Catching Up With... J.Tyler Helms

Like it or not, you and Bruce Springsteen have something in common. Something deep and emotionally binding. Something real. You’ve both seen 24-year-old graphic designer J. Tyler Helms’ homemade video for the Arcade Fire’s “My Body Is a Cage,” and you’ve both had more or less the same reaction to it.

You think it’s pretty genius.

Or, you would agree with The Boss, if you'd just take the time to watch it. The clip splices scenes from Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West with Neon Bible’s ghostly closer. It was followed by another music-movie marriage, this time pairing Radiohead’s “All I Need” and the 1996 nature documentary Microcosmos.

What both clips manage is the birth of something new and whole. The songs play less like soundtracks and more like narratives, burying themselves inside their films instead of sitting next to them, making everything else you’ve seen on YouTube a complete waste of time.

Paste: This might be a morbid way to start the interview, but I just finished watching The Bridge, a documentary about suicide jumpers on the Golden Gate Bridge. They interviewed family members, and one of them explained the way some people view their bodies as temples, while others view them as cages—like prison cells they need to escape in order to find peace. Were you thinking about that at all when you made the video for “My Body Is a Cage”?
Helms: I think some loose lyrical interpretations were there, but my main motivation for making the video was definitely born out of the instrumentation of the song. It wasn’t really until after I finished the video that I began to make the thematic connections. When it’s clear that Charles Bronson's character is completely motivated by revenge for something that happened to him as a child, you can imagine how trapped he feels in his need to find and kill this man in black. He is, in a sense, caged by this need for revenge for most of his life. How many years had he been looking for this man? Twenty, maybe 30 years?

Paste: What makes Once Upon a Time in the West the right backdrop for the song and vice versa? Why not something like Dead Man Walking, or Mystic River?
Helms: To me, the song sounds like an old hymnal. The organ and choir sound very antiquated. The rhythm sounds like war drums. It might work well with a newer film in terms of subject matter, but I feel like there could easily be a disconnect with the sound. The song is very dusty to me. And epic. I couldn’t help but imagine a western gun duel when listening to it, weeks before I looked for films that might give me the footage I wanted. Of course, I’m a little biased because I’m a nut for spaghetti westerns, and was particularly into Sergio Leone at the time.

It was entirely a personal experiment. I literally listened to the song 50 times over the first two weeks Neon Bible was out. I was kind of obsessed with imagining this gun-duel scene, and I began to wonder how I could visualize it. It was less about me wanting to pair a movie with the song, in the beginning. It was more like, "OK…I have this scene in my head. I don't have the resources to make it myself, of course. What footage will give me something close?"

Paste: Of all the songs on Neon Bible, you picked “My Body Is a Cage.” That’s actually the one song on the album I would say is non-epic and kinda flat-sounding. Did you have similar treatments in mind for any of the other songs?
Helms: No. I mean, all the songs are begging for videos, but I was determined to make this one. And I agree with you about “My Body Is a Cage” in a sense, because on my first many listens to the album, the last track had the least impact of all the songs for me. It was the cue that I had reached the end of all the fun, full-sprint rock tracks, and I’d click back to the beginning of the album. But—and this has happened with other albums for me as well—it was a few weeks after listening to Neon Bible on repeat that I rediscovered the one song I paid the least attention to initially. The other songs are epic, definitely, but this one really stood out on a second listen. There was something special about it. Like finding an earthquake in jar.

Paste: I get that feeling about “All I Need.” It's a different sound for them—almost like Nine Inch Nails. How did you find the footage from Microcosmos?
Helms: The video for “All I Need” came about in a similar way to "My Body is a Cage," really. For about a week of listening to In Rainbows, I kind of dismissed the track, but I eventually came back around to it and really became fascinated by it. The rhythm and that crunchy bass melody are so sensual and surprisingly understated. It sounded like something crawling slowly to me. I was imagining lots of centipedes.

At that point, the Arcade Fire video had been out for about eight months, and it was doing surprisingly well on YouTube, and I had gotten positive feedback from the band and such. So I was really wary of following it up with just anything. But when I got the idea about insects for “All I Need,” and remembered some of the beautiful footage from Microcosmos I had seen years ago, it felt pretty natural again.

Paste: How long did it take to put together each video?
Helms:Coming up with the idea and finding the footage for each was definitely the longer part. About two weeks of listening and looking through films. Actually editing the video was fast. Once I figured out that the footage will do what I want it to for the song, I get really excited about it. And once I start editing I won’t leave my computer until it is finished. Each one took me about four to six hours in one sitting.

Paste: Did you worry at all about copyright infringement?
Helms:Thankfully, nobody has confronted me about it. Arcade Fire was very accepting of the video, and even asked if they could put it on their website. I told them the video is theirs and they can do what they want with it. No word from Radiohead, but considering how they released their album, I’m not too worried about that. The film companies worry me more, but these are fairly older, more obscure films, and I hear often in emails and comments that my videos are actually making people want to see more of them. I hope the Leone estate would only be happy about that.

Paste: What are you working on now?
Helms: I've been in talks with Capitol Records lately. Apparently, Rick Rubin saw the Arcade Fire video and flipped out. I'm not sure what, if anything, will come of it, but it's wild to hear it got that kind of attention.

I've also been writing a film script with my brother for over a year now. We're into our second draft, and we're really excited. Of course, I don't have the means to actually make the film when we're done, so I'm working on adapting it into a graphic novel. I like to think of it as a really elaborate storyboard. Just like the videos, it's a way to entertain ourselves. If you're curious, the story is a Western.