Linkin Park’s Joe Hahn was a professional filmmaker long before he was a professional musician, in a way.
In 1996, he started working as a concept artist for a handful of special effects houses. Hahn found that directors and producers would often stop by to ask him and his colleagues how to turn an ambiguous or unimaginative part of a script into an incredible effect that would carry the film forward.
“We would have to … figure out a way to make those words into something,” says Hahn. “That’s where the seed of the idea for me to direct came into place: I realized that we were actually doing a lot of the work that I always assumed filmmakers were doing.”
The experience served him well. Four years later Linkin Park, formed with art school pal Mike Shinoda, released Hybrid Theory, which went on to sell more than 10 million albums in the U.S. alone. Hahn, the band’s turntablist, found a second calling after co-directing the video for the group’s biggest hit “In The End,” which has since racked up 86 million YouTube views.
Now, after helming dozens of music videos for Linkin Park and other acts, he’s trying his hand as a feature film director. His debut, Mall, will hit theaters this fall. Distributed by Paragon Pictures, the movie stars Vincent D’Onofrio and Gina Gershon and centers on a fictional suburban shooting spree; it premiered at Nerd HQ last week.
The most interesting aspect of Mall, however, may have nothing to do with the plot or rollout plan, but rather its ramifications for future collaborations between the film and music industries. Much of the movie’s $1.3 million budget came from members of Linkin Park and from Rob Cavallo, chairman of Warner Bros. Records, the band’s home for its entire career.
“That was just an artistic extension of Joe’s vision,” says Cavallo of the film. “And I felt like I should be supportive if I could be. It’s a more esoteric script and a dark indictment of American culture. So when I had this opportunity to invest and be supportive, I took a chance on it.”
With physical sales and mp3 downloads losing ground to streaming every day, labels are under increasing pressure to justify the size of their cut of acts’ revenues. Their reasoning has long been that they’re investing in artists; supporting musicians’ forays into film could be one way for record labels to stay relevant.
Hahn was hoping to find that sort of attitude a few years back when he started looking for investors (“I pretty much raised the majority of it through relationships,” he says). He asked Cavallo if Warner Bros. would consider investing in the film. Though the company wasn’t interested, Cavallo himself volunteered.
“Creating a wider array of content based on our artists’ visions and ambitions was an important thing,” says Cavallo. “I think that with our new ownership … that’s more of a reality than ever. When I did this, it was before [billionaire] Len Blavatnik bought the company.”
Cavallo himself has a deep connection to the intermingling of film in music. He produced Alanis Morrissette’s “Uninvited” and the Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris” from the City of Angels soundtrack, among others; he also produced the soundtrack of the film adaptation of the musical Rent.
His father, Bob Cavallo, had a long career in the music business that began as a nightclub owner and included stretches managing acts including the Lovin’ Spoonful, Green Day and Prince. He helped find financing for the latter’s film debut in the early 1980s.
“When I was in college, I watched my dad produce and go to bat for Prince’s Purple Rain, which was an enormously exciting thing to watch happen,” says the younger Cavallo. “I wanted to eventually follow in my father’s footsteps in that regard.”
As an album, Purple Rain stands as one of barely 100 in history to earn the RIAA’s rare Diamond certification for sales of over 10 million units in the United States. One of the most recent: Hybrid Theory. And for acts like Linkin Park, whose latest effort The Hunting Party debuted at No. 3 on the charts but sold 110,00 copies in its opening week--compared to Meteora's 810,000 total in 2003--the silver screen represents another way to diversify.
To be sure, there are plenty of other musicians who’ve made a splash in the film world, from Elvis Presley to Rob Zombie to Nick Cave to Michael Jackson. Particularly in the music video era, these two areas of the entertainment world are more connected than ever.
“I think there are a lot of parallels and a lot of differences,” says Hahn. “[With videos], you want to capture the essence of the music and help people recognize whoever is making the music. With movies … you have to have a pretty rock-solid script. If the script is strong, you can really play around with ideas and allow people to be really creative, as long as they’re within the guidelines of what you, the director, are expecting.”
Even with a once-in-a-lifetime smash like Michael Jackson’s short film Thriller, though, the label only made a minimal investment; these days, most big-budget music videos are heavily supported by advertisers in exchange for product placement. But Cavallo is optimistic that old patterns can change.
“The relationship that an artist can have through a label has increased fifty-fold,” says Cavallo. “It’s creative potential, it’s marketing potential, it’s business potential. … It really helps when everyone is an expert in their field and thinks, on a weekly basis, about ways to get that artist out to the masses.”
As for Mall, it might fall short of Purple Rain, but that’s fine by Hahn.
“I’m really fortunate—it’s not easy, but I have these opportunities if I push hard enough, to make art with film and music for my career as long as I can,” he says. “That’s all I can hope for.”
For more about the business of music, check out my Jay Z biography Empire State of Mind and my new book Michael Jackson, Inc. You can follow me on Twitter & Facebook.
