Paul Hunter can still vividly remember the conversation he had with D’Angelo and the singer’s then-manager Dominique Trenier when planning his breakthrough video for “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” off his 2000 second album Voodoo.
“We talked about how great the song was and how much of a great place he was in,” the acclaimed music video director tells Rolling Stone. “The goal was to make a stripped-down, unfiltered music video of D’Angelo performing the song in a really honest way. We wanted to light him beautifully and just make it very honest and raw.”
Hours after the world learned that Michael D’Angelo Archer had died of cancer at age 51, Hunter, one of the most influential hip-hop and R&B directors who’s worked with Mariah Carey, Aaliyah, and Missy Elliott, among many others, is still processing the news. “We lost a really beautiful soul,” he says. “And someone who really gave a lot to the world, to the community, to the culture.”
Hunter, alongside Trenier, is responsible for the singer’s most memorable video — Rolling Stone placed it at Number Seven on our 100 Greatest Music Videos — and the one that cemented him as a sex symbol to complement his visionary virtuosity.
“It was really simple: We lit him with a soft top light and had him on the turntable, so it was difficult to have the camera move around him and keep him lit a certain way,” Hunter says. “It was actually two shots weaved together. The camera essentially stayed in one place, and then we rotated D and the light moved in a way that kept him lit right.”
Upon its release, the video, which many thought featured the singer naked — He wore low-slung pants just out of frame — became a cultural juggernaut and launchpad for a thousand thinkpieces dissecting every aspect of the clip. As Rolling Stone contributing writer Touré noted in his tribute to the singer, “The video hit the culture like a neutron bomb and titillated everyone. Was this the best-looking man alive? Maybe.” “Initially, to him, [nearly being naked] seemed completely bonkers,” Trenier told Spin in 2008. “He didn’t quite get what I was saying. He kept going, ‘What do you mean, naked?’” As fans began to yell at shows for D’Angelo to take his shirt off, the sex symbol status proved both a gift and a curse, causing the singer, in part, to retreat from the public eye for years.
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Hunter is understandably reticent to discuss the video’s aftermath, preferring to focus on the singer himself. “We shot it, and that was pretty much it for me,” he says. “It’s a little tough because we just lost a really amazing artist and wonderful soul. So I think for me, that’s the feeling here.
“He was just a really chill, laid-back guy,” he adds. “Talked a lot about family and his grandmother and his love for the music that he was making, his artistry. His performance reflected the power of the song in a real way. Very truthful.”
In 2012, Hunter told GQ that despite the video featuring the near-naked Adonis-chiseled singer, his direction was “completely opposite” to anything sexual. “It was about his grandmother’s cooking,” he said. “Think of your grandmother’s greens, how it smelled in the kitchen. What did the yams and fried chicken taste like? That’s what I want you to express.”
“My approach was to think about the things that were most important to him,” he tells Rolling Stone today. “His early memories of what was warm to him or made him feel good and comfortable. And that was times with his family, times with his grandmother, her cooking. That’s what he enjoyed. So I said, ‘Well, that’s how we should approach this.’”
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“We are saddened that he can only leave dear memories with his family, but we are eternally grateful for the legacy of extraordinarily moving music he leaves behind,” the singer’s family said in a statement. “We ask that you respect our privacy during this difficult time but invite you all join us in mourning his passing while also celebrating the gift of song that he has left for the world.”
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Following his death, Beyoncé, Lauryn Hill, Missy Elliott, Nile Rodgers and many more musicians paid tribute to the musician. “You were the pioneer of Neo-soul and that changed and transformed rhythm & blues forever,” Beyoncé wrote. “We will never forget you.”
For Hunter, “Untitled” removed all the artifice and visual frosting, especially in a Total Request Live era dominated by splashy, extravagant videos. It remains one of the most striking clips ever filmed, with its sparseness representing the singer’s most direct visual link to his fans. “We thought it’d be great to just keep it to a very simple execution that would allow the audience to connect to D’Angelo,” he says. “Let’s make it so that there’s not a lot of cuts. Let’s make it about who he was so we could capture his soul in a very honest way. It was a really great way to capture an artist and put the audience front and center and we had a front-row seat.”
