If their newest music video is anything to go by, the Qualley sisters have a highly specific sense of humor. The 1980s pop-influenced visual was codirected by Rainsford and Margaret Qualley for Rainsford s new single, “Rendezvous.” Rainsford stars in the video alongside a highly stylized and accessorized elderly couple who lustily romp around a grassy knoll while she watches through binoculars from afar.
Inspiration came from an actual voyeuristic experience, says Rainsford, a former Miss Golden Globe and the elder of the two sisters. She had been taking a break from working in the studio one day when she and her writing partner Nick Dungo happened upon a mature couple enjoying a not-so-private moment in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. “They were making out with each other super hard-core and rolling around with each other in the grass,” says Rainsford. “At first, we were messing with them from a distance, playing [Marvin Gaye’s] ‘Let’s Get It On.’ ” Over time, though, those amorous elders proved to be “genuinely [inspirational]:” When Rainsford and Nick got back to the studio later that day, they wrote “Rendezvous.”
When it was time to create the video, Rainsford’s ideal collaborator was a no-brainer. She calls her sister Margaret “the most smart, talented, artistic, creative person in the world. . . I thought it would be really awesome if she wanted to direct the video.” She did, but as she had no previous experience directing a music video, they ended up directing it together. The entire process was essentially a family affair: Friends pitched in as drivers and movers, and they had to borrow their mother s car. The sisters did their own casting and styling, using Rainsford’s own vintage clothing (some sourced on Etsy, some from Goodwill) to outfit the cast. The flowing polka-dotted blouse that the romantic lead wears is from a vintage store in Paris a few years ago—Rainsford says that she still wears that particular shirt all the time.
The process, from start to finish, was something of a learning experience, but ultimately a liberating one, because, as Margaret says, usually working on this type of thing there’s “somebody telling you what you’re doing is too weird and bizarre. . . [but] when we were directing, there was no one to tell us that.”