Music Video
The "Play with Fire" music video was directed by Alex and Martin and filmed in Toronto, Canada in July 2006. Alex and Martin have described the video as "real and surreal" and compared its visual effects to an amusement park house of mirrors. The directors said that they designed the video so that each frame is vital, writing "or example, we could see a glass reflection close-up of Hilary vibrate and explode which then transitions to a completely different image behind her, then disintegrates into a new performing shot." The video was inspired by the 1948 Orson Welles film noir The Lady from Shanghai, and Duff said that "t's definitely different from what anyone had seen before". According to Duff, the music video for the song was filmed before the song's completion because she wanted it to be the album's first single. On the night following the rehearsals and wardrobe fittings for the video, Duff returned to the studio and finished recording the song three hours later, before a thunderstorm knocked out some of the equipment. Producer Rhett Lawrence submitted the song to the makers of the video the next morning, less than three hours before shooting was due to begin. Duff said that the situation "kind of worked out perfectly".
The music video premiered on August 15, 2006 on MTV's Total Request Live in the United States. It reached number five on the Total Request Live top ten video countdown and remained on the show for nineteen days, until September 14. In Australia, the video premiered during the week of April 23, 2007. For the video, Alex and Martin were nominated for Best Direction of a Female Artist at the MVPA Awards, losing to Floria Sigismondi and Christina Aguilera for the video for Aguilera's "Hurt". Jane magazine described the "trippy visuals" in the video as being "a million miles away from the rainy, suburban comfort and adolescent longing of the clip for 'Come Clean'". The magazine also noted Duff's "sexy silver dress" in the video, writing that "she seems to be announcing a new grown-up woman, one who is diving headfirst into her 20s with a mission to distance herself from her bubblegum past." Duff said, "I haven't really done the super-sexed thing. That's not really me. There's a different way, a cooler way to go about it."
Read more about this topic: Play With Fire (Hilary Duff Song)
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