Behind the Scenes With Beyonce #Beyonce #YONCE #JakeNava

Jake Nava on Bey’s vision for Beyoncé:

Having been lucky enough to keep working with her over the years on different videos, on different albums, I think that Beyoncé wanted to make sure that there was a kind of variety expressed. Perhaps the view at the end of seeing all of them gets a real diverse sense of everything she can be.

On having a younger Beyonce sing ‘Grown Woman’ in the video

The idea [was to make] a video which kind of tracked that development in her age and the different stages in her life, but this idea of kind of making the kids sing the song from now using a special effect, became kind of like a very important creative challenge for us. All the stuff like her dressed in Tommy Hilfiger in the bedroom is all things that we created now and just used costume and art direction to make it feel like the past. What was amazing about those scenes was she just looks so young in them. Her ability to act like as she would’ve at that age is what really bought those scenes to life.

On “Partition”:

When Beyoncé called me about working on the Partition video, Beyoncé was sort of seeking to be even more risque than she’d been in the past. The fact that Jay Z was in the video was really exciting. She wanted to kind of make it feel seductive and while I tried to capture and create a bit of genuine intimacy between them.

In the scene where they are in the back of the car, we actually had to do it really quickly because he was in the middle of doing a tour in London and we were actually filming in Paris. So we had to kind of like a police escort waiting for him to jump out and get on a helicopter and go and do his gig.

I think that Beyoncé’s got a really good instinct of how she wants to have herself presented now more than ever. Although she’s famous for becoming a mum recently, that doesn’t stop you from being the sexiest woman you can be.

On working with Bey all these years:

How I feel still inspired to work with her is because she’s still clearly one of the most interesting talented artists in the world. No matter what idea I may bring to the party, she steps up as much, if not more, in terms of what she brings to it. And that’s kind of what you want from an actor or an artist. You want them to have something that is special to offer and you do your best to capture it in a way that is appropriate to the idea or the atmosphere of the soul.