“I was trying to be an archaeologist”: SOPHIE’s creative director on working with the artist, understanding her vision and honouring her essence

Do you remember when did you first come across SOPHIE’s music, and your first reaction to it?

I actually met SOPHIE before her music. In 2014, I had just come back [to LA] from Berlin and I went to her house – my friend was there, and I was just blown away with this really interesting person. We started talking and she was so striking and enchanting. Then I learned she was a musician and went to her concert with Charli xcx, and it was just incredible. I didn’t really know how to react to her music without knowing her, but it was shocking – a mixture of something pure, like metal or noise, combined with this beauty. I fell in love with her and everything she did right away.

You shot her Crack Magazine cover in 2018 – how much did you work with her around that time?

The photos were so beautiful – she loved them. I did a couple more photoshoots with her [afterwards] for other magazines. Then there was a song and album she was going to make that ended up not coming out for various reasons, but I worked with her on a video for it, which I think was the gateway for this project because she was interested in working together more.

What was the collaborative process with her like?

It was really cool. She was actually a lot like me – she would always say in her interviews that the reason she wanted to do work was to recreate child’s play but for adults. With creative processes, you [usually] make plans and mood boards, and then you follow that outline strictly. With her, she was OK to be more chaotic and let things evolve on their own. So you would start out with a loose plan and see where it takes you. It’s like if you start a painting, do a little sketch and then the rest of the details paint themselves. It didn’t necessarily make things easier, but it made them more exciting. I learnt a lot from it.

SOPHIE trusted people a lot, she wouldn’t necessarily look [intensely] at a mood board. She would say: “Oh no, I trust you. I don’t really understand what’s going on here, but I like you. Just go ahead.” And the way she found collaborators was cool – she worked with her friends, whether or not they really had the experience. She looked for taste and the chemistry you had with her, and once she chose you, she would let you have all the freedom you’d want. I think that’s what she found so many interesting collaborators.

How did you come to be involved in the posthumous album project?

I was good friends with SOPHIE and her family. I’m close with her brother, who is very involved in the music for this album, and I think he knew that SOPHIE wanted me to be involved in this. It was nice of them to have trusted me as much as she did. It took me a long time – I took several years out of my personal life to really learn the things that SOPHIE liked.

What stage was the music at when she passed away, and how did it come to be completed?

Some of it was almost there and some of it was not quite together – some of the songs didn’t have lyrics but had melodies. They all had collaborators sketched out and in place. SOPHIE was excellent at having and starting ideas but found it difficult to finish. You know, to get there you have to make decisions and cut away ideas. Some of the songs, like Reason Why (ft. Kim Petras & BC Kingdom), sound quite different to how it did when she passed away. It’s not that the arrangement is different, it’s just that SOPHIE’s music is all about the tiny nuances and little sounds that made the whole thing special, so tweaking it is actually a huge task. I wasn’t the one who did the music, but [the people who did] were really obsessed with making it sound exactly like her.

How did you feel when you first heard it?

When I first heard the music a couple of years ago, I thought it was finished. Then I heard the final tracks and realised it was not. It sounded like Willy Wonka – bubbles, expansion, weird stretching materials – a really tactile experience. SOPHIE was a person who was really obsessed with surfaces, and it was just incredible. At the same time, it was really sad – it opens up mysteriously, with dark landscapes that are hard and soft at the same time, then moves into this ethereal part that feels godly, like this entity that you can look at but can never speak to. Then it becomes really intimate, delicate and vulnerable, and in the end, you just break down and cry because you realise what you’ve lost. Every time I listen to the last song I start crying. When we listened to it in the studio, everybody cried several times. The music is vulnerable and private, yet huge and distant at the same time. It’s earthly, but completely celestial. That’s why the theme for the visuals was to be both big and micro-small at the same time.

There’s a lot of astral graphics – what was your creative process and what did you want to capture in the visualisers?

It was tricky. Ben and the family told me that they wanted it to be celestial, and that’s what SOPHIE wanted. Also, tactile and liquid – from speaking to her I worked out that she wanted to explore states of matter. She would show me things that she liked, and she really gravitated towards black fluids, rocks and ice. SOPHIE’s family also definitely didn’t want to have any kinds of bodies or figurative objects present, and we didn’t want to make it look like stock footage of space, so I had to think of how to make these shapes look like things that you could attach yourself to, yet remain anonymous.

I watched every sci-fi movie I could find and screen-captured all these Disney shows. I had maybe five 2TB hard drives of references, then tried to choose from them – it was actually kind of horrible. I’d organise them by bubbles, fluids, colours, states of matter. The family really helped as well, telling me her favourite colours and so on. In the end, everything went back to SOPHIE – what she said and mentioned on this day or that. It was almost like archiving a historical project, or archaeology, and the level of detail and accuracy we were aiming for was insane. Then we found an amazing company who did the animation to work with us, who brought the visuals to life.

With creative decisions like not showing her face, what was the thinking there? How did you balance SOPHIE’s visual language with the knowledge that she isn’t here anymore?

In the beginning, when she first started out as an artist, she didn’t want to show her face and wanted to present her music as the central figure. And I think she was more amorphous and nebulous about identity. Identity is such a central figure in her work, as well as physicality. For some people it’s very important to be present, but for her, it was something to play with. She sometimes had another person pretend to be her in her performances. That was one of the considerations – playing around with the physical form.

How much were the visuals tied into specific sounds or lyrics?

We tried to match beats with the animation as much as possible and to use tactile influences – like in Exhilarate (ft. Bibi Bourelly), which has popping rubber sounds, which we tried to match with latex balloon shapes. We wanted it to be an audiovisual, immersive experience. Then another video is very metallic and then transforms into organic shapes. It was very much to illustrate what I could hear.

What was it like knowing that you couldn’t speak to SOPHIE and have her input in the collaboration?

I guess I was trying to be an archaeologist. I am an atheist, but sometimes it felt like I had to channel SOPHIE, like it was a spiritual experience. I tried to take on her personality as much as possible, thinking back to her work ethic and schedule and trying to live that myself.

Almost like method acting.

Yeah, I didn’t think about that. This is an example of the sort of direction SOPHIE would give, she would say: “I want this to be influenced by a massage.” I’d be like: “OK, a massage,” and then I’d go and get a massage. Or she’d want to be influenced by a sauna, and I’d go to a sauna.

How do you think SOPHIE’s legacy has evolved since she passed, and did that influence how you did the visuals?

It’s strange, because myself and her family haven’t been paying attention to social media. I think until the album was out, we were trying to stay true to what SOPHIE wanted. I actually don’t really know, because I’ve been in a bubble. But with how this has all evolved, I think she would have been absolutely happy with it.