We turned to the film’s director, former Beyoncé creative director and Grammy-winning music video bigwig Melina Matsoukas for those answers and more. The filmmaker, who has worked with everyone from Rihanna to Solange and Lady Gaga, revealed to ELLE.com how Beyoncé and Jay transformed into action stars, which actor dropped everything for their cameo and why she considers Bey and Jay family.
This "Run" video was straight-up epic. Take me through the process of how it came to life.
Obviously I’ve worked with Beyoncé quite a bit; I know Jay through the years. We’ve been trying to work together for a couple of his albums and it just never came to fruition. I’d been dying to work with him and I love working with her so it just felt like the perfect combination. With this song, it’s actually a music video — I know everyone’s calling it a trailer, which I guess it is as well. But it’s a music video for his song “Part II (On The Run).” I feel like in Jay’s career he doesn’t want to just do a normal music video. So we were trying to come up with a way to visualize the song that wasn’t something that we’ve seen before. So I came up with this whole movie trailer idea and it just kind of progressed from there. We were talking about trying to hide the fact that it was a music video and the idea was to release this trailer for this blockbuster that you’ll never see.
You’ve seen Beyoncé inhabit various different roles over the years. Was it surprising to see her wielding a gun and going full badass for this video?
When we first started she did send me some references and a lot of that was being a badass. I was like 'OK, this is a role she hasn’t played that she’s definitely interested in playing so let’s take it way further than she could imagine.' She’s really good with action and she’s a badass in real life. So why not be one in a video? It’s just about having fun and creating some cool images. And I think for her it’s a sense of freedom. Maybe these are things she didn’t think she could do a couple years ago and now she’s just like 'I’m gonna play whatever part I wanna play and not listen to whatever people have to say.'
