U2

U2 never settled on a single director, but they rarely hired a stranger either. Most of the people who made these videos were already inside the band's orbit before they picked up a camera for them.

Meiert Avis had shot I Will Follow and Gloria years earlier when he climbed onto the roof of a liquor store in downtown Los Angeles on 27 March 1987 to film Where the Streets Have No Name. The idea came from the Beatles' rooftop set eighteen years before. More than a thousand people gathered in the street below. The band had hoped for exactly that kind of drama, and it came: the police arrived and stopped the shoot, and the real interruption is what ends the film. It won a Grammy.

Anton Corbijn was the band's photographer before he was ever their director; he shot the cover of The Joshua Tree, and his first video for the band was one of the three made for Pride (In the Name of Love). Phil Joanou directed the 1988 concert film Rattle and Hum and then stayed for seventeen years, from One in 1992 to All Because of You in 2005. Kevin Godley — one half of Godley & Creme, who had left 10cc to direct — made Sweetest Thing.

They did reach outside eventually: Stéphane Sednaoui for Mysterious Ways, Joseph Kahn for Elevation, Alex & Martin for Vertigo. But the pattern holds across three decades. This is a band that kept hiring the people who already knew what it looked like.