The Stories Behind Rihanna’s Greatest Videos

“Unfaithful,” Mandler says, began with a phone call from Jay-Z. “We just signed this girl, Rihanna,” the director recalls the Roc Nation founder telling him “She’s incredible. I need you to do this video because we’re trying to place her in the right lane. We need something really cinematic and dramatic that captures who she is.” Having recently gone through a breakup, Mandler was drawn to the emotional account of love and deception that the A Girl Like Me single told. “The way that the song is performed and the hurt in the voice, it felt like someone had lived so many lives,” he says. “When I constructed this love story between her and this guy, it was more sophisticated than someone her age could generally understand. Most girls at that age are talking about young, cute love. This was tumultuous love.”

The video was shot around New York, with an off-Broadway theater serving as a rendezvous point for Rihanna, who was 18 years old at the time, and the man she was leading her fictional affair with. Mandler directed her in the same way he would an actress. “It was the way she moved her body, it was in her fingertips, the way she looked away,” he says. “It was the first setup where we knew we could do something amazing here. Her and I connected [because] I saw her as she really was, which I don’t think a lot of other people had.” She wanted to keep a piece of home with her as her career was taking off, so she had the Barbados flag drawn onto the wall of the theater. She told Mandler, “I’ll do this every video, everything I do.” The tradition didn’t last, but their creative partnership did. “The minute the music came on,” he adds, “her and I just had this incredible connection.” 

The day before Rihanna filmed “Disturbia” in Los Angeles, she took Mandler to lunch. “We sat down, and she’s like, ‘It’s not far enough,’” he says. Last-minute treatment overhauls weren’t ideal, but the singer had a vision. “I’m gonna paint my nails black,” she told the director. “I’m gonna do Blade Runner makeup. My hair is gonna look like this.” Mandler’s own inspiration board included Nine Inch Nails music videos, the eerie work of photographer Joel-Peter Witkin, and macabre themes, but filtered through beauty and danger. “It felt like a circus of freaks, a little bit, and she was the centerpiece of it,” Mandler says. “That was a big deal for someone like her to accept that kind of position, like, ‘I’m not the girl next door.’” It was all they imagined and more — evocative, distinct, dark.

When the video was finished, another call came in. This time it was from Def Jam. “We’re not putting this out. It’s too far. It’s going to ruin her career,” Mandler recalls the label saying. “It became a very big discussion about whose choice it was.” This was his fifth video with Rihanna, and he’d seen her pushing to get to this point. “She had been wanting to come to this moment for years, but she finally had the record and the moment to do it,” he says. He showed her some of Madonna’s most iconic videos to demonstrate “how far ahead of the curve she was and how she kept pushing the ball.” Rihanna felt ready to take the next step in her career visually, even if she had to pay for it herself and there was no turning back. “You can’t go this far and then unwind it,” Mandler adds. 

“It was a very intense 24 hours,” he says. “If I recall, she just pressed the button and sent it in. She took command at that moment. I bet the label that it was going to be the biggest video she ever had. Within 24 hours, it eclipsed everything else.” The record appeared on Good Girl Gone Bad: Reloaded, an extended version of Rihanna’s third studio album that cemented her status as an immovable pop force. “You have to be willing to cannibalize who and what you are in order to stay ahead of the curve, or you’re going to be replaced by somebody else,” Mandler says. “We shared a directing credit because she was more involved with it than most videos. She certainly took a lot of ownership in the creative more than ever, because I think she knew that this was the moment where she was going to change her path.”

Justin Timberlake isn’t officially a featured artist on the Good Girl Gone Bad single “Rehab,” but he did earn a credit for the music video. He co-wrote and produced the record with Timbaland and Hannon Lan, then joined Rihanna in the desert. “It was strangely futuristic and dystopian,” Mandler says. His references were more classic, but mirrored the star power of the pairing. “We were referencing Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio, these historic couples that were just ‘one plus one equals 10,’” the director says. He was also drawn to Sharon Stone and Grace Jones, particularly their potent confidence. 

“We’ve already been through everything with Chris [Brown] at that point,” Mandler adds. “She was in control of her sexuality and her female empowerment, she didn’t have to try hard. She could take a man and use him as a prop, push him around, throw him on a car. She was the alpha. That was fun to play with.” Timberlake was still riding the high of FutureSex/LoveSounds when “Rehab” was released. “Justin was at his height, at that moment, and he was such a big star,” Mandler says. “Playing up his sexuality and his confidence and masculinity — and then seeing the two of them sort of clash, because they’re both alphas, but there’s a beautiful dance between them — you can really feel the tension.” 

There’s a heat to the performance, potentially related to Timberlake wearing biker gear in the desert while Rihanna cycled through five different outfits. But the evident friction, Mandler notes, does come from the song itself. “You can feel that something traumatic has happened between these people. There’s tension in the way that they interact with each other. But it’s not like we’re fighting. It’s subversive.”

Mandler considers “Russian Roulette” to be “one of the most underappreciated” releases in Rihanna’s videography. She’d shared ballads as singles before, like “Take a Bow” or “Hate That I Love You.” Mandler helmed the videos for those, too. But as the lead single from Rated R, this was more suspenseful and gritty. “This one has a strange prison psych ward and this game of Russian roulette — love and love lost, and the game you play with somebody,” Mandler says. “The way the song is constructed, you hear the revolver spinning and you can hear the bullet going into the gun.” The director drew influence from film noir, as well as Russian and German cinema. “I was always trying to emphasize her strength as an actress, her strength to convey complicated emotions,” he says. 

Starring opposite Rihanna is Jesse Williams, who had recently joined Grey’s Anatomy as Dr. Jackson Avery. “He was very new. He’s this really beautiful, poised, thoughtful guy,” Mandler says. “Watching them pass this gun back and forth, there’s this tension.” All the while, Rihanna narrates a chilling scene, singing, “Say a prayer to yourself/He says, close your eyes, sometimes it helps/And then I get a scary thought/That he’s here means he’s never lost.” The song gave Mandler the perfect backdrop to expand on the narrative. The video shows her standing her ground while a car races toward her, and bleeding when a bullet pierces her underwater. “My language in everything I do is always trying to build characters and build stories,” he says. “When you have great records to work with, it gives you a lot of leeway to take chances.”

By the time “Te Amo” arrived as the final Rated R single, Rihanna had entered a higher tier of stardom that transcended traditional pop restraints. She shared six singles from the record, including “Hard,” “Wait Your Turn,” “Rude Boy,” and “Rockstar 101.” That was nearly half of the album. Rihanna got the most bang for her buck out of Rated R, so it makes sense that it would end on a note of gothic drama. “The song was really sexy, and wanted to be this gorgeous love story,” Mandler says. “Te Amo” tells the story of unrequited love between Rihanna and another woman, played in the video by model Latisha Costa. “There was a natural attraction and tension between them,” the director adds. “You start spending more time in Europe, you start understanding the definition of sexuality in Europe. You start seeing that there’s a different perspective to the way that people process their feelings.”

The “Te Amo” video was filmed at a chateau castle in France with extra smoke pumped into the space to create a sense of romantic surrealism. “You didn’t forget that this was a female-on-female love story, but it kind of added an artfulness to it that allowed you to see the beauty in it, which is what we wanted,” Mandler says. “It wasn’t a political statement. There was no, like, ‘Hey, this is going to get a lot of publicity, and this is good for us.’ It was very natural, and it was what she felt like doing at that moment.” He compares the scenes of seduction between Rihanna and Costa to similar marks left on pop culture by artists like Madonna. “It was very honest, and I don’t think there was any kind of baiting in this at all,” Mandler adds. “Some artists do that because they want attention. I don’t think that was ever the intention at all on this.”

With Loud, Rihanna shed the darkness and moved into the light. “Only Girl (in the World)” marked the beginning of one of the most recognizable eras in pop history with an unmistakable pop of red. “This was kind of the return to her femininity and girliness, in a way,” Mandler says. “There’s something so youthful about it, but done now through the lens of ‘Disturbia’ and ‘Russian Roulette.’” In alignment with the theme of the record, Rihanna is the only person who appears in the “Only Girl (in the World)” video, dancing around an expansive, saturated landscape with carefree confidence. She was the quintessential Tumblr girl. “We wanted a girliness and fun to it, but we wanted it to still be through the Rihanna lens,” Mandler says. “That’s where you get the very editorial imagery and surreal imagery. We hand-colored every frame to make the landscape red and make it feel like a poppy over-the-top dream world.”

Keeping the singer’s era-defining hair color under wraps during filming was the biggest challenge. “No one could know that she had red hair, and it was very hard because paparazzi were following her around all the time,” the director says. They filmed the video in a private facility near Los Angeles, transporting Rihanna to and from the location in a dark shuttle. “The night we pressed go on the video I was like, whoever owns the red hair dye at the local CVS could make a lot of money, because you’re gonna see a lot of kids dyeing their hair — and that’s what happened,” Mandler says. “She’s so brilliant at switching lanes. Everybody had basically taken the ‘Disturbia’ short hair, the leather, the record, and made it theirs. For her, it was like, ‘OK, how do I change this up again? How do I go a different way?’ The Coachella, California, girl through her lens was so brilliant.”

Rihanna and Mandler traveled to Jamaica to film “Man Down,” an unnerving video that begins with the pop of a gun. “I wrote that concept from the perspective of a woman that had been attacked and abused, and she got revenge,” the director says. The opening scene shows Rihanna shooting a man in the middle of a train station with tears in her eyes. “You start by watching her commit this act, and then you start over by seeing the innocence and loss of innocence,” he adds. “The worst thing you can do is take that away from somebody.” Once an easygoing girl next door, she turns to violence after a man follows her out of a party and assaults her in a dark alleyway. “Never thought I’d do it,” Rihanna sings, “Whatever happened to me?”

“It was powerful, and the song warranted us going for it,” Mandler says. “With what Rihanna had gone through with Chris [Brown], this was a very deep-cutting song. We wanted to see if we could push the boundaries again.” Internally, there was hesitancy similar to what preceded “Disturbia,” but this was a different beast. Mothers Against Violence and the Parents Television Council both called for the video to be banned, though BET refused to pull it from its rotation. “It felt controversial because it was the woman — not the man — getting revenge,” Mandler says. “If it was her brother that went and did it, you would say, ‘OK, street justice, that’s OK.’ But because she did it, it seemed to create this huge controversy. And part of that is women feeling comfortable speaking up for themselves.”

Throughout the backlash, Mandler was adamant about centering the context of the murder. “That was the point of the story, not that she shot the man. He had attacked her, and probably deserved what happened to him,” he said. “Many people don’t even say anything and have to live with that in quiet. We wanted to speak to that.” The director sees the legacy of the record and its accompanying video as something that exists to hopefully “inspire people to speak up and to not be silenced.” Despite what critics may have believed, he continues, “it’s not there to tell girls to go get guns and shoot people, but it’s metaphorical about taking your power.”

Six years of collaboration led Rihanna and Mandler to “Diamonds.” The single was the first offering from Unapologetic, her seventh album. “We understood each other so well, and she had such control of her craft and her person that I could then be really artful with her,” the director says. There wasn’t much they hadn’t already done together, but the song itself was a career-defining release. Throughout the video, Mandler toyed with analogies for love. “The two horses are lovers in the way that they interact, the rising female mare, it was just all power,” he says. “The room that’s destroyed that’s slowly coming back together, every image was an analogy for love, which is the innate relationship between beauty and chaos.”

Mandler and Rihanna hadn’t worked together for a while when they reunited for “Diamonds,” their final video together. There were scheduling complications that almost caused the singer to miss the standout sunset shot, but they made it work. Today, it remains Rihanna’s most-viewed video, with more than 2.4 billion views on YouTube. “It was her command of her voice and the tension in her voice,” Mandler says. “No one could have done that but Rihanna. It wouldn’t have had the depth, it wouldn’t have the resonance. To be able to do all single shots, simple moments that mean so much, it’s only her that could do that. It really was a culmination of all those years, like we were ratcheting up to that moment.”