To be honest, I don’t know our budget. What we got to do is fly to Montana and burn down a real house. And then once we built our set for the third act, we got to literally burn it down, and burn down everything inside of it. So none of it was fake.
Did working on the film before the album change how you went about the songwriting itself?
Tesfaye: Most of the music didn’t exist prior to it. I sent [Shults] demos and loops with OPN — Dan [Lopatin], who did the score —- and references of real songs out there, and even some old Dan scores. That helped us imagine what we wanted the score to sound like so that we could make the film. Then eventually I had to finish the album and finish the music. It was a long process, but it was probably the easiest process for me, because I knew what I wanted to say on the record. There were even scenes that we cut …that I was able to put into music. It’s almost like a musical director’s cut of what the film is.
The film is already being so ambitious and experimental that we can do all these big swings. We don’t need to spoon feed the audience. If they’re gonna connect with this film, they’re gonna connect. If not, they’re not.
How many takes did it take for Barry to nail the oner of him doing a bunch of coke, pushups, and thrusting in the air during one of the party scenes?
Shults: (Laughs) So the way we shot, I think we did five or six takes of oners where I just let Barry play. I basically just let him loose in a room full of extras: First take, do whatever you want. At some point you just got to go knock on that door and ask for Abel. That’s the only narrative beat here. I wanted you to see him without Abel and get the context that this guy…I don’t want to say is a leech to his life, but he relies on The Weeknd lifestyle, and he might prioritize that over his buddy sometimes. I was like, have you seen any Jean-Claude Van Damme or Steven Seagal movies? And that was the one when he was like, Ahhh! And then at some point he was doing, like, sit-ups. Then it turned into the air thrusting from the ground. That was the first day of shooting anything with Barry.
Was there a decent amount of improvising like that in Hurry Up Tomorrow?
Shults: Sometimes what you see in the movie is literally exactly what it was in the script. And sometimes we riff on top of that. In the end of the movie…there’s a tone shift [with Jenna and Abel’s characters]. And she’s pushing him to go to a place. I had her, in the script, come in way more intense. We shot a few takes, and we’re like, This is not working. And then it was like, Send everyone out, let’s sit down, talk about this, I think I got the tone wrong. So it’s Jenna, Abel and I just spitballing. And then it’s like, what if we just just ride the energy that you just had from that room, forget the intensity and the stuff I wrote? Just ride that energy and let’s see what happens. And then the tone became this more operatic, tragic thing.
Why did film feel like the best medium for this project versus a music video, a visual album, or a TV show?
Shults: Every movie that I’ve made, the ambition is to swing for the fences. I don’t know that [this has] been done before. Of course there’s Purple Rain and some other comps, but this isn’t that. It’s not Purple Rain. It’s not The Wall. We’re doing something different and new, and to me, that’s what’s exciting about it. The fact that he’s gonna play him a version of himself in this way, and we’re gonna tackle this stuff this way and pair it to an album? I was just excited at the ambition of the dream. The idea of trying to put everything in this movie into like, one music video or something, even a couple…I wouldn’t be the guy for it. I wouldn’t even know how to do that.