Last Sunday, for the first time in well over a year, the Weeknd looked pretty normal on TV. After a rainy performance at the BRIT Awards, the singer, bearded and in a traditional black suit with an overcoat and sunglasses, walked calmly as cars zoomed past him in the parking lot of the Santa Anita racetrack. The “Save Your Tears” performance was broadcast during the 2021 Billboard Music Awards, where the Weeknd won 10 awards. Accepting one of those awards, for Top Hot 100 Artist, he smirked and said, “I’d like to thank God that I don’t have to wear that red suit anymore.”
The “red suit era,” as it’s come to be known, began in fall 2019 with “Heartless” and “Blinding Lights,” before After Hours was officially announced. For more than a year, he wore the same red blazer and grew increasingly bloodied, battered, and bandaged, continuing the narrative across music videos and television performances. The first of those TV spots, a cinematic December 2019 performance of “Heartless” on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, is surreal to revisit—filmed to look like the Weeknd was walking through the bowels of the Ed Sullivan Theater, it was an unknowing precursor to the pre-recorded segments that became necessary during the pandemic.
The connective tissue tissue from Colbert through the BBMAs was director Alex Lill, who also conceptualized the Weeknd’s performances for Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the 2020 MTV Video Music Awards, the 2020 American Music Awards, and the Super Bowl LV halftime show.
“Abel has big storylines in his head for the narrative of the album, and he likes to string them along and finds these connecting pieces,” Lill says over Zoom. “He’s obsessed with Being John Malkovich, and that was a very big reference point in trying to blur the line between what’s real and what’s not.”
Pitchfork: How did your collaboration with the Weeknd start?
Alex Lill: The first one we came up with was that Stephen Colbert performance in 2019 with all those moving hallways. When we went to Colbert with that idea, it was a lot of eyebrow-raising and head-scratching as to what the hell we were trying to do, because they were very much not used to that kind of cinematic performance. We built all of these replica hallways that all had to move and conjoin and line up perfectly next to each other. Then, right after the pandemic hit, we were piecing together all these live performances and creating a new idea of how that kind of form could exist. It was very much a snowball: We started with one idea and it took off into all these narratives as we tried to push the form more and more.
For all these performances, who comes up with the idea behind it and how is it determined how it’ll be presented?
It’s definitely different for each scenario. Sometimes Abel has a really strong idea of what he wants. Sometimes [creative director] La Mar [Taylor] has a really strong idea of what he wants. More than usual, it’s a hybrid. For the 2021 Billboard Music Awards, it was definitely me coming to the table with them, because they were like, “We don’t want to do the After Hours promotion, we want to do something different.” I went to them and said “car ballet,” inspired by 1950s synchronized swimming but with cars—you know, not trying to do anything like Fast and the Furious or anything.
Your work with the Weeknd often features these long tracking shots. What inspired that style?
When I started out making music videos, it was a trick of sorts to try and get the biggest bang for your buck. When Abel and La Mar approached me, they were like, “We love this, give us something like this,” pointing to videos I did for Mac DeMarco and Melody’s Echo Chamber and such. At the outset, they really loved the set design and they loved the crazy [Martin] Scorsese, Paul Thomas Anderson camera movements that are super frenetic and fast and uncut. One of the big things that we’re always trying to keep in there is that it doesn’t feel too overly edited. The other thing that’s amazing is that he sings it all live—even in these crazy situations, whether it’s in a moving hallway or there’s fireworks going off or cars going around him. And he doesn’t like to do it a bunch of times. So we’re always trying to capture something or create an idea that doesn’t have a bunch of cuts to closeups or inserts or anything like that because it would feel very edited and pre-recorded. With the television performances, it’s very much been about trying to keep this live element.
So the Weeknd really pointed to Mac DeMarco’s “My Kind of Woman” video and was like, “I want this”?
Yeah. He loved that video. I was shocked, but I think in some weird reality, [Abel and Mac] actually met each other once. It’s so funny to think about them hanging out. I love that. Abel is so, so aware and in-tune and watches everything. He will pull up the most obscure references, whether it’s a music video or a movie. He never ceases to surprise me.
How do you look back this whole project, now that it’s complete?
The big thing I really love about Abel and La Mar that really doesn’t exist with a lot of artists is that they’re not afraid to take chances. And with this whole campaign, they were really open to do things that other artists weren’t doing. They were going to bat for people that aren’t the biggest names and putting a lot of trust in the creative process and always just thinking about innovation—that’s always at the forefront of their mind. The last thing they care about is, Am I going to seem cool during this? It’s all about just how good is the idea in comparison with what other people are doing and how can we really just create a lane for ourselves. That’s what he’s done brilliantly, being unafraid to commit to strange, original, weird ideas that a lot of artists won’t go for.
