A Quote by Hiro Murai

I thought there was a way of marrying what I wanted to do with filmmaking with pop videos, which I found out through a couple projects just wasn't possible. That's not saying anything about the artist. If you're making an Usher video, you're making an Usher video, not a film with an Usher song in it.
When I was in high school, the girls used to tell me I looked like Usher, so to be doing a song with Usher was mind-blowing.
I grew up listening to a lot of Usher at 13 and 14. I have every Usher album that ever existed. So I grew up listening to a lot of Usher, Michael Jackson, Luis Miguel, a lot of pioneers in Latin music.
Gospel music to me has always been a balm for the soul. It has been able to usher in the spirit, usher in worship, true worship and praise, healing. I find the music to be very good at healing and the passion, you know, which is a testimony being told in song.
I never enjoyed making videos, even though the 'Total Eclipse' video was nominated for a Grammy along with the song. We lost out to the 'Billie Jean' video.
I've got a superstar like Usher singing bachata, a tune featuring Lil Wayne. I'm offering people more than just bachata. That captures a new audience that would listen to bachata because Usher is singing.
I learned from making random little personal projects, like school projects or little GoPro montages with music. Then once I made my channel, I really improved just by making video after video.
I love making videos for my music, you can literally do anything. It's like you can write a song about anything; you can also write a video that is the weirdest thing you can relate to the song, and I find that quite cool.
When I hear him sing and see what he can do, though, it's always a reminder of why I look up to Usher as my mentor and why I will always be an Usher fan to my core. But I'm lucky to say that he's an even better friend to me than he's a mentor. He's truly the real deal.
And then there were the wallflowers who had recognized for years that the thing was hopeless, who had found in that information a kind of calm. They no longer tried, with a bright and desperate effort, to sustain a conversation with somebody's brother, somebody's usher, somebody's roommate, somebody's roommate's usher's brother... The category of wallflower who had given up on all this was very quiet, not indifferent, only quiet. And she always brought a book.
I have a music-video background, and I feel like the responsibility of a music-video director is to do something that hasn't been done before in a really cool visual way. So much innovation has come in filmmaking through music videos.
That song [You Got To Make It Through The World] came from a vibe I picked up from an old blues singer named Bo Carter. My lady was making a film as a thesis for U.C.L.A. and she wanted me to write a song to depict this character. The movie had something to do with bootlegging and stuff like that. I found this Bo Carter record and he was just saying something about making it to the woods or something like that.
My friend Phil Morrison directed a lot of my favorite videos back in the mid- to late-90s - all the Yo La Tengo videos that were funny, a Juliana Hatfield video. He was such an influence with me, and I wanted to do a video the way Phil used to do videos. I did that for Phil.
Videos is the worst. Let me make it clear: Videos suck. It sucks making a video. It's happy when it's over and edited and online, but making it, it ain't really too much fun.
Pretty early on in making the first movie I realized that this is what I wanted to do. I felt like by that time I just found my niche, like this is what I was supposed to be doing. So I completely submerged myself into the world of watching movies, making my own movies, buying video cameras and lights. When I wasn't making a movie, I was making my own movies. When I wasn't making movies, I was watching movies. I was going back and studying film and looking back at guys that were perceived as great guys that I can identify with. It just became my life.
My process in making a music video is pretty much a formula of talking to the artist. I've never made a video where I didn't talk to the artist before I wrote the treatment. Basically, I enter into it knowing we are collaborators.
As a child, I wanted to be a singer, but that was only because I thought I could sing. I'd sing along to Brandy and Usher and *NSYNC.
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