Hype Williams Reflects on Wu-Tang Clan Hating His “Can It All Be So Simple” Music Video

Hype Williams considers the music video for the Wu-Tang Clan‘s “Can It All Be So Simple” to be the first time he “got it right” as a video director. Everyone in Wu-Tang did not see it the same way.

Williams sat down with Aria Hughes for a lengthy Complex interview where he discussed his decades-long career as the premier director in the music business. The 53-year-old said he started out as an aspiring filmmaker who saw directing music videos as great experience.

“I was just trying to get a hold of a camera to make movies,” Williams explained. “Videos gave me the opportunity that I thought film school didn’t.”

Hype directed quite a few videos before “Can It All Be So Simple,” but everything just seemed to click with that one.

“‘Can It Be’ was like ’93. That was the first one I can remember where I got it right. Meaning like, here’s what I wanted to accomplish and it looked like what I wanted it to look like,” he recalled. “The prior stuff was always like, ‘Oh, this shit sucks. You suck. You’re no good.’ ‘Can It Be’ was the first time I didn’t suck.”

“Somehow the photography was flawless,” Williams continued. “Like every moment that we caught was perfect. Perfect light.”

While Hype was pleased with what he made, Wu-Tang felt the opposite. “The biggest problem we had was those guys,” he said of the group. “They were young superstars. They were uncontrollable, and they all hated the video. When I finished it I thought it was a masterpiece. So once they said they hated it, we had these horror edit sessions.”

When asked why exactly they hated the video, Hype saw the whole situation as water under the bridge. However, at the time, Williams remembers how the negative reception among the group led to quite a hostile environment.

“We were kids. Who knows? It’s irrelevant,” he said. “It was just whatever they thought it was supposed to be, what I did wasn’t it. So we had huge fights and arguments and violent outbursts, RZA especially, because they thought I had cheated them and didn’t do a good video. But with ‘Can It Be’ it was the first time I knew for a fact they were wrong.”