Director Mike Mills On ‘SOLEMATES’, Our Short Film Based On Air’s Music Video, ‘All I need’, by Director Mike Mills

If you haven’t heard yet, we just made two pairs of shoes with Vans - a Skate Authentic Mid and a Checkered Skate Slip On - and to introduce them to you, we made a short film, ‘SOLEMATES’.

If you haven’t heard, now you have. What you still haven’t heard, though, is that ‘SOLEMATES’ is actually an homage to one of our all time favorite music videos for one of our all time favorite songs by one of our all time favorite bands - Air’s ‘All I Need’ - which was formulated and directed by one of our all time favorite filmmakers, Mike Mills.

You’ve seen ‘SOLEMATES’. First thoughts?

It’s sweet, and interesting. I mean, I think that influence and borrowing is rad and a part of the good life and freedom and culture. It’s a little funny when something you did has almost like a shot for shot remake of parts, but it is actually really well done and interesting. I love Vans, I used to be in Vans all the time as a kid. It’s been weird seeing them get really big and they’re in all the malls now. 

When you first made the Air video for their song, ‘All I Need’, which we referenced and paid homage to in ‘SOLEMATES’, what do you remember being your initial thoughts? Where did that idea come from? 

I’d done a few things for them already; a cover and I think a couple of videos, so we were kind of friends at that point. I remember they found the song to be too pretty, so the main thing for me was like, alright, fuck it up. With a French accent, they said, ‘fuck it up’. I always try to put things in the wrong category or take something and use it in a different format or medium, so I was like, ‘oh, okay what if this music video was a documentary?’ and that’s pretty much what it is. That’s a real couple that we found from Ventura, and we put their real dialogue and ambient sound over the track.

I think [Air] had concerns about that song being too pretty, so their nervousness and my creativity sort of worked out. It was very fortunate. I grew up in Santa Barbara, never skated that park, but a guy I knew built it. It’s all very local, and those kids’ lives were very easy to relate to. 

How’d you find them? Craigslist?

Definitely not Craigslist, it didn’t exist back then. I think friends of friends and a casting person who was good at street stuff. I almost shot these kids down in San Diego and at the last minute their parents were like, ‘no, no, no!’ And the guys that we did in Ventura were so cool and like, not emancipated but, they lived their own lives. 

portraits by sam muller for monster children issue #73

You’re saying that Air was nervous about the track being too pretty, and you brought in elements of counter culture, but the dialogue is still very pretty. Did you give them any guidance about how to answer?

No, I just wanted to do a documentary about a couple and that was it. They were very sweetly in love, but they didn’t know that, and they’re very genuine and spiritual people. The guy in it had just been in this horrendous car accident and almost died, so when they talk about praying in the video, that’s what they’re talking about. So I just sort of tried to look into the depths of them, and it did synchronize with the music. 

The Air guys are in it, too. They’re in almost every shot.

Every shot?

They’re in like at least half of the shots. They’re in the background, they walk by. I think you guys referenced this one, Nicholas moonwalks backwards with a C-stand on his shoulder across the frame because we were thinking no one was going to notice that they’re in all the shots. 

I noticed a few but I didn’t know it was that many.

They were there for the whole shoot. 

Do they skate?

No, they were just standing at the top of the ramp. 

How often do you find yourself mining or referencing things you’ve done in the past?

Never… like looking at my old stuff? Never. I don’t know, it’s not interesting. Graphic stuff I’ll look at, or sometimes I’ll bump into something, but I never seek it out. I’m not sitting here like, ‘oh, I did that and it’s alright,’ I’m more like, ‘oh, I fucked that up, I’ll try to do better.’ I’ve had a team of therapists working on this for many years but it hasn’t started working yet. 

Oh yeah, we talked about that in the podcast. How’s that going? 

DGA isn’t paying for my therapy anymore, so it’s even worse.

Son of a bitch. Still over the phone?

Yeah well she switched to Zoom over the pandemic and just stuck with it.

This is a question I meant to ask you during the podcast and I forgot because I’m an idiot-

Wait I have a question for you: how much money did Vans pay you guys for that?

Vans pay us? Like profit?

Yeah.

Oh, man. [Redacted]. 

[Laughs] Yeah, that makes sense. 

There were so many favors called in for it, I’m stoked we were even able to get it done. The couple that was in it is actually just a young couple.

They’re sweet in it! They sound very sweet.

The car used was our editor Sam Hetherington’s car, and the director, Ben Briand, is a friend and helped us out a bunch. It was a real homie thing between all of us and Vans. 

It’s weird now to go into a Vans, they’re everywhere. I got my first Vans in probably like, 79’. My kid wears them now, it’s really weird. I mean, almost every kid at his school wears Vans. 

Well it’s for the kids, you know?

Yeah, totally. There's a Vans store in Glendale that I take my kid to to re-up and there are boards on the wall and I don’t think anyone has ever bought a skateboard there, it’s just like, set dressing. It's just crazy. And I’m not dissing Vans in any way. I can still remember Everett Rosecrans- I was sponsored for a minute when I was a kid, and I would get my blue Vans low tops in the mail like once a month or something, and I don’t know if he still works at Vans, but I remember Everett Rosecrans, if you were at a park and you wanted to get sponsored, you had to skate by Everett. 

I mean that’s still kind of the formula, you have to impress the TM. You don’t skate anymore?

I skate in a gentlemanly manner, but I’ve got some knee problems. The board from 20th Century Women, it’s a Tony Alva board with some sweet OJ’s on it, it’s in the back of my car. I dropped in on transition recently. Everytime I fell, my kid laughed so hard, he thinks it’s so funny. 

If we send you a pair of our shoes, will you wear them?

Yeah! I just bought these Tony Alva Vans with cheetah print from this rad board of his from like, 79’-80’. They have the cushy soles. 

You don’t like the cushy soles?

I love the cushy soles! But not all of them have the cushy soles.

These have the cushy soles.

Ugh… I’m already there. It’s just interesting, this culture, what it’s all become. 

What do you mean?

It’s gone from sort of mom and pop store, to a greater participant in like, mainstream capitalism mall life. 

Yeah skating has blown up. I can’t think of a single company in skating that I don’t see non-skaters wearing or using.

Yeah, totally.

And I can’t help but wonder how much of that is due to people like us or Hypebeast or whatever, or even just Instagram. As soon as a pro or an artist or whoever starts an indie company and prints a T-shirt, it’s worn by a fashion blogger. Sort of like, to participate in counterculture is to participate in capitalism?

Yeah, have you read- I’m not going to be able to quote this well at all, but David Brooks, New York Times, an angry dad. He writes opinion pieces. He did one about the creative class. I think it’s called, ‘Bonobos’, in the Atlantic. It’s an insane breakdown of how things happened from the 1970’s on, where people would be on the left, politically engaged, signifiers like Bowie- we’re all kind of rebels, we’re all Lou Reed and Bowie. But none of us are caretakers, we’re all children, and we never grow up, and we never take care of things. He talked about how the creative class is especially guilty of this. Like if anyone with a Velvet Underground record in their collection would kind of be like this, and skateboarding culture and skaters would be part of this little cosmos. It was really interesting. It’s fascinating how this overly easy, kind of convenient, comfortable, irresponsible alignment with the outsider and the rebel- skateboarding used to be a signifier of that. 

I mean, skateboarding is so large that it’s not really even counter cultural. 

Do you have time for a story? Great, story real quick. I skated, I wore Vans, went to high school. They were red and blue low top Vans. I would get beat up for wearing clown shoes! No one saw shoes like that! The world was just violent and conformist. Anyway, that world, the skate culture that I knew, was truly Bad News Bears. There were ex jocks and stoner kids and arty pretentious weirdos like me. It was people who were not totally functionable in the more mainstream cultural waves. The skatepark was filled with that. I don’t think ‘rebel’ or ‘rebellion’ are even what I’m talking about. Skateboarding used to just be a safe space, for the weird. Just the weird. 

I’ve been thinking that maybe there’s just less weird these days. When everyone’s punk, no one’s punk. 

The internet, the exposure; the internet’s made it hard to be truly weird.

Yeah, because your weirdness is immediately an aesthetic that I can pin to my Pinterest. 

Or like when you go to Tokyo and the cool skate dudes have the same posture as the dudes in California.

Yeah! Every skate crew around the world skates and dresses the same now!

The same tricks! There’s no more Bulgarian tricks or like, that’s a Japanese ollie which is totally different. 

Whereas before it was more organic growth of creativity based on your resources and environment. 

Back in the day, we’d get a Thrasher and see a photo of a rock n roll, but it’s just one picture and not a sequence, and we’d never seen rock n roll, so we were trying to figure out what he was doing. Not how to do the trick, but being like, what is the trick? We would try different stuff to make our board look like that and there would be arguments about what the trick was. 

This interview was supposed to be about ‘SOLEMATES’, but it’s become more just a chat.

Well I will say that [SOLEMATES] was a tastefully done piece of filmmaking, and the couple’s feet were cute. 

Get your hands on the cushy sole MC x Vans collab shoes, here.