The video covers 13 days in the repetitive life of a woman waking up and going to unspecified job, where she experiences a range of emotions from indifference to sorrow to rage to, finally, a kind of peace–all of these moods going unregistered by the other humans she interacts with.

“It was a two-day shoot, and it was very minimal financing,” Mills says. “It’s 13 days and each day gets a very strong emotional prompt that she followed through all those different iterations… Half the time was spent like, ‘OK, go change your clothes, come back, be incredibly angry and throw the chair. OK, go change your clothes, come back, cry.’ It really did feel athletic. She had guidelines, but it was a great ride because you just never knew what the fuck she was gonna do next. You’re only seeing a second or two seconds of each little scene, but there’s three minutes in there that we shot (of each bit). It was bonkers — so fun and so inventive, and she’s so generative of ideas and ways to be in an emotional state that felt really authentic and grounded. All the improvising that’s going on, things she’s saying that you don’t hear, the tip of the iceberg of what she did is what you see. It was so much fun to shoot.”

Mills has continued to do select music videos on top of his award-winning films since the 1990s, and most don’t have the band in them. The fact that Talking Heads were not about to reunite for the project didn’t represent anything unusual for his m.o.

Mills got request to submit a treatment, and, he guesses, “I’m sure three or four or five other directors did.” He did have a possible leg up from the start: “I do know the Talking Heads a little bit because I did a movie called 20th Century Women (for which he earned a best screenplay Oscar nomination] that had three or four Talking Heads songs and whole Talking Heads kind of subplot where I needed to get their approval.

And over the years I’ve met with David — we’re friendly and we’ve hung out — but I never dealt with the whole band, really. And having a relationship with David doesn’t mean you have a relationship with Talking Heads.

“They saw my treatment, they liked it, and we did a Zoom with all four of them, which was the most nerve-wracking thing for me. That record [‘Talking Heads 77,’ the group’s debut] is so hugely important to me — they’re my 14-, 15-year-old gods, and my. 59-year-old gods, to me, still. So I was completely nervous and baffled and honored that they liked my treatment right off the bat, I think because it wasn’t reducing the song.”

The long-broken-up foursome issued a statement in conjunction with the release of the video, saying: “This video makes the song better. We LOVE what this video is NOT – it’s not literal, creepy, bloody, physically violent or obvious.”

Says Mills, “It’s very Talking Heads to me, my treatment — it’s like a pattern, not a narrative. It’s dealing with all these hyper-intense emotions, but also in a very disassociative, strange way. And I remember Tina (Weymouth) saying, “Oh, your treatment reminds us of us, of all the things that we liked when we got started.’ I was like, well, yeah, because I’ve studied you for my whole life, you know? … When I hear that first record or ‘Remain in Light’ or anything, I find it’s asking me to be innovative. It’s asking me to rethink how you make things. It’s the sound of people trying to break the rules in interesting ways.”

Mills is known as actors’ director; Christopher Plummer won a best supporting actor Oscar for his work in Mills’ “Beginners,” and the filmmaker has drawn talent like Joaquin Phoenix, Ewan McGregor, Annette Bening, Greta Gerwig, Elle Fanning, Tilda Swinton and Keanu Reeves in his four feature films to date. So far, Ronan had not been on this list of A-listers, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.

The filmmaker knew he was setting the bar high for a star for this video. “At first, I was really daunted: How am I ever gonna think of an idea for this iconic song that I love so much? Then the idea just came to me fully formed in like one second. But then I was like, ‘Oh damn, who would do that?’ It’s very demanding and hugely extroverted and virtuosic ask for an actor. But I do have a bunch of relationships with actors that we’re like, ‘Should we try something together?’ We like each other’s work.

Saoirse has been one of those people that we meet every once in a while, or chat. When this came up, we had happened to just be talking and so I texted her back like, ‘Have you heard of this band Talking Heads? Did you want to be in this video?’ She’s a huge fan too and wrote me right back, ‘Of course, what are you talking about?’ It was an ongoing connection that found a great outlet.”

“There’s increase of energy,” the director says, “but overall, I was trying to show a pattern, not narrative, and for things not to progress in one direction. Often after she’s feeling a very strong anger or love, she’ll go in the opposite direction. I did want to end on some kind of feeling of self-acceptance, and that while she might seem like she’s the intense one or the crazy one in this world, she’s the only sane one–the only healthy one who’s having all of her emotions while the people around her don’t really respond in this kind of false normality. I did want her to end the last day where she’s very at peace.”

“Human life is incredibly redundant, but also, the cycles of the earth and the moon and the sun are very redundant,” Mills points out. “There’s some pain or there’s some grief to that, and that’s not all easy when you layer capitalism on top of that, and jobs and structures and institutions and systems which kind of control behavior. That’s where it gets more spicy and more interesting. And that’s a place that the Talking Heads are often talking about, like, ‘I wouldn’t live there if you paid me to.’ You know, there’s often this dissociation from normality that’s going on in David’s lyrics, and I was trying to echo or be aligned with that in this video in a different way. … To be able to look at things that are very small and seemingly banal and locate and extract all the oppression or joy or power or subversive weirdness in these little things, that’s influenced all of my work.”

Few filmmakers have work in music videos as much as Mills has. Over the years he’s created videos for Air, Yoko Ono, Blonde Redhead, the Divine Comedy, Beth Orton, Martin Gore, Everything but the Girl and Moby.

He’s gone beyond that in his collaborations with musicians, doing record sleeves for Phish, Beastie Boys, Sonic Youth, They Might Be Giants, Sleater-Kinney and others. And in the case of the National, the collaboration went as full-scale as any collab could without actually joining the band.

Music videos were “my film school in the ‘90s — how I really learned how to be a director,” Mills says. “I did a whole 23-minute film with the National with (Oscar-winning actress) Alicia Vikander, and did the record cover and ended up as co-producer on the record.

We did a whole tour together. When special projects come up, I enjoy it because it’s sacred ground for me, because it’s my film school. Music is sacred ground for me. I started off in bands, not as artist or film director, and I still find music to be the most inspiring thing for me as artistic person. When something like Talking Heads or the National that’s really had big impact on me comes up, it feels special to get to play with their cosmos.”