Director Nick Canfield can’t recall exactly when it happened. Was it while he was rewatching Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or The Secret of My Success, two comedy faves from his childhood? Or maybe it was one of those moments on The Simpsons that featured Duffman, or an episode of South Park and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
Whenever it was, Canfield heard that song — “Oh Yeah,” the 1985 track by the Swiss duo Yello with the clattering, burping electronic pulse and lascivious baritone title phrase. “I must have seen it in something, and I went to sleep and it was stuck in my head,” Canfield says. “I woke up in the morning thinking, ‘This song is in everything. I wonder if the guys who made that song are as outrageous as the song itself.’ And it turns out they are.”
With that concept in mind, Canfield embarked on a journey into one of the strangest and most unexpected songs to burrow its way into pop culture. Centered around new interviews with the two somewhat mysterious men behind it, Oh Yeah!, a short film directed and produced by Canfield, explores the back story of Yello, their song’s ongoing life, and the way “Oh Yeah,” especially its connection to Eighties yuppie comedies, has come to connote “desire, gratification, and excess.” As Yello’s Boris Blank tells Rolling Stone, “When people listen to ‘Oh Yeah,’ they’re immediately reminded of that moment they laid eyes on something they really want — something they’re sure will give them pleasure. It could be a sports car, a beautiful woman, or just the sun and the moon in the sky. Oh, and it’s quite a catchy tune.”
Oh Yeah!, an official selection at the Tribeca Film Festival before it played at this year’s DOC NYC Festival as part of their prestigious Shorts List, was acquired by Rolling Stone Films and Documentary+ Originals and will begin streaming today on Rollingstone.com, Rolling Stone’s YouTube channel, and on
Documentary+.
While he’d heard of Yello before, Canfield, who started his career as an assistant to the renowned filmmaker Albert Maysles, admits he knew little about the band when he began his research. After digging around, he learned their names — producer and keyboard player Blank, now 73, and singer-frontman Dieter Meier, 80 — and their backgrounds. Meier, for instance, was a provocative performance artist before he joined Blank and co-founder Carlos Perón (who left the band in 1983) in Yello. “I was like, ‘Wow, these guys are amazing, and their music videos are so unusual, and they seem like these real avant garde guys,’” he says. “The song has all these connotations with American culture, and yet these guys are Swiss.”
Once Canfield reached out to Blank and Dieter by way of their manager, the duo were intrigued. “We were pleasantly surprised when Nick approached us,” Blank says. “After a Zoom call, we knew this is our man.” But as Canfield soon learned, finding time in their schedule was more complicated than he first thought. Yello has been an ongoing concern — the duo released their last album, Point, five years ago, and is working on a new one for 2026 release — but music is only part of their portfolio. “Their manager said, ‘Oh, we’d love to do this, but I don’t know how much time they can give you, because they’re very busy, and they are making a new album and Dieter has many businesses,’” recalls Canfield, who learned that Meier has a ranch and winery in Argentina and restaurants there and in Europe, much of it thanks to recurring royalties from “Oh Yeah.”
After a few months and a Kickstarter that raised $16,590 to fund the movie, Canfield found himself in the Yello studio — the basement of Meier’s house in Zurich. Canfield admits that the two “didn’t quite know what to expect” when he showed up. “They knew it was going to be about this song, and they’re well aware it’s their legacy,” he says. “But I don’t think they thought this was going to be as serious of a film as it is. I showed up with serious equipment and had all these printed questions. Halfway through my interview with Dieter, he’s looking at the stack of pages and says, ‘How many more pages are there? I want to go play golf.’”
But the two wound up giving Canfield two days of their time, and the director came to appreciate their eccentricities and lifestyle. “They’re about art for art’s sake,” he says. “They just love making music and videos, and they just do it because they have the means to do it. They don’t care about fame. I found that really refreshing.” Given that “Oh Yeah” doesn’t incorporate any conventional instruments, Canfield also came to realize how influential Blank was. “Boris really is a pioneer in sampled and electronic music,” he says. “He’s been recording sounds his whole life and has this amazing library of over 40,000 sounds he used to make music with.”
In addition to Meier and Blank, who talk about their working relationship and the origins of “Oh Yeah,” the film also includes commentary from musician-writer-comedian Reggie Watts, Eighties music expert Lori Majewski, and others. British movie executive Tarquin Gotch, the music supervisor on Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (and other films by the late John Hughes), explains how “Oh Yeah” wound up in the iconic scene in which Ferris (Matthew Broderick) finagles his way into the front seat of the prized 1961 Ferrari owned by the father of his bud Cameron (Alan Ruck). Broderick himself wasn’t available — although Canfield did ask him at a public Q&A session if he’d want to be in the movie and didn’t receive a direct response. But through a lucky connection, Canfield was able to interview Ruck: Ruck and Canfield’s niece, Juliana Canfield, were co-stars in Succession (Juliana Canfield played Kendall Roy’s assistant, Jess).
Canfield feels the film’s brevity — only 17 minutes — is an ideal length for its subject. “I wanted to focus on the song, its trajectory, and its cultural impact,” he says. “It’s a fun, digestible story, and I thought it was something that would be good in a short form. I was reading a review where someone wrote, ‘I thought why is this just a short, but when I got to the end, it was the perfect length.’ A specific examination, like one song, can be the best way to reveal something larger about our society.”
As for Yello’s reaction to Oh Yeah!, Canfield says, “I think they enjoyed having their personal back stories in there, and it was nice for them to hear about how their song is really appreciated in America, because they don’t get over here all that much.” And that added exclamation point in the title? “Aside from wanting to differentiate it from the song, I thought it warranted it conceptually,” he says. “The film and the song have that energy, and the way it’s utilized in our culture is to convey enthusiasm.”
Oh Yeah! credits:
Director & Producer: Nick Canfield
Co-Producers: Justin Levy, Paul Lovelace
Executive Producers: Alexandra Dale, Justin Lacob, Bryn Mooser, David Dodge, Jason Fine, Gus Wenner
Archival Producer: Debra McClutchy
Editor: Paul Lovelace
Featuring: Alan Ruck, Reggie Watts, Lori Majewski, Merck Mercuriadis, Tarquin Gotch, David Kamp, Ian Tregoning, Dieter Meier, Boris Blank
Made In Association with Rolling Stone Films and Documentary+
