Blink-182 is famously one of the most immature chart-toppers in pop-punk history. Needless to say, with music videos depicting them running through the streets naked like dang freaks and releasing albums like Take Off Your Pants And Jacket, the band didn’t have the air of prestige that calls to hot-shot movie directors. Let alone ones that appear as self-serious as M. Night Shyamalan did in the early 2000s.
And yet, on a recent episode of the Apple Music 1 series After School Radio, Mark Hoppus, hosting his former bandmate Tom DeLonge, got to talking about the 2002 M. Night Shyamalan film Signs and how they asked Shyamalan to direct a Blink-182 video.
Blink was plugged into the movie world back then, thanks to MTV. In the early 2000s, Hoppus said, MTV enlisted the band to interview celebrities about upcoming movies. So Hoppus interviewed the cast of Austin Powers: Goldmember, including Mike Myers, Verne Troyer, and, oh yeah, Beyoncé. Meanwhile, DeLonge interviewed Mel Gibson, promoting the 2002 M. Night Shyamalan film Signs, which is pretty much perfect considering Tom’s interest in UFOs.
Later in the conversation, Hoppus remembers the band running into M. Night Shymalan in a hotel in Japan. Mark recalls Tom saying, “I’m going to go ask him to direct a Blink 182 video.” At the time, M. Night Shyamalan, hot off movies like The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, was still one of the biggest directors in Hollywood. It was a pre-Lady In The Water world when people didn’t laugh when his name came on the screen. “Within half an hour, we’re all sitting together and he’s coming up with ideas for a Blink video,” said Hoppus. “And I mean, he did come up with a whole treatment and everything. It was going to cost, whatever it was, $20 million, but I mean, just on your gumption or I don’t know, no fucks to give, just walk up to somebody and say, ‘Hey, I want you to direct a Blink video.’”
The typically low budgets of Blink music videos might’ve turned Shyamalan off, DeLonge theorized. “I think when he found out what music video budgets really were, he was like, ‘this is so beneath me,’” said DeLonge. “No, he didn’t say that, but of course, he was like, ‘I’m not going to do this, this is a nightmare.’”
Who knows what song the band had in mind for Shyamalan—“Aliens Exist” seems like the obvious choice. But who wouldn’t want to see M. Night’s take on some classic Blink, like “Carousel” It would be quite the twist to make a music video for a song that came out a decade earlier. Oh, well, old concert videos will have to suffice.