Love The Way You Lie director Joseph Kahn sat down to talk Megan Fox with Vibe. Kahn admits:
I initially thought it was a long shot to try and cast Megan Fox for the lead role. Seriously, before every video you think to yourself ‘let’s cast a girl like Megan Fox.
Fox accepted the role with out hesitation on the account of her being a huge Eminem fan., Shocked by the ease of pulling such an in-demand starlet, Joseph used the opportunity to create his own story rather than base the characters on the artists. Kahn explained:
We wanted to make a specific story about two people—Meg and Dom—not a video that was representative of all couples or all domestic violence situations. I’m not saying that all couples fight this way. I just want people just to be able to identify with the characters and recognize that they’ve seen relationships like this where two people are together that are completely wrong for each other and things spiral out of control.Kahn managed shoot both Eminem and Rihanna’s part in one day before going back and completing the video with Fox and Monaghan. The director also told VIBE he doesn’t think the video would have made as big of an impact without Megan’s performance.
Megan was the key to this video. I feel like people constantly pick on her because she’s so beautiful but I’ll tell you as a director the reason why their scenes in the video feel so real is because in the moment they were real. When the camera stopped you could see their bodies still shivering and their breath.
The scene where Dom smashes through the wall, Megan keeps her face there and reacts to the camera, instead of turning away from his fist, which would be the natural reaction but the audience would get denied her facial expressions. It was an incredible act of vulnerability and allowed the audience into the moment. That’s the difference between and actress and movie star.
Mind you, Eminem and Rihanna shattered Youtube records last Thursday (Aug. 5) for the most views in a 24-hour period with their visual ride for Love The Way You Lie, bringing in over 6.6 million hits on the first day of its release.
Source: Vibe
