Michael Bay And David Fincher Worked Together On A Video That Still Holds Up Today

It’s a rare thing when two equally well-known artists collaborate behind the camera. An auteur director team-up doesn’t happen often, but it’s certainly not unheard of. This year alone, we’ve seen the news that Steven Soderbergh is helping out Matt Reeves with “The Batman Part II,” while Quentin Tarantino has handed the “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” character of Cliff Booth over to David Fincher for the upcoming Netflix spin-off. That latter director, as it happens, isn’t a stranger to blending his creative DNA with another filmmaker. Famously, Fincher took over the troubled “Alien 3” after it had been developed for years, and inherited a script structure from director Vincent Ward that he isn’t thrilled with to this day.

Around the same time, the budding film auteur (who was then still primarily known as a music video director) was approached to make a video for the rock star Meat Loaf’s 1993 single “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That).” According to Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum’s 2011 book “I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution,” Fincher and Meat Loaf’s vision was pretty much what the finished video became, a Gothic riff on “Beauty and the Beast.” However, Fincher’s price tag caused Meat Loaf to look elsewhere for the video’s director, turning to none other than an up-and-coming Michael Bay. (That’s one version of the story, at least; more on that later.) Though the two didn’t directly work together on it, the final video is, in its own weird way, a collaboration between the pair.

Although Michael Bay and David Fincher technically worked together at the production company Propaganda Films, their relationship was definitely more complex than just coworkers or collaborators. As various colleagues and other luminaries who worked at or with Propaganda detail in “I Want My MTV,” Fincher was already a star internally given his extensive work on numerous successful music videos, and this was something that the young Bay was all too aware of. Employees told Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum that Bay would follow Fincher around the Propaganda offices constantly, with some people already considering him a younger version of Fincher.

This comparison came to a head when Meat Loaf approached Fincher with the gig for “I’d Do Anything for Love.” According to Meat Loaf, the musician pitched Fincher with a “Beauty and the Beast” premise for the video, which Fincher allegedly loved. However, Fincher supposedly gave Meat Loaf a quote of $2.3 million, which Loaf balked at. He continued:

“So he came back a few days later and gave me a budget of $1.7 million. I said, ‘David, we don’t have that kind of money.’ And Fincher said, ‘Well then, get Michael Bay.’ That’s the last time Michael Bay was the cheaper option.”

So, in Meat Loaf’s version of the tale, the vision for the music video was the singer’s idea, Fincher couldn’t make the budget work, and the then-cheaper Bay got a hand-me-down project which he spun into a hit video.

In Meat Loaf’s version of what happened with the “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)” music video, the video was an idea had by the singer which changed hands from David Fincher to Michael Bay. However, according to Propaganda Films producer Joni Sighvatsson, it was his idea to pass the torch from Fincher to Bay, and as such, the video ended up being the one and only collaboration between the two filmmakers. As he recalled:

“Fincher was very expensive. He and the label were at an impasse over the Meat Loaf video, so I said, ‘Why don’t we just give this to Michael Bay?’ Fincher gave it to Bay, we ended up spending $750,000, and it was a seminal video. Michael directed, and it was David’s concept. That was the first and last time Fincher and Bay collaborated.”

It’s very possible that Sighvatsson is merely aggrandizing the story of the “I’d Do Anything for Love” video, making it sound like it’s the result of two now-famous auteurs rather than just one. Or it’s possible that he and Meat Loaf have hazy memories of what went down and how. All we really have to go on is the video itself, which remains one of the most visually rapturous short films of the 1990s. It’s the most perfect visual encapsulation of Meat Loaf’s sound, all theatricality and opera. It’s got Bay’s fingerprints all over it, of course, from a fetishization of hardware and sunsets to the way every woman is shot like a supermodel. Yet the video’s Gothic flavor and trappings feel more Fincheresque. However it happened, the video is a gift, and we should probably thank all three men for it.