Inside the handcrafted world-building of Olivia Rodrigo’s The Cure music video

And he did. After earning a degree in graphic design in London and building props for theatre and event design, Liam turned to pop music, a conduit for all his curiosities. In the I Drink Wine music video, Adele is on a boat, drinking on a stylised river, surrounded by painterly, theatrical tableaux, all handcrafted. In Billie Eilish’s What Was I Made For?, tied to the Barbie soundtrack, the singer is in a domestic space carefully handling miniature doll clothes, before a storm disrupts everything.

In Olivia Rodrigo’s music video for The Cure, the handcrafted tradition endures. “Art direction is SO back,” is one of the most-liked comments on the video’s YouTube. In interviews, Olivia has said that the song is the thesis statement for her new album, You seem pretty sad for a girl so in love, which came out 12 June. The thesis is clear in The Cure: the long journey to finding one’s voice. Olivia plays a nurse, attempting to revive a broken heart in vain. Eventually, she pricks herself with a needle and begins to unravel: she bleeds red yarn; multiple red threads jut out of her body as she winces in pain. Other nurses wheel her in the operating room, until, in a twist, the camera pulls back to reveal that the hospital is a cardboard diorama, which the ‘real’, life-sized Olivia picks up, crushes underfoot, and walks away from.

The idea, Liam explains, stemmed from the directors, Jaime Gerin and Cat Solen. “Jaime even drew out these little storyboards of Olivia going to the hospital with the nurses and the unravelling with the yarn,” he says. “Cat comes from a stop-motion background, and her show, The Shivering Truth, explores stop-motion and clinical spaces. So, it was basically: How do we create this world that feels handmade but still tells the story, has this colour palette, and is in the world we’re creating for the album?”

The moodboard drew from a deliberately mixed set of references: the otherworldly staging of Björk’s videos, Michel Gondry’s handmade visual trickery, the desaturated, deadpan universe of Roy Andersson’s films, the stop-motion whimsy of Regina Spektor’s video for Us, and the Méliès-inspired theatricality of the Smashing Pumpkins’ Tonight, Tonight. For The Cure, there was only one rule: Everything in the video should, almost across the board, have a handmade touch. The walls and electrical wires would be made of cardboard, wood, and yarn, controlled with stop-motion. For the yarn, Liam and the directors examined over a dozen samples to get the right red, the right thickness. Olivia, despite being swamped with recording and performances, was deeply involved in selecting every element on set, including colours and textures that resonated with her. “The lab equipment is rented because we wanted this tactile feeling of glass and metal,” he says. “Because the whole thing with Olivia, and the song, is this softness meeting something a bit more severe and hard.”

The balance speaks to the story. Encased in cute pink-and-blue palettes, the music video’s story is darker than it looks: beating hearts go grey under needles, the nurse herself is unable to cure herself and bleeds red yarns. On Reddit, there are detailed fan theories about the symbolism. A post on r/OliviaRodrigo argues, among other things, that towards the end, when Olivia becomes a patient and six hearts are hooked onto her, it signifies how “she needs external hearts (sources of love) again, since her own heart (self-love) is not working well”. On the number of hearts itself, one of the comments on the post claims that it “represents the six romantic relationships” Olivia is rumoured to have had.

Liam, though, has focused on striking the balance between soft and severe in the set’s details, away from the labyrinthine corridors of fan theories. For the animatronic heart, a motorised, mechanical puppet that appears throughout the video, he found Erik Beck on Instagram, who was already building one. “We had this robotic shell and Sara Paquette, my lead fabricator, made the skin for it with felt so that it’d beat realistically.”

Cardboard was crucial. When Olivia finally crushes the diorama, it is revealed to have been made of it. When she is playing the guitar, it is a life-sized, intricately detailed cardboard guitar and not a basic prototype. The microphone she sings into is covered with a cardboard mesh. “Inherently, cardboard has this texture to it, and so, even when we were making the blinds in the hallway and the walls, we started coming up with a patchwork motif in pastel colours, a little rough around the edges,” Liam says. “It started feeling not too clinical and not too whimsical. It’s this mix in between, where you just feel the texture and this darker nature of the set. It was also exciting to use a pastel colour palette, which you’d think would be inherently happier, and contrast it with something a little sadder or darker, the brown of the cardboard.”

“The ending of the video is a testament to our director of photography, Chris Ripley, because there is the full-size set, the miniature of the operating room, the lights – all of it had to be lined up carefully on camera down to the last millimetre, so that when we gave it to post, they could match those two things,” Liam says. “We had to ensure that when she picks the room up, it doesn’t distort the image, doesn’t shake too much, so that we can keep those two things aligned, and it’s a seamless transition from one to the other.”

Regardless of the mind-numbing march of AI, Liam’s sets have always been handcrafted, from Adele drifting down a river to Billie Eilish among the dolls to Caroline Polachek pouring wine in a sun-warmed world of grapes and goblets. It’s all about the wonder that can only emerge from the human touch; it’s what he certainly felt on those Pirates of the Caribbean rides and watching, mouth agape, all the things Kate Bush did in her music videos – twirling in chiffon through fog, switching costumes mid-song, building rain machines in a field. “I hope people just get lost in The Cure,” he says. “My favourite stuff has always been the kind that lets me escape for a little bit; hopefully it will help others escape too.”