A man spends a restless night plagued by the presence of a woman who remains elusively out of his reach in Fred Rowson Why Dont You Answer? promo.

The London based director took his treatment lead for the promo from the powerful images evoked by the Friendly Fires’ track:

I thought the track was really striking: its production has a sound that wouldn’t be out of place on the soundtrack to some big nocturnal L.A. crime drama, like Drive or Heat, but the song’s central question — ‘why don’t you answer?’ — sounded to me like the kind of question you’d find in an early 20th Century British ghost story. So the synthesis seemed like a natural one: both forms share a kind of male ennui. It’s M.R. James meets Michael Mann.

To capture this otherworldly atmosphere Rowson experimented with the use of slightly retro effects such as slow optical zooms and cross-fades and rigidly adhere to the discipline of only using ‘trick shots’ which could be achieved in camera with a single take. Some of the shots took a fair amount of setup comparative to their onscreen time such as the underwater shot (which you can see below) – which took 40 minutes to setup but occupies a mere two seconds of screen time, but which Rowson assures me was “Totally worth it!”

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