Chris Cornell’s final music video for “The Promise” was posthumously released today, and the director of the video said it has made everyone he has shown it to cry or stay silent for 10 minutes.
Director Meiert Avis discussed the video in a new Rolling Stone interview.
Avis sent footage to Cornell while working on it, and Cornell had a simple message: Make it less depressing and more optimistic.
“It’s very hard to put the pieces together for me,” Avis tells Rolling Stone. “I’ve had many people break down when they watch the video. They either cry or are silent for 10 minutes.”
“When you destroy whole cultures and fragment families, you’re left with psychic scars that last hundreds of years,” says Avis, who helmed videos for Cornell’s 2008 song “Ground Zero” and Audioslave’s 2002 hit “Like a Stone.” “When you’re part of that history, it’s very unnerving when you see it happen in front of you. There’s a cognitive dissonance where we’ll spend billions of dollars protecting the habitats of a certain kind of frog – the ecosystem is very important – but at the same time, the human ecosystem is completely ignored and a 10,000-year-old culture is considered worthless. That’s what we’re trying to address in the video.”
The Promise (Official Video) by Chris Cornell on VEVO.
