Hurt

Mark Romanek did not wait to be asked.

When he first heard Johnny Cash's cover of "Hurt" on American IV: The Man Comes Around in late 2002, he went directly to Rick Rubin and, according to his later accounts, "begged" for the commission. He offered, according to the same interview in Dave Urbanski's book The Man Comes Around, to shoot the video for free. Rubin — who had produced the Cash covers for his American Recordings series and had a longstanding relationship with Trent Reznor dating back to the "Closer" video — said yes.

Cash was 71. He had been living, since the late 1990s, with autonomic neuropathy, a degenerative nerve condition that was sometimes misreported in the press as Parkinson's disease. By early 2003 he was, according to those around him, visibly frail, struggling with his eyesight, often in a wheelchair for longer journeys, and subject to frequent hospitalizations. Romanek has recalled that Cash had limited stamina on the day and could not tolerate the cold for long stretches. The plan was to shoot fast, close, and candid.

Filming took place in February 2003 — the exact date is not well documented, and some retrospectives disagree — in Hendersonville, Tennessee. There were two locations: Cash's home at Old Hickory Lake, where Romanek shot the dining-room and piano scenes, and the House of Cash, the family museum and archive a short distance away. Romanek has described the museum as "closed for a long time" and "in such a state of dereliction" that he decided to use the dilapidation itself as set design. Water damage, reported in several retrospectives, had further weathered the interior. The museum has sometimes been described as being in formal foreclosure at the time of filming; the documentary record does not support this. It was closed and in disrepair, but the property was not sold until 2007, by the family rather than a bank.

Jean-Yves Escoffier, the cinematographer, shot Cash's face and the cluttered museum surfaces in tight, unglamorized close-up — the documentary texture Romanek wanted.

The material that populates the frame came from two places: new footage, and the museum's own archive. During location scouting, Romanek discovered old film reels, photographs, and personal objects on the museum's shelves and cases. Much of the archival material intercut through the video — Cash performing young, Cash with June, Cash on television, Cash as a child — was drawn directly from the family's own holdings rather than licensed from external film libraries, according to later interviews with Romanek and members of the Cash family.

June Carter Cash appears only briefly, standing on a staircase behind Johnny, watching him. She neither sings nor addresses the camera. The reading that her gaze functions as a farewell is a popular critical interpretation; Romanek has never stated it as a directorial intention, and June's own framing of the moment is not documented in primary sources. She had her own health troubles. In May 2003, three months after the shoot, she underwent heart surgery and died from complications on May 15. Johnny Cash died on September 12 of the same year, from complications of diabetes.

Trent Reznor, whose song this was, has described his early reaction as conflicted. He was flattered by the cover, but worried that it could come off as a gimmick. When he first heard Cash's version without seeing the video, Reznor has said, something felt wrong — in his own phrasing, the recording "sounded alien," a personal song in an unfamiliar voice. His position shifted when he saw Romanek's finished video. In an Alternative Press interview widely paraphrased since, Reznor is reported to have said something to the effect that the song no longer really belonged to him — that it was Cash's now, and he had simply written it. The exact wording of that remark varies across citations; it should be treated as an established paraphrase rather than a verbatim quote.

The video was released in the spring of 2003 and nominated for six MTV Video Music Awards that September: Video of the Year, Best Male Video, Best Direction, Best Art Direction, Best Editing, and Best Cinematography. Escoffier won Best Cinematography. Video of the Year went to Missy Elliott's "Work It." Justin Timberlake, accepting Best Male Video at the same ceremony, is widely reported to have said that the award should have gone to Johnny Cash.

At the Grammy Awards in February 2004, "Hurt" won Best Short Form Music Video. Cash had died five months earlier. His son John Carter Cash accepted the award on his father's behalf.

The video's critical afterlife has been unusually sustained. NME ranked it the greatest music video of all time in a 2011 poll. Rolling Stone placed it second in a 2021 retrospective of the same kind. Romanek — already the director of "Closer," "Scream," "Criminal," and the 2002 Robin Williams feature One Hour Photo — went on to shoot Jay-Z's "99 Problems" the following year and Never Let Me Go in 2010. He has not since directed another music video that has received comparable acclaim. Few have. The video runs a little over three and a half minutes. It is still, by most accounts, the nearest thing the form has produced to an autobiographical final statement.