Filming John Maus requires conviction. His presence as an artist both on and off stage is fully devotional, deliberate, and uninterested in irony. If you watch him perform or listen to his songs, you’ll see someone much more committed to emotion than image. That’s his ‘Hysterical Body’ philosophy; a radical embodiment of music to push past the superficiality that clings to everything now. To capture that takes someone behind the camera with a shared sensibility, an understanding of John’s intention no matter how intense the delivery. 

Blake James Reid, a New York-based filmmaker and music video director, never tried to temper that energy or translate it into something more palatable. Their collaboration spans the short film The Man Without Qualities, and the music videos for Disappears and Pick It Up from Maus’ latest album Later Than You Think. Across all three projects, identity never sits still, expression slips into imitation, and reverence can read a lot like theft.

For Blake, that fascination with imitation inadvertently led to his collaboration with Maus. Long before he reached out professionally, he discovered John’s music the way most younger siblings discover anything: through their cool older brother. If his brother had We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves on repeat in 2011, so did Blake. 

Years later, after moving to New York and beginning to make films of his own, Blake saw Maus’ stage presence with a more cinematic eye. He realized that Maus was someone who just needed to be in a film. So he wrote one for him.

How did you first reach out to John?
I didn’t know him, I just sent his manager a script and said, “I wrote this role for John. Anybody else would be doing a second-rate imitation. I won’t make it without him.” And, well, John liked it, then one day I got a “maus” on my Zoom screen.

That project became The Man Without Qualities, the short film that sparked their partnership. A few months after wrapping, Blake received an email from Maus’ label praising the film and asking him to direct a music video for John’s song Disappears.

That’s like, a dream email to receive.
I swear to you, I thought it was spam. I was like, “What kind of sick joke is this?” It was everything that I wanted. Because I was specifically interested in focusing on his hysterical body. And I thought, if I could do a video for any of the songs on his album, I would’ve chosen Disappears too.

WATCH DISAPPEARS

There’s an absurdist quality to the video that feels lighter than the song itself. What were you hoping anyone watching the video would feel that might be different from just listening to the song? 
I look for things that make me smile or laugh, even if it’s not funny, just overpowering. John talks a lot about, with his hysterical body, how some people don’t know how to interpret it on stage. How this generation, our generation, thinks about it in an ironic or absurdist way, even though he’s being completely sincere. The video is similar. It was meant to capture John’s hysterical body. It’s as if John Maus’ on-stage presence is not only on stage, but his everyday existence.  

How much of that hysterical body is performance, and how much of it is just him?
John is an on/off switch. And when he’s on, he does everything to the maximum. When we’re filming the video I was like, “Okay, John, you don’t have to punch yourself in this take. We got a lot of you hitting yourself. It looks great.” He goes, “Okay, Blake.” “Action.” Immediately punches himself in the head. 

You’re a narrative filmmaker first and foremost, this was your first music video. How did you bridge those two art forms together when approaching Disappears?
I spent a lot of time looking at the lyric sheet, and looking at them very literally. He’s talking about “turn us into something light,” he’s talking about “Satan, Satan lies.” So, I was just thinking about simplicity and pretty much just trying to make Star Wars. All the bad guys in red, John in blue. There’s an angelic light around him at all times, reminiscent of the Later Than You Think album cover. To me, this is John’s most spiritual album, so I just wanted it to be simple and feel like you’re either for the good or you’re for the evil.

How do you balance inserting your own interpretation versus keeping John’s original meaning intact?
As a director, I’m always in service to the idea more so than my own ego driving anything. There’s an extra layer added when you’re doing a music video for an artist because you’re in service to them and their song as well, but you just align with those around you and follow the North Star. Luckily, John and I were on very similar wavelengths. It was all about understanding: Where is John coming from? What is his on-stage presence like? What does it feel like as an audience member? And then being in service to capture that. I felt like more of a documentarian in that way.

In the Disappears video, Maus knows exactly who he is and surrenders to it. There’s clarity in devotion. But in his first collaboration with Blake, the short film The Man Without Qualities, he appears far more destabilized. 

Blake directs Maus and performance artist Brian Belott in a My Dinner with Andre-esque two-hander. The seven-minute film centers on a man (Maus) who studies another so closely that admiration becomes blatant imitation. Identity is presented as something assembled from visible parts: style, taste, posture, and gatekept with paranoia. In our singularity-obsessed culture, the short film makes identity feel like something you have to consume rather than something you simply are.

WATCH THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES

The dynamic between John and Brian starts light and playful, then turns unsettling as it goes on. Why did you choose to frame imitation as something predatory rather than flattering?
I don’t think imitation is flattering, so I wanted to make a film that dealt with imitation in this ‘I don’t know who I am, so I need to latch onto something,’ type of way. Especially in this world of consumption, it’s so easy to pull from so many different places and not even know where you’re pulling from. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I also wanted to confront this animal kingdom territorial instinct. Why do we feel the need to gatekeep so much? Why do people hide what brand of shoes they wear? You didn’t invent those shoes. So the film takes on this double meaning; John is the man without qualities. He has no identity and needs to latch onto someone. Then Brian becomes this man without qualities, because his identity was eliminated. He’s eaten up.

Where’s the line between imitation and theft for you as an artist?
For me, there’s a big difference between stealing and imitation. It’s so cliche, but it really relates to that quote, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” What that means for me is, if you take a scene idea from Inherent Vice, you take a colour palette from Philip Guston, and you take a sense of rhythm from Dean Blunt, and you put that all together, now it’s its own thing. Now you’re articulating your taste in a way that you’re Frankenstein-ing ideas together, and if it has enough substance then you have the full flesh and blood.

Is this fear of being copied something you think is amplified now?
We all want to be the prettiest girl in the room. And we live in an era obsessed with individuality and main character syndrome. People morph into different versions of themselves all the time. I’ve always been curious about this idea that you can buy or subscribe to someone’s identity, you can follow someone’s taste like it’s an instruction manual. If you do this, wear this, talk like this. I could go on your Instagram right now and start posting exactly how you post. Then it makes you reinterpret your own self, and you’re like, “Wait, what is my thing?” And then it’s this constant cycle of paranoia of, like, “Who am I?” And then you become like Wes Anderson, where you’re a caricature of yourself because you’ve doubled down so much. No hate, by the way. I love Rushmore, just watched it again the other night.

As he works on his next script, Blake has been thinking less about influence and more about access—the difference between referencing a world and actually talking to real people who have been shaped by it. While specifics are being kept under wraps, Blake can say this much about his new project: Palm Beach Ladies. Junkies. A modern Noah’s Ark. Hailing from South Florida himself, that landscape is familiar to him, not assumed. The project loosely adapts HALT: The American Rehab Experience, a new book by his brother Graham Reid-Van Every, being released by Blurring Books this month. It’s a collage of rehab stories told from the patient’s perspective. Think of a scratch-and-sniff pop-up book, but with cigarettes. That’s why lived-proximity is so much more interesting to Blake right now than aesthetic-proximity. 

I think so much of that comes down to authorship. Who’s behind this story and whether or not they have the perspective or conviction to tell it.
Yeah that’s all it is. Anything you do with intention and confidence, and you can stand behind, I think is worth it. I’m not gonna go make a porno movie like Boogie Nights, because I didn’t grow up in the Valley in the 70s. I have this quote that’s always in my head, it’s this Tarkovsky quote—which John would like, ’cause John likes Tarkovsky—“You can never return to the place of origin because you’ve changed in the making.” If I stretch that quote a little bit and reshape it, it’s “I can never go to that place of origin because I had a different life trajectory.” Again, it’s about simplicity. What resonates with you? That’s where you have to be unpretentious.

Access matters, but sometimes it’s just not possible. When Maus’ label asked him to direct another music video and John couldn’t be there, Blake had to find another way to preserve the hysterical body. Pick It Up, a love song written for his wife Kika, still demanded his presence somehow.

Pick It Up is such a beautiful love song. How did you go about capturing that intimacy of a real connection without the real people?
Originally we were talking about Kika being in the video, but with the tour it wasn’t possible. So we approached it symbolically and cast a dreamy, angelic figure to embody that same presence—my friend Hennessey. And I’m all about contradiction, everything has to have contradiction, so we paired her with this Eraserhead baby thing. This live, human heart. And then I just asked my director of photography Owen Smith-Clark, who had literally just finished shooting Disappears with me, if he was up for another Maus video. A super DIY music video in a top-down Mustang convertible, driving back and forth along FDR drive, just you, me, and the actress. He was like, “Obviously.” I was director/driver on that one.

WATCH PICK IT UP

It’s quite literal then, John’s not here but his heart is.
He’s the heart, yeah. And not only John, but every guy like John, who’s fallen in love and allowed someone to take a joyride with their heart.

Identity always seems to be mutating in all three of Blake and John’s collabs. In Disappears, he’s celestial and unwelcome. In The Man Without Qualities, he’s a blank canvas looking to consume. In Pick It Up, he’s replaced by something symbolic.

Looking back at all three projects, did you realize they were circling similar themes?
Disappears, in a way, was the movie that I always wanted to make with The Man Without Qualities. In the music video I wanted to light John so he felt separated from the space, like he’s beyond earthly. And then he disappears into the light at the end. That idea of disappearing was already in the script for the short, but I feel like I was able to fully realize it in the music video.

There’s so much here about losing or trying to find yourself. Our current culture is so oversaturated with micro-identities, and I think this anxiety about being copied or replaced or misunderstood is so relevant right now. Was that something you were trying to tap into?
Definitely. I saw a movie with a friend a while ago and he was like, “Man, that’s my idea.” I’m like, “Really? That’s from a 1960s comic book, man.” I think it’s such a silly way to be, because if you’re cynical towards the world, first of all, you’re not gonna get rewarded. Second, if your idea gets stolen, maybe it wasn’t as original as you thought in the first place. And third, it’s just a race to the game. It’s not just about having the idea. You need to write it down, structure it, be charming, raise money, do the work. Are you waking up every day moving towards this goal?

It’s like the Seinfeld thing, “Anyone can take the reservation. But can you hold it?”

In a moment where identities function as trend-cycles, there’s an ambient paranoia about ownership. It’s easy to feel territorial about taste. I thought of that first. That’s mine. That’s my thing. Blake doesn’t seem especially interested in that part. Ideas are great but they’re cheap. Conviction is rare, it wins every time.

Filming John Maus still requires that same conviction. Not to defend an idea from being stolen, but to recognize when an idea, an identity, an author, is fully alive.