Adele returned with a new single and music video Oct. 23, three years after the release of the James Bond theme “Skyfall,” the last time we heard the powerhouse belt out her amazing sound.
The new single, “Hello,” is a heartbreaking song with a beautifully shot six-minute video directed by openly gay filmmaker Xavier Dolan.
Adele herself contacted the French-Canadian director to direct.
“It’s Adele who reached out in the first place,” Dolan said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “I wasn’t sure how she could actually know who I was. We operate in different scales and I was very humbled and flattered that she thought of me.”
Dolan flew to London to meet with the Grammy-award winning songstress where they spoke over coffee.
“We chatted about our lives and our loves and our romances – it was so much about who we were,” Dolan said. “We had so much in common. Basically, all of her songs are revolving around the theme of unrequited love and so are my movies. We might come from different places and operate on different platforms, but we do share things and I think that was necessary to really connect.”
The music video also made history as being the first to use IMAX technology in the actual filming.
“The shots on IMAX are two shots: mostly the finale on that pond, and there’s the shot of her opening her eyes. I love an introduction like that. It just seemed nice: she had been gone for three or four years. So she’s settling in and taking all of those curtains and sheets off, ripping them down from the walls. It’s like Adele coming back home. It felt neat and fitting that she would sort of sit down and open her eyes as if she had awakened,” Dolan said.
The internet seems ecstatic to have Adele back. The video already has more than 3 million views on YouTube, Adele is a trending topic on Twitter and “Hello” is already the number one song on iTunes.
Dolan is working on the final draft for the film The Death and Life of John F. Donovan. Adele’s full album 25 will be released Nov. 20.
