Apr 27, 2026 6:30am PT

Michael Jackson’s Auteur Music Video Directors: Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, David Fincher and More

Kennedy French, Arushi Jacob

WireImage

The new biopic “Michael” covers Michael Jackson’s rise from precocious frontman of the Jackson 5 in the 1960s to launching his solo career in the mid-80s. So, as one would expect, the film recreates the making of Jackson’s legendary music video, “Thriller,” in 1982. But when the King of Pop (played by his nephew Jaafar Jackson) shyly asks a producer to deliver a note to the director, a man named John, audiences might not immediately recall who he’s referring to.

Of course, Jackson means John Landis, whose filmography already boasted “Animal House,” “The Blues Brothers,” “An American Werewolf in London” and “Trading Places.”

But Landis was far from the only major filmmaker that the King of Pop collaborated with to bring his short films to life. Jackson commissioned the likes of Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Spike Lee and more to craft some of the most enduring music videos of all time.

John Landis: “Thriller” (1983), “Black or White” (1991)

Image Credit: TIFF

Jackson approached John Landis after seeing “An American Werewolf in London,” and the two cooked up the nearly 14-minute horror short, which is widely considered one of the greatest music videos ever made. Shot on 35mm with a budget of roughly $500,000 (about 10 times the average music video at the time), “Thriller” featured the work of Oscar-winning makeup artist Rick Baker, choreography by Michael Peters and a spoken-word cameo by Vincent Price. When the video debuted on MTV in December 1983, it effectively doubled sales of the “Thriller” album, and in 2009, it became the first music video inducted into the National Film Registry. The music video has over a billion views on YouTube to date.

In 1991, Jackson and Landis reunited for “Black or White,” creating an 11-minute spectacle (with a $4 million production budget), which debuted simultaneously in 27 countries to an estimated 500 million viewers. The video featured Macaulay Culkin, a face-morphing sequence pioneered by Pacific Data Images and a controversial epilogue in which Jackson — who morphed out of a panther — wrecks a car in a solo dance sequence that drew widespread outcry. It remains one of the most-watched music video premieres in history.