, Chris Soos, the DP, suggested we use sound stock. It was very tricky because if you were off even half a stop over or under there would be nothing on the film.
Manson saw something in that video, so he asked me to direct ‘The Beautiful People’. I remember he had doubts about looking good in a bald cap and, it’s funny, looking back at that video, the image of him as the hairless dictator is what gives that character a fearful element.
The night before the video I was getting cold feet. Had I gone too far with all these crazy ideas? But as I tried to sleep, I heard whispers in my ear – I don’t know what they were saying but it was continuous chattering. I’ll never forget it. Like I was downloading some OS information I was going to need the next day. What making this video taught me is to just go for it no matter how strange my ideas were.
Amel Larrieux – Get Up (1999)
With this video I wanted to try something really different, very modern. I had reached out to the flame artist, Susan Armstrong at TOPIX, who was a frequent collaborator, looking to do something we had never done before. I wanted to create a video that played with dissecting the image into various sections so I could play with running parts of the frame backwards while other sections ran forward. They wrote special code for me to create the effect and it was different every time we ran the footage through the program. It made it very exciting to see what it would spit out.
Amon Tobin – 4 Ton Mantis (1999)
We had an extremely low budget to do this one so I ended up doing the cinematography myself on a Sony MiniDV camera which I bought to document my personal life. The challenge was deciding how to best use these low resolution images. I decided to shrink the image on the screen and combine it with a more graphic approach, incorporating Polaroid images and blending the two techniques seamlessly.
I needed to bring the ‘4 Ton Mantis’ to life so I reached out to Drew Lightfoot to do the stop-motion animation. He built the mantis out of paper and I think it worked really well and was really spot on with its movements.
Sigur Rós – Untitled#1 (Vaka) (2003)
This video came out of my time living in Lower Manhattan and the aftermath of 9/11. I wanted to follow ordinary kids at school but in a postapocalyptic world. As the recess bell rings the kids come barrelling through the school doors to an otherworldly environment, with black snow falling from a fiery red sky.
We had to solve the challenge of how to make the snow black without using toxic materials because kids had to play in it. We ended up using squid ink, which got super smelly under the hot lights.
Living Things – Bombs Below (2003)
I shot this video in the Czech Republic, and we found an amazing old sugar factory that had holes in the walls that looked like bullet holes. It had beautiful, high ceilings where the daylight would come in. This video was the beginning of my relationship with Lawrence Rothman, who became my husband and gave me a beautiful daughter, Tosca, my greatest creation.
Christina Aguilera – Fighter (2003)
I have a phobia of moths – they just terrify me! It’s something about their dusty bodies. But I like putting myself in safe situations, like film shoots, to study my fears up close. Somehow, I learn more about myself as I go through this creative journey.
Moths are drawn to light, symbolising the drive towards enlightenment. I liked this idea, and in the video, Christina becomes the source of light. Her pain transforms into this beautiful creature suspended on the wall, with moths drawn to her newfound illumination.
I wanted to use real moths – on set, they landed right on her hair and face. I was in absolute bits watching this happen and being in such close proximity to them. They were the size of small mice!
The Cure – The End of The World (2004)
The challenge here was: how do you create ‘the end of the world’? The idea was to film at a construction rubble site, build part of a roof, and stick some chairs into the rubble. Ask and you shall receive – we actually found an army base near our shoot where they were demolishing houses. We asked them to hold off for us so we could document it on camera. Now that was the perfect depiction of domesticity, a relationship at the end of the world!
Funny enough, the army base was where Robert Smith’s father was stationed when he was growing up, so it felt like it was meant to be. Everything had a serendipitous feeling about it. It all just fell into place.
The White Stripes –Blue Orchid (2005)
When I arrived on set I brought my five month old daughter, Tosca, with me. Jack looked at her and said she needs to be in the video. He thought she could play a baby Meg. So we quickly made up an outfit that mimicked Meg’s and plopped her on the plates that Meg was breaking. All this was happening as Pamela Neal, my hair stylist, was adding extensions to the horse’s mane. One image that I was very happy with was the interaction between Karen Elson and the horse at the end of the video. Karen and Jack met on this video and married shortly afterwards.
Justin Timberlake –Mirrors (2013)
The song was about Justin’s grandparents – his grandfather had just died and he was looking back at their legacy. The brief sounded like a lifestyle video and that's not really what I do! When I came up with the idea of his grandmother filling different rooms of their house with a different memory, I was off. It was a very challenging shoot with only two days for a six minute song, double the typical length of a video. The first day was the story of the grandparents meeting at a dinner, the fun house, the challenges of a young couple and her memories as an older woman. Basically enough moments to represent a life together.
The second day was Justin's performance, which was all choreographed, on a set that depicted a funhouse filled with mirrors. My DP and I, Matty Libatique, had to figure out how to not see the camera in all the reflections, but still have the freedom to move.
My favourite moment while shooting was when Justin was looking at his reflection in the mirror. We see a dancer emerge and they both reach out to touch the other’s hand. This was not choreographed and there was an incredible synchronicity between Justin and the dancer’s movement with the lights coming up. This shot was all done all in camera with no special effects and it worked out beautifully.
David Bowie – The Stars (Are Out Tonight) (2013)
I had made two videos for David Bowie in the late ‘90s,‘Little Wonder’, and ‘Deadman Walking’. After suffering a heart attack, he was pulled away from doing music for about 10 years. So when he called, it was really exciting. There was magic in the air! He wanted everything to be super hush-hush.
All the meetings had to take place at my house because he didn't want anything to leak out that he was filming in Hollywood. It literally feltlike I was pregnant, ready to give birth, but no one could see my bump... The pure joy of working with Tilda Swinton and David has to be one of my career highlights. David gave me some of the most important lessons in my creative life, and he always got behind my ideas 100%.
Sam Smith featuring Kim Petras – Unholy (2022)
I grew up in the world of theatre and opera. This film presented the opportunity for me to reach deep into that history, to bring the drama, to create our own world without making a period piece. Shooting in a theatre gave us the setting of cabaret but the costumes and choreography broadened that and injected a modern element. For me it's a celebration of the LGBTQ+ community and creating that was the most important and joyous experience.
