Britney Spears's 'Oops!… I Did It Again' Director Looks Back At Her Iconic Trip To Mars

As far as iconic music-video moments go, it's hard to overlook this one: An astronaut on Mars reaches down to the planet's sandy surface and uncovers a stone tile emblazoned with Britney Spears's face. The ground shakes, and the pop star descends from a platform in a flashy red catsuit because the track's stabbing synths set in. Then, the music cuts out for a brief moment, as Spears delivers the initial line with a sarcastic snap: "I think I did it again."


This week, "Oops!… I Did It Again" turns 20 years old — the Mars-set visual premiered on MTV on April 10, 2000. It ushered in Spears's hotly anticipated second album era; her debut, …Baby One More Time (the girl loves an ellipsis), had taken the pop world by storm the year prior, and Brit wasted no time crafting its follow-up. She had reunited with "Baby" producer Max Martin for another banging single, and this time, the loneliness wasn't killing her. On "Oops," she is the one toying with gentlemen hearts.


In honor of the video's 20th anniversary, MTV News talked to its director, Nigel Dick, about how it came with each other and what its legacy is currently. "Oops" marked the fourth video Dick helmed for Spears, following "...Baby One More Time," "(You Drive Me) Crazy," and some days Although this was their most ambitious undertaking yet: an intergalactic ride with special effects and early-aughts quirks that traditional Spears as a pop icon-in-the-making.


MAKING MARS


"Oops!… I Did It Again" became a stepping stone bridging the schoolgirl-gone-wild look from 1999's "…Baby One More Time" to the sweaty, python-wielding visage of 2001's "I'm A Slave 4 U." Here was Spears hinting at the direction she was headed by announcing that she's "not that innocent," though Dick doesn’t remember it being strategized as such.


"Very often, the label rings you up and says, 'We hope to project this artist into a different age order right now To my memory, there was no discussion like that at all," Dick told MTV News. "It was quite simply, 'Britney's got a new single. Can you get on the phone with her? She's got a couple ideas.'"





The two had a brief conversation, while in which Spears laid out her vision: "'I hope to be in a red suit, I'd like to be on Mars, I want there to be a good-looking spaceman, and I never want a rocket,'" Dick recalls her saying. "And the rest was left up to me."


The video was shot over three days in March 2000, in Universal City, California. A crew from MTV's Making the Video was there to capture behind-the-scenes footage, and in a pre-shoot interview, Spears mentioned, "The song is essentially about a girl. All these guys fall in love with her, and she just can't help it. If I meet a guy that I'm seriously attracted to, I get butterflies in my belly, I get a total brain fart, and I don't know what to say."


Once the cameras began rolling, though, Spears was the opposite of the shy, bumbling girl she claimed to be in real life. As Dick instructed her in Making the Video, "This is Mars. You own Mars, you are the Queen of Mars. This is your city and these are your subjects. You're here to dazzle them." To do that, she required the best look.


THE CATSUIT CRISIS


Spears's skintight, red-hot catsuit was a point of contention in the 24 hours leading up to the video shoot — because, as Dick explained, there was another, supposedly superior costume. "We had picked a gorgeous catsuit, which I loved," he mentioned. "It was much softer material. It wasn't shiny. It was more feminine. And certainly, the problem right now is that it's been supplanted by this rubber thing, or whichever the material was, which I felt was not very flattering."


Spears determined the day before the shoot that she wanted a different suit, so she called on designer Michael Bush, who'd famously created costumes for Michael Jackson while in the '80s and '90s. Bush actually appears in Making the Video; he has a short conversation with Spears about the look she wants, then promises he's going to pull a "all-nighter" to carry out it.


That wasn't the only sartorial-centric dispute on set. Spears's other notable outfit from the video is the white cropped turtleneck and asymmetrical skirt she wears while laying on a glowing, spinning circle. Turns out, that all-white 'fit was another last-minute decision — Dick says that Spears initially wore a much more revealing two-piece that he describes as an inexpensive Vegas stripper outfit." And while it probably wouldn’t be also risqué by 2020 standards, Dick notes that the "Oops!" Video was filmed not long soon after Spears's then-scandalous Rolling Stone photoshoot, which accompanied a 1999 cover story that invited readers into the underage star's "heart, mind, and bedroom" (the article opened with cringey descriptions of her "honeyed thigh" and "ample chest").


Taking that into consideration, Dick and Spears’s team convinced her to reconsider. "We went back to Britney's trailer," Dick mentioned, "and looked for something else, and we came up with what you're seeing in the video now."


THE Males OF MARS


"Oops!" Is, at heart, a cosmic crush story, so needless to say there needed to be some dudes pining for the Queen of Mars's heart. The video featured a gaggle of buff, shirtless guys operating mysterious levers in the background of Brit's lair — in one pretty scene from Making the Video, the pop star giggles, "I don't know their names nevertheless they're hotties! I don't mind looking at them!"


The main object of Spears's affection, though, was the astronaut played by Eli Swanson, a Abercrombie & Fitch-type model who was chosen by Dick and his team from a lineup of hopefuls. Although he's not even the real star of the show, in the director's opinion.


"I like the guy in the control booth. I love the fact that he's real. He's not a super-hunky, spaceman type," Dick mentioned of the Rivers Cuomo look-alike who speaks to Swanson's astronaut through a headset. "It's like, it's just another day on the job at NASA. Yesterday, he was looking at the Backstreet Gentlemen on Saturn, and today, he's got Britney on Mars. These are things you come up with and you're routinely frightened that the label is going to go, visualize that guy grooving at the desk? Take him out.' Nevertheless it all stayed in."


BRITNEY'S JACK-ROSE MOMENT


Swanson got his moment to shine while in the song's delightfully dated bridge: a quirky bit of dialogue in which Spears's boy toy gives her the "heart of the ocean" necklace from Titanic. Yet I thought the old lady dropped it into the ocean in the end," Spears sweetly says. He answers, "Well, baby, I went down and got it for you." Hey answer to this impossibly procured gift of the most symbolically romantic treasure of the late '90s? "Aw, you shouldn't have."


"I'd of course heard the song before I talked to Britney about what the video was going to be like," Dick remembers. "I mentioned to her, 'Well, hang on, there's a little bit in the middle about the Titanic? What are we going to do about that? Are we supposed to suddenly cut back to 1912?' And she mentioned, 'Oh, you'll think of something.'


"So you throw with each other this little sequence and nobody ever questioned it," he continued of Spears and Swanson's scene. "Everybody just mentioned, 'Yeah. That'll work.' For me, I had no idea why that sequence was in the song at all, nevertheless it’s lighthearted and doesn’t take itself also seriously.”


OOPS!…


one of the best stories from the "Oops!" Video, as Spears super-fans surely recall, is the injury she sustained while shooting scenes in the all-white outfit. As legend goes, a segment of the camera hovered above Spears fell on her head — though there really are varying degrees of the seriousness of the injury, which Dick is happy to set straight.


"Firstly, nothing like that should ever happen on set," he mentioned. "I was especially mad that in a scene like that, where the gear is over Britney's head, that it was not flawlessly secured. I don't believe I've ever worked with that camera assistant ever again.


"The second thing is, no, the camera did not fall on Britney," he continued. "If it had, that would have been the end of my career. A segment of the camera which fits on the very front, the matte box, was what fell on her because it was not completely secured. And it's still quite heavy; not to minimize the effect of it. It has threaded screws in the best left and top right corners. I believe one of these hit her in the head."


Dick mentioned that the medic on set advised Spears to rest in her trailer for a couple hours, to create ensure she did not have a concussion. The crew powered down, yet, "being a trooper," Dick mentioned, "Britney came back and got on with the work."


STUNT-NEY


Wardrobe disagreements and minor injury aside, Dick remembers the "Oops!" Video as a fun three days, even once it came time for Spears to face her fears and hop into a harness for the spinning sequence. "That was a little bit of a tense moment," Dick conceded. "You need time to practice with that stuff as soon as you're wearing the magic outfit and you've got a harness on under your red Mars suit and whatnot."


Throughout it all, though, Dick describes Spears as consummate professional and also an enthusiastic dancer who didn't slack as soon as it came to executing choreographer Tina Landon's intense routine.


"She rehearsed for like, five days. Plus it wasn't, 'Oh, we'll show up at two in the afternoon, have a few lattes, and then we'll do a little bit of dancing,'" Dick mentioned. "They were there at 10 in the morning, and I would go and visualize a run-through at five at night. They looked like hell because they'd been sweating all day, their hair is ratty, their T-shirts have stained. I mean, it's fucking hard work. It's Olympic-level athletics at that stage."


Not only that, yet Spears did it all in that tight latex suit — and she apparently still remembers how tricky it was. In a Instagram post commemorating the 20th anniversary of the song's release last month, Spears shared a behind-the-scenes photo from the "Oops!" Video on Instagram and wrote, "I remember that red suit was so freaking hot… however the dance was fun. Also it made the shoot fly by!"


"OOPS!" LIVES ON


several years ago, a uncut version of Spears's close-ups from the "Oops!" Video began making the rounds on YouTube. One upload of the vid boasts over 23 million views, plus it shows Spears performing the entirety of the song from just the waist up. It could as well be in the dictionary under "charisma."


"The thing you've got to remember is, you can't fake that," Dick mentioned. "All the videos I did for her, I felt captured something magic about her. I think the aesthetics, in inverted commas, of Britney was that she truly was the girl next door. She certainly had this fantastic passion for dancing and she seemed so happy all of the time, which is why I think people loved her so much.


"People's perception of a video being charismatic, excellent, whichever, comes later," he continued. Several times I've Been asked on set, 'Are we making an award-winning, iconic video here?' And my answer is usually, 'I haven't got a fucking clue.' You do the perfect work you could on the day, and people's perception of it then develops, and all you could do is sit back and watch."


"Oops!… I Did It Again" went on to be a TRL staple and earn four VMA nominations, while the song itself secured a coveted Grammy nod. Twenty years later, it's still a charisma-fueled, fan-favorite video that ushered Spears into the new millennium while capsulizing her growth as an artist and as a woman. That is just so usually Brit.