Watch even a handful of Scholfield’s videos and his propensity for movement, dance and choreography is obvious. Is there a link? “My mum was a dancer,” he explains. “And also I was a very graceless B-Boy. All power moves in breakdancing and no uprock or toprock. I was less good at it, but always into the idea of dance and I saw a lot of stuff growing up, contemporary dance, that influenced me. But I have always been interested in it as a form of expression and how you use dance to make feeling or use choreography to make feeling.”
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Like many directors who have found a career in music videos, Henry Scholfield grew up on a diet of MTV. It was mostly thanks to his friend Benji, who had access to the channel. Scholfield would go around to his house even when Benji wasn’t there (Benji’s mum would let him in) and he’d absorb it all. “I would watch music video after music video, and sit there just waiting for my favourite ones to come back around,” he remembers. Those include, amongst others, “anything Gondry. You’d have to just sit closer to the screen. It was like watching magic in some of those videos.” Jonathan Glazer, too, namely his video for Unkle and Thom Yorke’s track, Rabbit in Your Headlights. “I was curious because it wasn’t like film, it wasn’t like anything you saw,” an experience echoed by plenty of YouTube commentors. “Spike Jonze as well, obviously.” But above all else? “99 Problems is my favourite video of all time.”
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