The Blinkink director explains how his personal experience of OCD fuelled his outrageous Man vs Fly comic-horror.

Willl Wightman's debut music video is something to behold - but probably not if you're of a sensitive disposition. 

The young director, who has already combined music and humour in his work - like his graduation film Heart Failure, essentially a self-written mini-musical about twentysomething relationships, and Deliciously Predictable, his film for US potato brand Ore Ida - breaks his music video duck for Irish DJ Tommy Holohan & Megra's old school rave tune Show Me The Sky by making a fearlessly gross comedy about primal fear and human vulnerability. 

As unrestrained in its imaginative violence as an old-school cartoon, Wightman's video features Jared (played by Hamilton Charles) a recovering obsessive-compulsive disorder sufferer who is about to experience a major relapse due to the appearance of a pesky fly. 

Jared becomes determined to remove the fly from his pristine home, but the fly has other ideas: we witness the vile insect enter Jared's head, via his right ear and, now played a man in fly mask and wings, advance towards his victim's brain. Jared's response, pouring cleaning fluid into his earhole is just the first extremely painful step to his abject submission at the hands' of the fly. It's a very cruel fate for poor Jared, and it's played for big, bad taste laughs. 

We talked to Will WIghtman about the video, and discovered that in an era where the instinct to play safe is stronger than ever, this bold, scurrilous work derived from his own experience of the same condition that essentially seals Jared's fate.

He just needed to get it out there...

Above: Will Wightman on set of the Show Me The Sky video

I love mental comedy music videos from the Nineties and Noughties - that was definitely an inspiration.

PROMONEWS: How did the project start? Was there a brief that suggested that Tommy Holohan was looking for an outrageous comedy horror for his Show Me The Sky video? 

WILL WIGHTMAN: I’ve had this loose concept buzzing around my head for a good while now, but Tommy’s music really unlocked it for me. I actually wrote the video to another one of his tracks a year ago. The timing didn’t work out that time, but when he came back round with this amazing new EP I jumped at it.

I love the energy and cinematic quality of Tommy’s music. His tracks often evolve through different motifs and paces, in a way that’s quite rare for dance music. It’s so perfect for telling a story with different emotional beats, which is what drew me to his work. That and they're also just wicked dance tracks obviously. 

[Being OCD] is not just about keeping your room tidy and washing your hands.

And what was the starting point for your Man vs Fly comedy - and when did you realise you needed to go to extreme lengths in showing one’s worst fears via a particularly vindictive insect? 

I've wanted to make a project inspired by my OCD for a little while now. There's a lot of misconceptions about it, so I wanted to talk about it in a way that was fun and not overly preachy. 

It's not just about keeping your room tidy and washing your hands. My experience of the condition mostly involves spending full weekends convincing myself that the mole on my neck is 100% going to kill me in the next 3-6 business days. 

That's where the idea started really, following a character who always believes the worst outcome is the only possible thing that can happen. Then, I just really ran with that. It's inspired by one of my fears about insects in my ear that I had as a kid (/fully grown adult). 

The head and the wings were the key elements, then making the rest of him human added so much comedy.

Like the music this seems to hark back to a past era, when off-the-wall comic ideas were more common in music videos. Was that a part of your thinking? Were there conversations about how extreme you could make it?

I really love some of those mental comedy music videos from the Nineties and Noughties, so that was definitely an inspiration for this. People take music videos too seriously a lot of the time I think. This is fun music, so we wanted to make a fun video!

Actually we had to keep an eye on that all the way through the process - making sure it never got too dark or too sad. We kept adding little beats of levity right into the last few days of the edit so we always kept a toe in the comedy sphere while still having that really gritty edge.

That being said, this video is still definitely not for everyone!

It’s a role that requires 100% commitment. Harrison absolutely delivered.

The story is propelled by cutaways to Google searches and medical diagrams. So any factual basis for the horrible events that ensue?

This is definitely something that happens for real! Up until the Ratatouille-style body control... you never know though!

It’s a great performance from your lead actor. Who is he and why did you cast him? Does he have any background in creating self-destructive, obsessive characters?

Harrison is a wicked comedy talent. I'd seen him in a few shorts and I just loved this unhinged and manic energy that he could bring. (I should add for the record that Harrison is not like that in real life; he's lovely.)

There were a lot of different performance gears that we needed to switch between to make this work, from the out-and-out comedy beats to the more intense emotional moments and the much more physical almost choreographed movement at the end when the Fly has taken control.

Above: Concept art for the fly character in the Show Me The Sky video, by artist Darius Bristow.

Above: Members of the art department team prep the Fly - played by George Osman - on set. 

When casting this, I was looking for someone who was prepared to absolutely throw themselves into the insanity of what we were trying to create. It’s a role that requires 100% commitment. Harrison absolutely delivered. I think he’s a star to be honest with you. 

And the Fly is genuinely horrible, of course. How did you transform that actor into the creature?

Thank you! The idea of the character was to create this theatrical exaggerated version of how a hypochondriac  might imagine a fly. If you're finding him horrible, then we succeeded!

One of the biggest challenges with the project was trying to decide how to bring the fly to life. That fly-to-human ratio was tough but crucial I think. He needed to be clearly a fly, but also a character with expressive, human features that helped him have that personality. Also, it needed to be a character we could actually make on the cheap.

The whole video rests on the relationship between Jared and the fly, but the two characters were never on set at the same time.

In the end, the head and the wings felt like the key elements. Then making the rest of him human just added so much comedy. Lani, one of our incredible prop makers, built the mask and wings and then we just dirtied up our actor and got a nice pair of big manky pants and a bit of gold jewellery. 

When and where did you shoot the video and were there any particularly difficult challenges to overcome to make it all work?

Certainly the most unique challenge of the shoot was trying to bridge the gap between our characters and their worlds. The whole video rests on the relationship between Jared and this fly, but the two characters were never on set at the same time.

Directing both actors and my team to always be thinking about the character we weren’t filming, was actually really integral to making these two different worlds not feel entirely separate from one another.

Hopefully we pulled it off, but you’ll have to be the judge of that!

• Will Wightman is a director based at Blinkink in London - more of his work here