Talking Heads never got around to shooting a music video for “Psycho Killer.” They had other priorities to worry about at the time, like burning down the competition at CBGB. Exactly 50 years after their live debut at the New York venue, though, they faced up to the facts and gave the people some visuals. The resulting video, directed by Mike Mills — of cinema, not R.E.M. — follows a young woman played by Saoirse Ronan who’s seemingly on the brink of losing it as several days pass in her life. Tina Weymouth’s bass line sets the scene: She’s brushing her teeth, lying in bed, and going about a normal day at the office. Or is she? Each daily loop becomes more and more manic for her character, to the point where you begin to question if it will crescendo and mirror the title in a very literal sense. For Mills, what happens next is the scarier option.

“The last thing you want to do is pin down or reduce what the song is about. The song is so much more than being psychotic or killing,” Mills explains. “At first, I was totally daunted. I was like, How the fuck do you make a video for ‘Psycho Killer’ for my art heroes? It’s impossible. I can’t think of that idea, it’s too hard. Then walking down my hallway, the idea came to me in a flash. Saoirse isn’t at all a psycho killer or anything. It’s the environment and that life and false normality.”

Mills, a lifelong Talking Heads fan whose film 20th Century Women featured a subplot about the band, pitched his idea to the four members over a Zoom tribunal. He stressed that the music video would by no means be a direct illustration of the song, but rather a spinoff or interpretation. “There’s something violent about the false normality of all the people around her,” Mills says, referring to the colleagues, boyfriend, and therapist that materialize. “There’s something violent in the banality of it all. It’s psychic violence, but it’s still hostile to me. I don’t think normality actually exists. It’s a construct.” David Byrne, Jerry Harrison, Chris Frantz, and Weymouth chose his vision over several other competing directors who wanted the job. (No, he won’t name who he beat.) “I was like, Fuck, what if I don’t get this? I love this band so much. I adore them. I should do this, but I could so easily not get it,” he adds. “They really liked that it wasn’t reducing the meaning of the song. That’s essential to the way they work.”

Mills knew that he needed a “virtuosic actor” to handle the demands of his script, which involved 13 different daily loops with unique emotional prompts for each one. “I wanted it to be very heightened and intense,” he notes. “I think there were 300 shots in the whole video. There were few people I thought of who could handle it.” Coincidentally, Mills and Ronan had established a friendly rapport when he was developing “Psycho Killer,” the timing of which encouraged him to see if she was a Talking Heads fan. “I said, ‘Hey, do you know this band?’ It turns out she got married to ‘This Must Be the Place,’ grew up listening to them, and had her own connection,” he says. “She wrote back right away, ‘Hell yes, what are you talking about?!’” They shot the video in January at an old compound in Pomona, which used to serve as the grounds for a hospital — fa fa fa fa irony that Mills acknowledges. “I didn’t choose it because it was a sanatorium,” he says. “It’s just where I could shoot cheaply.”

After sending the finished video to the band members, Mills and Ronan nervously monitored their inboxes to await feedback. Mills soon got his answer through Byrne’s response, which arrived with a “Brilliant” subject line. (And the man knows a brilliant “Psycho Killer” when he sees it.) “I didn’t even open the email for five hours because I was like, That’s enough. That’s a beautiful gift. I’ll just keep it at that, who knows what’s inside,” Mills jokes. “My response was, Okay, great, I don’t have to do therapy for at least a year.”

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 “I was totally daunted,” Mike Mills says of directing the song’s first-ever video. “How do you make a video for my art heroes?”