The award-winning music video for "Boulevard of Broken Dreams", which was directed by Samuel Bayer, depicts the band members after their car has stalled in the desert, and they begin a melancholy walk down a dusty road. Scenes are interspersed with video footage, taken from around Los Angeles, of homeless people and other miserable sights. The video also features performance footage of the band playing the song.
The video begins with the band in a steaming broken-down car. Behind them is a stop sign. The car’s labeled as ‘Green Day’. As the three band members step out of the car the film becomes marked by scratches, dirt and grease, giving it a feel of an old damaged movie. Tumbleweed blows past and the steam from the car blows to the right. We get a closeup of the grenade-clutching hand on the bonnet of the car.
As the lyrics start the band members walk through a ghost town in the middle of a desert. A vulture sitting by a mail box turns to watch them pass. The camera now cuts to the band performing in an abandoned building. “Ah ah”.
The second verse finds the band walking through the city, passing pedestrians, traffic signs. A Chinese video shop has a poster for “Red Trousers”, a documentary on Hong Kong stuntmen. Another shop features an American flag in the front window. The camera takes us past pedestrians warming themselves by a bin fire. They walk past a Spanish shop and into the night lights of the city. Finally we cut back to the band members in the desert again.
The music videos for "Holiday" and "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" were filmed with a single, continuous storyline — the video for "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" picks up where "Holiday's left off. with the last few seconds of "Holiday" audible at the start of the "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" video.
The video features a 1968 green Mercury Monterey convertible that was modified for filming in the "Holiday" and "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" videos. The car features a hood ornament in the shape of the hand and heart grenade image from the American Idiot album cover, which was also used in the video for "Holiday." But the "iron fist" was actually used in the video for "Walking Contradiction", when the band members meet at a car towards the end of the video. The band's name is also on the front of the hood in silver letters. The band rode this car to the 2005 MTV Video Music Award ceremony.
As shown in an MTV Making the Video special, director Samuel Bayer used unorthodox techniques to achieve the aged look of the "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" video, including physical damage to the film: scratching the film with razor blades, pouring coffee on it, and extinguishing cigarettes on it.
The video of "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" won six awards at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2005, most notably for Video of the Year. It also won Best Group Video, Best Rock Video, Best Direction, Best Editing, and Best Cinematography.
You can watch the video right here (opens in a new window).
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