Director and Bath alumnus Nigel Dick is responsible for the most iconic music videos in pop culture. He’s worked with the likes of Britney Spears, Guns ‘n’ Roses, Oasis, Cher and so many more artists than we can list here, directing over 400 music videos, documentaries and feature films.
Here, Nigel shares his unpredictable journey, from hitchhiking up Bathwick Hill as an architecture student, to leaving for Los Angeles and a glittering career in the record business. He reveals the realities of working with difficult bands and briefs, the behind-the-scenes of Baby One More Time and the life-saving video he’s most proud of.
What brought you to Bath to study architecture?
I wanted to be a musician but back then that wasn’t acceptable, certainly not to my parents. [They said,] ‘You must go to university and get a real job.’ Bath was one of the universities I applied to and they accepted me.
Do you have any fond memories of your time as a student?
Yeah, it was a good time. Of course, I was like most university students – absolutely broke. After my first year, I found a place to live down in Bath, so I spent most of my time at the bottom of the hill with my thumb out trying to get a lift to campus. I indulged in giving my best to the course, but I did lots of other stuff outside of university. I had a mobile discothèque and I played in a band.
From the outside, it seems like [my degree] was no help at all, but actually I think there are similarities between being an architect and a director. It’s quite a parallel process in that if you're an architect or a director, you come up with an idea and you create a plan, or drawings or whatever, and then you rely on artisans and craftsman to turn your idea into reality.
I certainly never imagined I was going to be part of the film business, so it was not a conscious career change at all. It was pure happenstance that I wound up doing what I have been for the last 40 years.
I also do a lecture called ‘12 things they don't teach you in film school’, and one of the things I discuss is based around a lesson I learnt while training to be an architect at Bath after a submission went terribly wrong. It became a very useful life lesson for me.
How did you make the leap to becoming a film director?
Training to become an architect takes as long as it does to become a doctor – it's a seven-year process. After the first four years, I left Bath and tried to get a job in an architect's office. I couldn't get work, so I did lots of different jobs. I became a cab driver; I worked in the sewage division of the local water authority; I spent six months drawing safety diagrams for gas platforms in the North Sea. I hated all of it.
Long story short, I got a job as a motorcycle messenger at a record company and it went from there. I took a lot of photographs, so I wound up helping to make some music videos. Then I started directing. I got lucky and I've been doing that ever since, so it's completely accidental. It's not a process that you could plan.
What is the process for creating a hit video?
When music videos were at their height and MTV was in business, you would be handed a brief, something like: it needs to be shot in New York in three weeks’ time. The budget is $300,000. You will have the band for one day. They would like a story, or not. The ‘goal posts’, if you like, would be variable. The brief for Oasis’ Wonderwall video was, ‘We want it to be in black and white but with colour.’
On an extreme level, I'd been on holiday in Thailand and I got back to LA at 4am and was woken at 8am by a phone call asking if I could get on a plane for France that afternoon to go and shoot a Celine Dion video. I don't even know if I'd heard the song before I got on the plane. You’re literally and figuratively flying by the seat of your pants in circumstances like that and so you have a choice. You either say yes or no, and I always said yes.
A lot of diplomacy is needed [when creating a music video]. Some people are easy to work with and they’re engaged in the process. Others are absolute nightmares. They don't want to be involved. They're resentful that you're taking an afternoon of their time and don't seem to care that their record company is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, which incidentally, some of which is coming from their future royalties, and they just appear to want to get it over with. So you try and engage with them and you try and make the process as easy for them as possible.
Sometimes you have to rethink the idea as you go. You might have planned a scene where the artist stands on a box and they say they have a problem with heights. Then the people at the record company get very upset when they see the footage and the person is not standing on a box and you have to explain why. I’m still stunned, years later, by how unhelpful some management and record label people could be. Some were fabulous but others would be like, ‘Well, you’re directing now, it’s your problem,’ even though they’d given me half a million dollars to spend. It’s an interesting insight into the human condition.
You directed Britney Spears’ debut video. What’s the story behind the Baby One More Time video?
Britney was 16 at the time. I met her in New York, and I pitched an idea. Nobody liked it. They said to me, ‘Why don't you have a chat with Britney on the phone because she's got an idea.’ And I'm like, ‘Great. I'm a grown-up man with a career and I have to listen to a 16-year-old girl tell me what she wants to do.’ So we got on the phone and she said, ‘I want to be at school with a bunch of cute boys, dancing.’ I’m thinking, ‘Is that it?’
I had a moment where I realised I’d been at a British boarding school with boys for my entire teenage years, so maybe she has a better insight into what teenage girls would like and perhaps I need to swallow my pride here and use that as my brief. I took her idea and expanded it, and that's the video that you see.
It’s certainly become iconic. When something you create hits the zeitgeist like that, it’s as if it’s no longer yours – it’s in the public consciousness. In many ways, I look back and see it through the same eyes as everybody else now, almost as if I had nothing to do with it. It’s an interesting mental process to go through.
What was your original idea?
It will be in the book I’m working on….
Of your 400-plus videos, which project are you particularly proud of?
The job I'm most proud of is the Band Aid video [Do They Know It’s Christmas?], which I directed very early on in my career, because it was part of a process that raised millions of pounds to help famine relief. Unquestionably, that video, and the record that Bob Geldof made with Midge Ure, saved lives, and I don't suppose any other video has done that, so that’s something I’m very proud of.
We were talking about it a few months ago and somebody said they'd actually met people who were one year old when the money started arriving, and they're now married with kids. Those families would not have existed [without that help].
What’s next for you?
Well, the model for music videos doesn’t exist anymore. Unless you're Taylor Swift or Beyoncé or somebody like that who's making huge amounts of money from touring, record sales do simply not exist anymore the way they used to. As a result, there's no money for making videos and at the same time, the technology has changed. So originally when I would go on set, I'd be surrounded by a film crew and there was somebody who put the film in the camera, someone to take care of lighting and all the rest of it.
Now, we shoot digitally. I have my own digital cameras and I drive to shoot gigs around the States. Last week I was shooting the making of an album in a studio in Dallas because of course now we have YouTube, Tiktok, Facebook and so on, and that animal needs to be fed with video. And so I shoot this process and edit it, and then when that record is released, they have the equivalent of a music video and all the bits that go with it, because without that you just don't have a career if you're a musician, essentially.
It was different when there was MTV. You would ship it to the record company. The record company would approve it and they would supply it to MTV. If it was played, certainly in America, then all your problems were solved. Now most recording artists have to do a lot of this work themselves.
You have to adapt. Waiting for somebody to ring me up and say I've got 300,000 bucks to spend on a music video doesn't happen anymore. The irony of it is, back in the day, $300,000 was the opening gambit for any artist on the label. I was told by my rep to never accept a job for less than that. It’s a very different world, which is fine, and I've adapted.
What would be your advice to Bath students and graduates looking to leave their mark and make an impact, as you have done with your career?
My advice is to not set out to make a big impact because you will ultimately fail. What you should do is always work hard, show up and do the best job that you can. The rest of it is down to luck. Some people tell me that I shouldn’t say that a lot of my career is about luck, but it is. You know, we've talked about the Britney Spears video. If nobody bought the record, we perhaps wouldn't be having this discussion. There are things in your life that you cannot control.
You just have to get up every morning and be prepared to do some work. So, you know, when I finish this discussion with you, I'll ring my client back, I'll do some editing, I’ll have a meeting about some future work – it's a constant process. If you don't engage with enthusiasm, either you're in the wrong job, or you're just simply going to fail.
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