Joseph Kahn learned to direct in three-minute pop videos and has spent thirty years insisting that this is proper filmmaking. The craft is not in doubt; what the features have argued about, with him, is what all that speed is for.
Fi1m perspective
A Joseph Kahn shot rarely stays still. The light changes, the frame changes shape, the cut arrives a beat before you expect it, and the world on screen turns into whatever the song or the joke needs. He learned this in music videos, which he began directing as a teenager in Houston after a year at film school, and he has been making them since the mid-1990s. He objects to the idea that it is a music video style at all. "I've been trained as a formal director," he said in 2012, "so essentially in my music videos I apply, at its core base, the same new wave filmmaking that Spielberg and Scorsese use." The interesting thing is that he keeps trying to prove it at feature length.
The first attempt was Torque (2004), a motorcycle action film that critics admired for its look and marked down for the pile-up of references and a tone that would not settle. He then paid for Detention (2012) himself, a high-school horror-comedy pastiche that went round the festivals and found a distributor, and heard much the same thing: quick, funny about being young, and too pleased with its own quotations. Bodied (2018), a satire on battle rap and the manners policing it, is where the reception warmed, mostly for dialogue that moves as fast as the camera. Ick (2025) is the latest. Between features he has directed television, including an episode of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2017).
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is our one point of contact, and it is a small one. The show's numbers had the grammar of pop videos from the pilot, so Kahn, arriving among the later directors, was working in his own idiom rather than adapting to someone else's. We watched four years of those numbers half expecting them to tire, and they did not; the staging stays confident to the end, which is part of why Nena Erb's trick of cutting Rebecca from soundstage to car park without a pause kept landing. We would not claim more for one episode than that.
The pattern across the features, as critics have drawn it and as the videos bear out, is a director who is expert at the surface and knows it. Pace, reference and a joke about the genre he is standing in come easily; the ground underneath shifts. That was said of Torque and again of Detention. Bodied suggests he is better when the material is already an argument, because battle rap gives the speed something to be about. He has never made a slow film and we doubt he will start now. The question with each new one is whether the speed is carrying an idea or standing in for one, and Bodied suggests he knows the difference when he wants to.
Biography
Joseph Kahn (born Ahn Jun-hee) is a South Korean-born American film and music video director. Born on 12 October 1972 in Busan, South Korea, he spent part of his childhood in Livorno, Italy, before moving to Texas in the United States at the age of seven. He attended New York University's Tisch School of the Arts but left after a year to pursue directing.
Kahn began his career directing music videos in the 1990s and has since worked with artists including Britney Spears, Taylor Swift, Eminem and Lady Gaga. He has won multiple Grammy Awards for his music videos. His feature films include Torque (2004), Detention (2011), Bodied (2017) and Ick (2025). He has also directed episodes of television series including Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2015) and Happy! (2017).
