A Major Moment

“His manager said to me: ‘make sure you find room for him to dance’. So I went through it with him, and said we had this chorus that we could do the dancing.

“When we came to do it, I said ‘I’ll show you all the paving stones that light up’, and I led him along the street: This one, these two, that one…’ So I said: ‘shall we walk through it and rehearse?’, and he said: ‘No, let’s just do it.’

“I’m on camera tracking back as he came forward… and it was astounding. At no time before did you have any idea… nobody did, until that moment. And then when he came forward through that chorus, literally my eyepiece steamed up, and I’m thinking: ‘fucking hell, this is amazing, he is incredible.’ Dancing on his toes, the whole thing.

“We shot that first take, got to the end, and everyone – up in the gantries, eating their sandwiches, reading the paper, painters working on another set – just burst into applause.

“We all just knew we’d seen another era of superstar that the world was about to see. It was a major moment.”

Steve Barron on the making of his video for Billie Jean (from PROMO July ’06)

Source: www.promonews.tv/2009/06/26/michael-jackson-by-steve-barron/