“This will be beautiful, romantic, soft, and nostalgic.”
That’s how director Sophie Muller began her two-page treatment for the music video for Gwen Stefani’s song “Cool,” which premiered on MTV 20 years ago this week, on June 30, 2005. The fourth single from her solo debut, Love. Angel. Music. Baby., it was warmly received and charted well but was dwarfed by the album’s aughts-defining hits like “Hollaback Girl” and “Rich Girl.” Those were dance-floor bangers whose glossy videos drove home her Harajuku–girls–meets–Vivienne Westwood aesthetic at full throttle.
“Cool,” meanwhile, was a synthy, mid-tempo ballad about finding peace with an ex years later (“After all that we’ve been through, I know we’re cool”). But the track has slowly risen in stature, thanks in large part to its evocative, Lake Como–set video that now ranks as Stefani’s third most viewed on YouTube.
Written by Stefani and Dallas Austin, it was clear at the time that the song was about Tony Kanal, her former lover and No Doubt bandmate with whom she remained close, bound by creative duty and deep admiration. Muller had won an MTV Video Music Award for directing the video for that band’s 1996 hit “Don’t Speak,” another Stefani-Kanal breakup ballad, making her the obvious choice to helm “Cool.”
“We had a history of making emotional videos together, and I remember that we wanted to make a mini movie,” Muller told Vogue last week. They went for authenticity by setting it in Stefani’s ancestral home of Italy, with the singer originally meant to play a glamorous actress returning to her native village. To really make it personal, they also cast Erin Lokitz, Kanal’s then girlfriend (now wife), as the ex’s new partner. “Having Erin just seemed logical, but to have Tony in it would have been really, really weird,” Muller explained.
A few tweaks later, what resulted was—and remains—a breathtaking short film that complicates the song’s surface happiness, adding layers of poignancy through match cuts intertwining past and present, contentment and longing.
It opens with an expanded instrumental intro, requested by Muller to make use of their gorgeous main setting: the 19th-century Villa Erba, built by the Italian director Luchino Visconti ’s maternal grandfather. A man and woman walk nervously across its lush gardens toward Stefani, smiling tightly at its doors. After some charged pleasantries, he stumbles into their hostess; this triggers brief flashbacks to their younger selves, smiling and in love on a lakeside dock. The song then begins in earnest, and the video settles into its impressionistic groove: two timelines constantly collapsing into each other by moments and objects that prompt memories both painful and joyous.
Below, Muller shares with Vogue her closely held memories of the shoot—and some even more closely guarded on-set photos and storyboard frames.
I knew that Gwen was a really good actress but not in a straightforward way, like playing Shakespeare. She’s an amazing video actress. My proof is always this shot in “Don’t Speak,” where she’s holding an orange as she’s being photographed. She sees the band looking at her, pissed off, and she’s smiling for the photographer before her face falls, and you see that she feels terrible and guilty. That close-up of her face is really subtle, and that was what I based the whole concept of the “Cool” video on: her ability to do looks. The emotion comes not so much from the singing but from her look.
My influences are obviously films, especially from the 1950s and ’70s, but there weren’t any conscious references for the video. I wanted to allude to that time when filmmaking language was innocent and soft, not overly sexual. If anything, the person I copy all the time is Hitchcock: the camera work, colors, and design of his films. That, combined with romantic Italian cinema and a blonde female lead in ’50s suits. But Gwen and I both had a love of The Sound of Music, and one shot alludes to that, which is where they’re standing at the gates of the mansion. That looks a bit like the one from the movie.
It was a two-day shoot. The whole first day—the past scenes—was shot on 16 millimeter, and it was very quick: Get on the bike, go in the room, go into the café, run around. The second day, we shot inside on 35 millimeter, and it was really precise and really hard. There was a lot of, How will we finish? But everyone was literally at the top of their game, right at that moment in time. Lots of people came from Gwen’s world. Her brother was there, filming behind the scenes, because that’s what he does, and a photographer came to take pictures of the set. I remember her saying, “I just can’t believe it. I could approve every single one. Everything looks amazing.”
Originally, Gwen was going to have a partner in it. It was gonna be two couples, and you weren’t gonna see her husband—it was going to be just his hand or something. But then we thought, Oh, this is so stupid. Let’s get rid of the husband. We wanted to lean into the idea that [the ex] should be an Italian actor but eventually went with a Spanish one [Daniel González]. And then it was, Well, Erin is an actress, let’s use Erin. They were friendly, and Gwen and Tony were friendly. Having Erin just felt logical, you know? It wasn’t very hard directing them because they knew what they were doing. And Erin was great because all she had to do was be someone who was witnessing it all for the first time.
You can do a lot with a head turn. If someone does that and then you show what they’re looking at, you’ve created a story. The match cuts came from the idea of: How do we portray the past and present without being crass? My favorite shot—I’m so proud of it, and it’s storyboarded, which is what blew my mind—is when the waiter puts the spaghetti and meatballs down and it cuts with Gwen putting biscuits down in the present. I storyboarded all the connections: the hands, the meatballs, the teacups with their lips on them. I worked with one of the best storyboard artists ever, Glyn Dillon, who no longer does it because he’s so successful doing something else. He helped me come up with all those ideas.
Everyone loved it at the time, but it wasn’t a bigger hit. If you read the comments on YouTube now, it’s really amazing. I don’t read comments, but these are so profound. People are saying they went to Como on their honeymoon because of the video and commenting all the things it’s meant to them. I just could not believe it. I know some people love music videos, but this one touches people in a really weird place. They all cry when they watch it. I didn’t expect that.
Of all the people I’ve worked with, the crew here just gave their best performance. It looks incredible. The cinematography is amazing, the art, styling, everything. And an interesting fact is that it was Gwen’s cheapest video because it didn’t have the Harajuku girls and they cost a fortune. I am genuinely proud of it, and people absolutely love it.