Jonah Hill Directs New Sara Bareilles Video

Sara Bareilles and Jonah Hill on set

Sara Bareilles via Twitter.com

It didn't take much to get actor Jonah Hill to agree to direct Sara Bareilles' forthcoming video for "Gonna Get Over You," which will be released sometime in the next few weeks. 

"We’ve known each other for a long time, and he wanted to foray into this world. I’m like, 'Um, yes please, do my video,'" Bareilles told Rolling Stone at the East Los Angeles supermarket where they were filming the video she describes as a "mish-mash of Grease and West Side Story."

Bareilles had no problem breaking her famous friend into the music video game. "There’s something really special about being someone’s first, like he’s a video virgin," she said. "I feel like I’m in new territory as well because I’m dancing for the first time, it’s a totally different thing I’ve never done."

Hill was inspired by Spike Jonze, whom he calls a hero and a friend. "His videos have informed a lot of the way I think visually, and music video direction is something I think will help make me a better director," he said.

On his wish list is a band with a completely different sound and aesthetic: Odd Future. "I would really want to do a hip-hop video next," he said. "I think there can be a lot more creativity involved in hip-hop videos and a lot of them look the same."

As for Bareilles, she has her own grand ambitions of who she'd like to work with next. "I want Baz Luhrmann," she said. "I want to do some crazy like Moulin Rouge-inspired overproduced spectacular."

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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