'Everybody Hurts' director on the R.E.M. video that 'changed' lives 30 years ago: 'It touched everybody'

Jake Scott, son of Ridley, was still trying to make a name for himself in the early '90s. Then someone gave him a cassette to listen to on a long, gridlocked drive.

Lyndsey Parker
·Editor in Chief, Yahoo Music
·7 min read
165
Michael Stipe in R.E.M.'s
Michael Stipe in R.E.M.'s "EVerybody Hurts" video, 1993. (Photo: Warner Bros.)
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In 1992, a 27-year-old rising music video director name Jake Scott, the son of renowned filmmaker Ridley Scott, was still trying to make a name for himself. The self-declared music geek, who’d grown up in London “obsessed” with punk and goth, had already lensed videos for Glenn Frey, Cypress Hill, and k.d. lang, but he “hadn't yet done that one video when you knock it out of the park, as they say,” he tells Yahoo Entertainment.

That’s when the commissioner at Warner Bros. Records who had hired Scott for lang’s “The Mind of Love” video, Randy Skinner — “a lovely, lovely, lovely, lovely person who was very supportive of my career, because she saw something in me that maybe I didn't even see” — gave Scott a tape of a song called “Everybody Hurts,” off college-rock heroes R.E.M.’s eighth studio album, Automatic for the People. “And it changed my life, basically,” says Scott.

A classic from the 1990s’ golden age of MTV, the clip that Scott eventually directed for “Everybody Hurts” — which was filmed in November 1992 and came out exactly 30 years ago, in April 1993 — was nominated for a Grammy and won four Moonmen, including Best Direction and Breakthrough Video, at the MTV Video Music Awards. In the latter prestigious and especially competitive VMAs category, it even beat out the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” (directed by Spike Jonze), Björk’s “Human Behaviour” (directed by Michel Gondry), Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer” (Mark Romanek), and Deep Forest’s “Sweet Lullaby” (directed by Tarsem, who’d been the darling of the VMAs two years earlier with another R.E.M. video, “Losing My Religion”). Scott went on to direct iconic music videos for Radiohead, Smashing Pumpkins, Tori Amos, U2, Live, Soundgarden, Tina Turner, Oasis, and the Strokes, but it all really started with “Everybody Hurts” and a long, bumper-to-bumper drive through the California desert — a road that figuratively led Scott from Joshua Tree to Federico Fellini’s Rome to, finally, Athens and San Antonio.

“This track just really got hold of me — took hold of me,” Scott recalls. “I was living in Los Angeles, and I drove out that Friday night with a tape of it; I put it in the tape deck and drove out to Joshua Tree, which is a place I love. And on the way there, I was stuck in traffic under this intersection of freeway overpasses that goes out towards San Bernardino on the 10 [freeway] … that Spaghetti Junction kind of thing. It was solid traffic, going out on a Friday night. And as I was listening to the track, I suddenly realized that the tempo suited that slow roll of traffic, right? That was really the spark.

“And then as I was driving to Joshua Tree through Riverside and everything, I listened to it over and over again. And I started to do a connect-the-dots kind of thing,” Scott continues. “And I thought, ‘Oh, there's that scene at the beginning of Fellini’s 8 ½ where [Marcello Mastroianni] gets out the car and has this dream sequence. Maybe I could do something like that.’ So, I like to call it an homage to Fellini, that.”

R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe “loved” Scott’s written treatment, so Scott flew out to the band’s home base of Athens. Ga., to further flesh out the concept. It was then that he and Stipe realized that shutting down a stretch of highway in Southern California, one of the most gridlocked parts of the world, for a complex, multi-day video shoot was not a realistic prospect. “So, we decided that the best place we found — the only place where we could shut a section of freeway down and control it like that — was in San Antonio, Texas.”

The Texas Department of Transportation and the San Antonio City Council reportedly approved the closure of a portion of I-10, near the I-35 Interchange and the intersection of Fredericksburg Road and Woodlawn Avenue, because the upper level of the double-decker 10 freeway could remain open and still allow traffic to (very slowly) creep through. “It was the section of the 10 between two ramps that we shut down for three days, and [local government officials] were great,” says Scott.

News reports from 1992/1993, however, indicate that many commuters didn’t think the “nightmare” congestion that Scott’s shoot caused was so great, particularly because Patrick Swayze’s movie Father Hood was filming at the same time, causing a portion of San Antonio’s Loop 1604 to also be closed down. But other locals were thrilled to be part of what turned out to be MTV history, with young R.E.M fans even ditching school to be extras in the video. One such fan, Paul Francis, told the San Antonio Express News, “It was cool being in it. One day I showed up early and chilled In the band's trailer.”

Scott and Stripe’s vision came to fruition even more spectacularly than they had even hoped. The video depicted Stipe and his R.E.M. bandmates Mike Mills, Peter Buck, and Bill Berry idling in traffic, while people isolated in the cars surrounding them agonized over private, subtitled thoughts like “they’re all stuck,” “they’re going to miss me,” “you die, you turn to dust,” “if I had a gun,” “she’s gone,” “there’s nothing I can do,” “leave me alone,” and in the case of one desperate praying man, “Why won’t you answer me?” There was no typical video lip-synching until the very end, when the band and other drivers/passengers abandoned their stalled cars in the middle of the highway and wandered along the asphalt, with Stipe dramatically singing the coda, “Hold on, hold on...”

After Scott returned to L.A. with the footage, he was grateful that he “had time to cut it,” since “Everybody Hurts” would not be released as the fourth single from Automatic for the People until five months later. “So, I really polished this thing,” he says. “And it just was one of those videos. It touched everybody, it seemed.”

The haunting result certainly touched the VMA voters over at MTV, who nominated “Everybody Hurts” for seven awards, including Video of the Year. But while the cinematic, ambitious clip was serious and somber, it became a wacky footnote in pop-culture history at the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards ceremony — when Scott’s win for Best Direction over Jonze’s retro cop caper “Sabotage” resulted to a classic, unscripted, bonkers VMAs moment that overshadowed the victory itself.

That was the famous night when late Beastie Boy Adam Yauch's lederhosened “uncle,” Nathaniel Hornblower — outraged that “Sabotage” had been shut out in all VMAs categories — famously bumrushed the podium, just as Stipe was about to deliver an acceptance speech on Scott’s behalf. “This is an outrage! … Since I was a young boy, I have dreamed that Spike would win this — and now this has happened!” Hornblower semi-yodeled in his thick Swiss accent, before security yanked him from the stage.

The Beasties’ Mike Diamond told Yahoo Entertainment in 2020 that Stipe was “pretty surprised at getting bumrushed by Hornblower in the moment” but “thought it was pretty funny — although I did hear that other people from Warner Bros. were not psyched about Hornblower!” (The group’s Adam Horovitz then joked, “And that's the first and last time [Yauch’s] uncle ever came to any one of those f***ing award shows with us!”) But Scott, who wasn’t able to attend the VMAs ceremony at New York’s Radio City Music Hall that year because he was working in Los Angeles, was, like Stipe, very amused, and was happy to go down in bizarre MTV history.

“Ironically, I was actually in L.A. with friends of the Beastie Boys — watching [the VMAs ceremony] at my friend Jacquie Coppola’s [actress Jacquie De La Fontaine’s] house with [fellow video director and son of Bob Dylan] Jesse Dylan,” Scott recalls with a chuckle. “I was with Jesse and a couple of other people watching it, and as I remember, I thought that was amazing. It was really cool.”

The above interview is taken from Jake Scott’s appearance on the SiriusXM show “Volume West.” Full audio of that conversation is available on the SiriusXM app.

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