Niagara Falls & Orange Juice: The Untold Story Behind The Waterfall In Duran Duran’s “The Reflex”
In 1984, the music video landscape was populated by some of its most popular artists. Michael Jackson, Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, Culture Club and many others were all enjoying mega-platinum success from the relentless rotation of their videos. None of these artists, however, seemed to fully capture all the opportunities for titillation, band worship, and international travel the way one set of British boys did: Duran Duran.
Never a critic’s darling, Duran Duran was the heavyweight champion of the music video zeitgeist. By mid 1984, the band had amassed top ten hits courtesy of their iconic clips. The band found success with “Girls on Film” and “The Chauffeur” through video airplay in the London clubs, while “Hungry Like The Wolf,” “Rio,” “Save a Prayer,” “Is There Something I Should Know?”, “Union of the Snake” and “New Moon on Monday” built a rabid following for the band in the U.S., sparked many an argument among teenage girls about their favorite band member, and sold millions of albums to a captive MTV audience.
Then, in March 1984, it came time to shoot the video for the third single from their Seven and the Ragged Tiger album, a screwy guitar-and-synth funk declaration with Simon LeBon’s ever-enigmatic lyrics about lonely children and lucky clovers called “The Reflex”. Exactly what “dancing on the valentine” means didn’t seem to matter — the public wanted their Duran Duran, and the more the better.
Established and heralded music video director Russell Mulcahy was preparing to shoot the video, having directed several of Rio-era videos but none for Seven, since he was unavailable. The Thunderdome storyline of the “Union of the Snake” video (directed by Simon Milne) and the French underground resistance theme of the “New Moon on Monday” video (directed by Brian Grant) both yielded hits, but the band pulled Mulcahy back in to helm “The Reflex,” which combined live footage shot at the Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens with bursting blacklight bondage vignettes and various post-production effects.
“Well, I’d done concert videos before,” Mulcahy explained, “and what impressed me was the screens around the stages. And they were never really big enough on film, so I really want to exaggerate that. So the whole video was based around those gigantic screens from the high shots to the low shots to the side shots — the band performing on stage and these huge screens which we then put imagery in during the post production. It was meant to look like the screen was real, and that the concert was just gigantic in scale, and just full of energy.”
Mulcahy was interested in spotlighting the band as a live act and incorporating arresting video images on the screens, but for the famous waterfall moment in the video, inspiration had struck in the most unlikely of places.
“The weird part of that story is that when I arrived in Toronto to do the video, I was going into see the band that night,” Mulcahy explained. “And on the afternoon, we’re driving up to where the band was playing, in a small place somewhere, there was a sign saying, ‘Niagara Falls. Turn Left.’ And I said ‘Ah! Turn left. I’ve never seen Niagara Falls!’ And so I went to see, it was winter, and I saw Niagara Falls for the first time in my life. I didn’t get to see the band at all that day.”
“Now, before I did the video, I’d directed this local commercial in Australia. And I was in that TV commercial because I was sort of becoming a celebrity in Australia, and my part of commercial had a moment that had me and a wall of orange juice, where we’d turn it on, the liquid would collapse in slow motion, turn it off, and then turn it on again. And so I have this image of orange juice. When I got back to post production for ‘The Reflex’, and having seen Niagara Falls, during the big climatic moment of the song I then got the orange juice, turned it to blue and then bent it, so it comes bursting out of the screen.”
Russell Mulcahy and the orange juice shot from the original commercial
“We just used the raw footage of the orange juice since we did many takes of this orange juice. And so being truant, and not going to see the band to have a useless meeting about shooting a live concert, and me going up to Niagara Falls, and the combination, that’s how it was inspired. It was just coincidence, and meant to be, I guess. I just grabbed that footage, recolored it, and bent it.”
Check out the video for Duran Duran’s “The Reflex” right here, as well as a clip from the Duran Duran documentary “Sing Blue Silver” where Mulcahy discusses some ideas for shooting the video.
Sing Blue Silver excerpt (Russell Mulcahy at 3:05)