Green Day's label got pitches for the video from directors Mark Kohr, Roman Coppola and Kevin Kerslake, all of whom had done videos for the band. They rejected them all because they were too morbid, each one having something to do with death. Kohr, whose treatment had an undertaker putting makeup on a corpse, offered to make a video on the fly in the three days the band would be in New York. Kohr had done several Green Day videos by this point, including "
Basket Case" and "
When I Come Around," and had a great rapport with them.
In a Songfacts
interview with Kohr, he explained how it came together and what it symbolizes. "I tagged along with them for three days, and it was incredible," he said. "They did two or three television shows. They were on
120 Minutes with Matt Pinfield. They were on
Conan, and then they did a show at Tower Records and they did a show at Roseland, so they were very busy, and it was really fun.
The show at Roseland was the last thing. It was an incredible show and it ended with the song 'Time Of Your Life,' which was just wonderful. And when we were on the
Conan show, we were waiting there in the greenroom and Conan was in there playing the guitar with Billie. He's a really great guy, a real social guy. Conan went off to do the show, and Billie said, 'OK, I want everyone out of the room except for Mike and Tré and Mark because we're going to talk about the video. I'm going to come up with an idea.'
We hadn't talked about it at all. Billie said, 'Maybe we make kind of like a Pogues video with people who are working-class people that are in their scene. They look really great and it looks really beautiful even though it's really ordinary, and it's kind of like they're drunk.'
And that was it.
Bang. That was as much as I needed.
I worked on the idea and wasn't too crazy about the drunk part because it's such a fricking beautiful song, but all the other stuff I allowed. Then I remembered there's a Wim Wenders film called
Wings Of Desire that's about an angel. Like, this guy is an angel and can move around and listen to people's thoughts and hear their conversations and so forth. It's a really beautiful film.
So how did he move around? He kind of pops around, but there's this one part of the film where they do this hand-held thing with a slow shutter speed where they run around really quick at night, like here's a person - vroom - and here's another person - vroom - here's another person - vroom. And that little bit, it just hung with me. I felt like it was a metaphor for connection, so I was playing with that idea.
I defined it like this. I said, 'There's moments in your life - and they can be really ordinary - where everything seems really vibrant and alive and open and it's just clear. You are connected.'
Later I came to hear from different philosophers that the term for that is 'satori,' which is the feeling of universal connectedness and the clarity and beauty in that. So I was working with that. All these people are connected in their consciousness and in that kind of feeling of satori, and the individual is fully connected. So the visual technique and the metaphor had to arise that feeling in the viewer.
I took a big f--king risk because it was a lot of money. We had three days to shoot and each one of those scenes, except for the girl who we open with, is only seen one time, and yet when we shot it we were moving from location to location shooting with 35mm cameras, dolly tracks, high-speed film, going through the camera and then hand-held and doing really nice lighting in these ordinary situations. I was trying to have reflections be seen through the windows and so forth, so there's just that little bit of information, and then sew it all together in this piece.
When we were shooting, the assistant director would say, 'Mark, are you sure you don't want to shoot any coverage? You don't want to shoot anything else?' I was like 'No, it's not that kind of video.' I didn't shoot any coverage because I didn't want to spend that kind of time and I didn't want to lock myself into that creative, so I took the risk and luckily it all worked out, and as far as my career as a music video director, that was my greatest gift because afterward the visual technique showed up in television, in commercials and in movies. Art is a conversation, and we all add to the conversation and we all take from the conversation as it has preceded us, so I was really honored that other people were inspired enough to integrate that technique and that look into their pieces as well."
