My Hero

About

After his successful debut in the directors’ chair for ‘Monkey Wrench’ Dave returned to the hot seat for the ‘My Hero’ video.

Whilst many fans and members of the media jumped to what they believed was an obvious “Kurt Cobain!” conclusion on the meaning of the song Dave Grohl quickly corrected that notion when predictably asked by numerous journalists. “It's more about heroes that are ordinary” he would counter when asked. “My Hero was written as a celebration of the common man and his extraordinary potential”.

Principal filming took place on an unspecified street in South Central, Los Angeles, with a condemned apartment block on the street serving as the main location. Tenants had already left the apartments by the time filming commenced and Dave Grohl noted that it smelled “awful”, a large dead rat spotted in one area that had evidently been there a while.

The idea of an ordinary hero was naturally the basis for director Grohl’s video treatment - The premise would be to show an anonymous “common man” saving the day as a fire breaks out at an apartment building, becoming an “ordinary hero”.

The hero characters face is purposely never shown in the video to emphasise that he is an unknown hero to the wider world and the actor playing the role has never been revealed with Grohl referring to him as only “This kid named Johnny”, the character name.

The video begins with the anonymous lead character appearing from a nearby building and sprinting down the road to the apartment. In filming this opening scene, the camera operator was struggling to keep up with the man whilst carrying a Steadicam setup, so an ATV/Quad Bike had to be hired to get the required footage.

Through the course of the video Johnny continually returns to the apartment, first rescuing a baby, then a dog, and finally a photograph of the mother of the baby. In giving some small back story to the video Grohl noted that the mother is in love with Johnny but stopped short of confirming the paternity of the baby - “See that’s a little sketchy, don’t know, there needs to be a little mystery in this video”. On his final visit to the building Grohl’s face is seen singing on the television, which was something drummer Taylor Hawkins came up with, the sticks man also noting that he found the photo retrieval scene “pretty corny”.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Foo Fighters video without the band themselves being involved and so Dave conceived the idea of them performing the song inside each of the rooms as the man runs around the apartment. The hero would not acknowledge them however, insinuating that they were not actually there, more metaphorically celebrating the hero.

The sweat seen on the band members inside the rooms was meant to simulate the effects of the heat from the fire and was achieved by having a crew member regularly going around spraying them with water from a squirt bottle.

Grohl elected to film the video as if it were one continuous shot although ghost shots utilising the smoke from the fire appear to have been used to disguise any cuts. Hawkins later revealed that whilst filming took place only on a single day it was “the longest day ever, it felt like a year”, and took approximately ten to twelve hours to complete.

Both the baby and the dog have censor bars across their eyes which was not actually for privacy reasons but merely something Grohl thought would be amusing. “I was thinking it would be funny to scramble faces for no reason at all” he explained, noting that the black bars were meant to be temporary until a full pixelated effect could be added but he thought the initial bars were “even funnier” and left them as-is.

The closing scene sees the triumphant hero being celebrated by an onlooking crowd with the final elevated shot achieved by having the cameraman follow Johnny out of the building then step backwards onto a hidden crane which slowly elevated him above the crowd.

This was the only music video to feature guitarist Franz Stahl. The next music video, ‘Walking After You’, only featured Dave Grohl and by the time of the following video, ‘Learn to Fly’, Franz had left the band.