No Paparazzi, PleaseMark Pellington (Col ’84) makes mark in films, videos without hassles of celebrity
by Sarah Graham
He’s buddies with Bono and Cameron Crowe. He’s directed A-listers like Jeff Bridges and Rachel Weisz in feature films. He’s earned a lifetime achievement award for his music video work. But you wouldn’t look twice if you saw Mark Pellington (Col ’84) on the street.
Photo by Ken Allen c/o Monster Lighting:
ken@monsterlighting.com |
And that’s just fine with him.
"I’m completely unrecognizable," he says. "I would never want to be famous at the level of paparazzi, believe me. I did a short film with Demi Moore one time, and I saw her not even be able to walk down the street without photographers."
Pellington’s relative anonymity can be gauged by the several Web sites that get even his basic stats wrong: "Everyone expects me to be 5-5 and British, but I’m 6-5 and from Baltimore," he says and laughs.
This unconcern with appearances is striking coming from someone known in the industry for his visual style. But Pellington’s original interests were more audio than visual. He spent most of his undergraduate days in Charlottesville writing record reviews for the University Journal and deejaying for WTJU, hoping some day to work for a record company. His career gained momentum thanks to a chance meeting and a fledgling new art form.
"In the fall of my third year, I was at a Kinko’s and ran into this girl who had just interned for MTV," he remembers. "This was in ’82, so MTV was only a year old and was kind of exploding." Pellington became enthralled with the new music-video format and earned an internship at MTV simply by listing his favorite bands.
Over the next 25 years, Pellington helped set the standards of this medium with groundbreaking videos and projects for bands such as Pearl Jam and U2. His video work eventually put him in the director’s chair for big-budget motion pictures, most notably The Mothman Prophecies. Pellington has applied his distinctive directorial style to concert films, documentaries, experimental shorts and television series as well.
His film work took a different direction in 2004, when his wife, Jennifer, died after a brief illness. Pellington began searching for a hopeful, uplifting story and settled on Henry Poole is Here, a comedic drama (starring Luke Wilson and Cheryl Hines) about a man who learns he has six weeks to live. Slated for an April 2008 release, the movie promises to deliver the same unique vision and technical prowess that has drawn fans to his thrillers.
To top off his success, Pellington has something he believes is worth a hundred lifetime achievement awards: the ability to walk anonymously back into that Kinko’s without anyone suspecting how far his last visit took him.
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Pellington’s Greatest Hits
Video director:
Jeremy, Pearl Jam (1992)
Zoo TV Tour multimedia show, U2 (1992-1993)
Do You Realize? The Flaming Lips (2002)
Gravedigger, Dave Matthews (2004)
Best of You, Foo Fighters (2005)
Film director:
Arlington Road, starring Jeff Bridges and Tim Robbins (1999)
The Mothman Prophecies, starring Richard Gere and Laura Linney (2002)
U2 3D, IMAX concert film (coming spring 2008)
TV producer/director:
Buzz (1988), Homicide: Life on the Street (1993, 1997), The United States of Poetry (1996), Cold Case (2003-2007)
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