Music

How Haim Built Their Long-Running Collaboration With Paul Thomas Anderson

As their new album, WIMPIII, finally arrives, sisters Este, Danielle, and Alana discuss their evolving music video aesthetic, and how the eight-time Oscar nominee became one of their most frequent collaborators.
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Photo Illustration by Alicia Tatone; Image from Shutterstock.

About 40 people got to see what turned out to be the last live performance by Haim—at least, the last one for a long time. Sisters Este, Danielle, and Alana Haim had planned a series of intimate shows leading up to the band’s third album, Women in Music Pt. III, which at the time was scheduled for release in April. On March 11 they performed in Washington D.C. at a deli called Call Your Mother, in an event the Washingtonian said “felt like a time warp into an alternate reality where things are okay.” That same day, D.C.’s mayor declared a state of emergency due to coronavirus.

“I personally didn’t think that was going to be [our last show],” said Alana last week, beaming through a computer screen alongside her sisters from their respective “pods” back in L.A. “I was like, ‘OK, we’re gonna quarantine for like, what, two weeks? And then we’ll get back. Because no one had any information, right? We’ll do this for two weeks and then we’ll slowly come back. I had no idea what was to come. I mean I still don’t know what is to come. I still feel like, especially when it comes to touring, I have as much information about touring as I did then. It really is just so up in the air.”

Initially delaying the release of WIMPIII to some undetermined calendar date, the sisters ultimately decided that their new “summer record” needed to be released at the beginning of summer, pandemic be damned. (It arrives June 26.) And while they are still unable to support their new songs with any direct contact with their fans, the sisters have just been forced to be more creative, such as doing a series of Zoom classes teaching fans the dance choreography from some of their music videos.

Those videos, from the fly-on-the-wall intimacy of their studio-filmed short Valentine, to the circling tracking shots of “Little of Your Love,” have become full-blown extensions of the band’s loose, we’ll-find-a-way-to-make-it-work energy—as well as ground-level love letters to their home city of Los Angeles. Many of the best videos have been directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, the eight-time Oscar nominee who has become an almost full-time collaborator with the band. He directed videos for the singles “Summer Girl,” “Hallelujah,” “Now I’m in It,” codirected the music video for “The Steps” with Danielle, and even photographed the new record’s album art, which features the sisters in L.A.’s Canter’s Deli surrounded by sausages. (The “Now Serving” number reads 69).

Patiently waiting like everyone else for the day when things will get back to some sense of normal, the sisters hopped on Zoom to share some behind-the-scenes stories, from attempting to do doughnuts on Ventura Boulevard in the middle of the night to Anderson’s idea for a music video that felt like jumping in a swimming pool on the first hot day of summer.

Vanity Fair: I feel like the best place to start a conversation on your music videos is to talk about “I Want You Back” from your sophomore album Something to Tell You. I feel like it really established a visual foundation for the band. I was really curious about what it was like shooting that long one take down Ventura Boulevard.

Este Haim: Can we paint you a picture? Oh can we paint you a picture.

Alana Haim: When it comes to visualizing things, we’ve always been such a huge fan of music videos. We grew up watching Making the Video. We grew up learning the dances from all these different music videos from Beyoncé videos and Destiny’s Child and Britney Spears and ’NSync. We would study those music videos. And I still want them to bring back Making the Video. It was such a genius show. I even remember the count down. And then immediately the next day it would be on TRL. It was the coolest. What a time to be alive. Anyway, we have always been such a huge fan of just the craft of making music videos and I think when we started, we learned quickly that we really do love very simple concepts, or at least trying to do them very well and taking time to fine-tune something simple. We’ve kind of now become accustomed to one-shot videos. We love one-shot videos. They’re super difficult, you really can’t fuck up. With the “I Want You Back” video, it’s a legend in the Haim canon, in our scrapbook.

Danielle Haim: We came up with this idea of driving down Ventura Boulevard and at the very end, when everything kind of kicks in at the end [of the song] after the break down, we were gonna start doing doughnuts in the middle of Ventura Boulevard. So we showed up at 9 p.m., got our hair and makeup ready, went to Ventura Boulevard at midnight to rehearse a lot of times before the sun came up. So at this point, we got this rig, it’s called a biscuit rig. They used it for the film Drive. There’s someone driving the whole rig and it can do all these crazy things. But they try it without anyone in the car, just the biscuit rig guy, and he does it and it doesn’t really do a full doughnut. And everyone’s just kind of like, “What’s going on?” It’s three o’clock in the morning, what the hell’s going on? Finally, the director, Jake [Schreier], is like, “OK, do you guys want to get in to try it?” And I was a little scared. The next day we were going to the U.K. to do a bunch of promo and I was like, “Are we going to fuck up our necks? What the hell’s gonna happen?” So I was like, “Jake, will you try it first and tell me how it is?” So Jake gets in, it gets to the part where it’s doughnut central, and the thing crashes into a parking meter. And it will not restart.

Alana: It breaks. So of course we freak out.

Danielle: So we release the song with no video.

Alana: While we were in the U.K., we got a call from Jake, like, “Okay, what should we do for this video?” And we were like, “Should we scrap everything? Should we just start from the beginning?” And he was like, “We have 24 hours to get the city of Los Angeles to give us that sliver [of the street] again. We should just get it and we’ll figure it out.” So we got home and were like, “What is safer than driving a car? Walking? Maybe we’ll walk?” And we were also like, “What should happen when the beat kicks in? Maybe let’s just do a dance.” It was very much just flying by the seat of our pants. Maybe this will work. We have no idea. We figured out this dance the day before we shot it. And it just kind of happened. And the take that we used was the…17th take?

You did it 17 times?

Este: We did more than that.

Alana: I think we did it 18 times. We had fucked up on every single one of those takes.

Este: The 17th was the best we got.

Alana: It really was this very spur of the moment idea. It was supposed to be something completely different and we kind of just went with it. And it paid off. It’s one of our favorite music videos.

Este: The full circle moment for us was we used to play the Sherman Oaks Street Fair in that exact stretch of land with our parents when we were kids to literally four people. And then here we are shutting it down for our music video.

Of course it’s fair to say that the video also firmly established what I’ll call the Haim power walk in your videos.

Alana: Who knew we were good at walking?

The rest of your music video filmography is highlighted by your very unique collaborative relationship with Paul Thomas Anderson. How did your relationship start?

Alana: It’s a very long story, but I’ll give you the CliffsNotes because I don’t want to take 45 hours of your time. But what really fast-forwarded our relationship was that our friend Asa Taccone, who’s in this band called Electric Guest, was at a party, and we don’t get invited to parties, but that’s a discussion for another time. But Asa was at a party and he was overhearing Paul talk about these three sisters from the Valley. And Paul loves the Valley as much as we do. I think that really just solidified our relationship. And Asa, who I’ve known since I was 16 was like, “Are you talking about Haim? Those are my girls.” And he was like, “Yes! Haim. Give them my email.” And Asa called us the next day and was like, “Yeah, hey, PTA wants me to give you his email. Can you email PTA?” And we’re like, “What? What’s happening here?” And I think it took us five days to muster up the courage. Half of our thought process was, “This is probably a hoax.” And so we finally sent him an email. And then we started emailing each other. And then he invited us over for dinner and we met his whole family. Maya Rudolph is also the most incredible human being of all time.

Este: She’s my idol. She really is.

Alana: And we became really close, but we never knew whether we were going to do something together. And then when we were putting Something to Tell You together, Paul visited us in the studio just to hang. He is such a lover of music. And he came and he was like, “Oh, we should film this.” And we were like, “What?” And he was like, “This.” So that’s where Valentine came about. When we were shooting it we had no idea what it was going to be for, what it was going to become.

What has been your experience working with him over these number of years and music videos?

Alana: I mean he’s been such a huge part of the last two records. He is just the best cheerleader. He is just so down to bounce ideas off of. It’s all very much an open forum.

Este: It also helps that all of his ideas are really good.

How would you describe Paul’s approach to your music videos?

Alana: It really just depends on the song. We show Paul everything before we even show our label or management or anyone. Paul’s always our first call. With “Summer Girl” I just remember him coming to the studio, and we showed him a bunch of ideas. And we had always loved the song, but it wasn’t done yet.

Danielle: We weren’t even making an album. We were just in the studio messing around and he just came to listen to stuff and that was the one that stuck out to him. He was like, “Oh, that was cool. It feels like a breath of fresh air.” And we started talking about it and he said, “It just feels like that moment where we’re about to be in summer, when it’s like 103 degrees in the Valley, it’s so hot and sticky and you get home from work or from school and you see a pool in the distance and you’re just like, ‘I need to get in that pool,’ and you’re taking off all your layers and diving headfirst in the pool.” And we were like, “Wait, I fucking love that. How do we do that?”

Alana: “We don’t have a pool. How do we do this?” And it really was just, why don’t we just run around L.A. and ask for favors. The last shot we did full guerilla-style, no permit, outside on Ventura.

Danielle: In my head the night before I was like, “I’m gonna look so awkward taking off clothes. This is gonna be the most awkward shit ever. But when we’re all with Paul and we’re walking it through, it just ended up happening in that moment where it felt OK.

Alana: I wish I could tell you that our music videos are planned months in advance but we’ve never worked that way, especially with this record. Everything has been so spontaneous, flying by the seat of our pants. That’s why Paul is so amazing. I don’t think we’ve ever had a Paul music video that’s been planned more than a couple days in advance. “In the next four days it has to be out,” and he’s like, “Alright, let’s try something. Let’s go.”

Is that how Danielle wound up going through a car wash in “Now I’m in It”?

Danielle: That might have been one of the first ideas for that video, where I end up in a car wash. The two main things I remember from “Now I’m In It” was the stretcher and then my sisters helping me get out of this funk with me in a stretcher and going into the car wash to wash it away.

Alana: My knees for the next, like, three months, I felt like a grandma after that because we had to carry Danielle around on a stretcher and I was wearing platform shoes. I was like, “I am in so much pain.”

My perception of Paul is only through his body of work. What do you feel is the biggest misconception about him?

Alana: You see these incredible documentaries about these bands in a studio and I’ve always been like, “Fuck, I want to look like Tom Petty at Sound City [Studios]. I just want to look like that.” And I remember seeing Valentine and feeling like he captured something that I honestly don’t think anyone has ever been able to capture. We’ve done so many sessions in studios for various things and I think with Valentine it really did feel like he saw something that no one else had seen before and really captured us as a band. At the end of the day we’re a rock band and what he captured—I remember just looking at it and my jaw dropping. He saw something that I have always wanted to see, but I never thought that I would be that person. It just felt like so much bigger than me. I feel so grateful that he likes working with us and wants to work with us and wants to shoot us.

Este: Don’t jinx it, Lans.

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