Deborah Harry Does Not Like Interviews

The film—

Blondie’s Debbie Harry endures years of superficial, tedious, and demeaning questions from journalists until she devises a brilliant way to turn interviews on their head. Directed by Meghan Fredrich, this is Public Interest Productions' first short film.

The look—

The digitized copies of quickly-degrading magnetic media that comprise the film tell a story of the state of our cultural archives. Rather than laboriously polishing the artifacts away, we embraced them, letting them provide additional context.

The identity—

For the film's promotional materials, we wanted to play up the superficial focus continuously placed on Debbie's image, objectifying her iconic looks to draw attention to the same behavior from her interviewers. 

Initially, I spent some time trying to create the film's key image through photomontage.  After chatting with our amazing photographer, he was confident we could achieve the concept entirely in-camera. He was right: the image is virtually unretouched.

We found the heavily saturated Chiron look from the early 70s fits perfectly with the overall look of the material. VFX for the film was limited to simple color grading, VHS transitions, and retouching of watermarks added by some of the amateur archivists.