DELTA Goodrem has just thrown a glass of red wine in a fit of rage. The target the forehead of her fiance, Brian McFadden. Her aim is spot on.
A bleeding McFadden is eyeing off a chainsaw with a destructive glint in his eyes.
He’s swearing at her, she’s yelling at him. Then the director says “cut”.
The loved-up pair are playing combative lovers in the video for their duet Mistakes.
Loosely based on Brangelina’s Mr and Mrs Smith, the clip starts with a romantic dinner that triggers an explosive domestic dispute.
The pair may have the occasional argument, but this fictitious one is turbo-nuclear.
On set in Sydney last week, director Dan Reisinger is yelling obscenities at Goodrem to get her in the (war) zone for the fiery feud.
“It’s not every day Australia’s sweetheart gets called a f—-g b—-,”Reisinger laughs.
“I had to get her motivated.”
“The first word I said after ‘cut’ was sorry . . . before re-loading and letting her have it again.”
While Goodrem taps into her Logie-winning Neighbours days for angst-on-cue (“Brian’s like ‘I don’t want to offend you’ I’m going, ‘Come on!”‘), McFadden struggles to abuse his partner of six years.
“The happy bits are easy,” McFadden says, “trying to get each other riled up is hard.”
Reisinger, director of McFadden’s last two videos, closed the set after a string of failed takes.
“They are such private people when it comes to their relationship, which is why it is so successful,” Reisinger says.
“Brian was reluctant to hurt Delta’s feelings, particularly in front of strangers on set. She kept trying to reassure him it was just acting, but he couldn’ t bring himself to insult her where it hurts, a thing anyone’s partner knows better than anyone else.”
The words hurt, but McFadden is at ease with the string of button-pushing stunts.
Goodrem makes a digital smoothie when she throws his watch in a blender and smashes one of his platinum discs.
She uses the disc to slice his guitar (James Bond fan Reisinger’s nod to villian Oddjob) while he retaliates by using the chainsaw to turn Goodrem’s piano into firewood.
“Delta was genuinely traumatised by us doing that,” Reisinger says. “It was like us chainsawing the family pet.”
Goodrem, worried about instrument karma, admits it was like “a horror movie”.
“I feel physically sick,” she says. “When we finished the treatment the biggest issue I had with the whole video is the chainsawing of the piano.”
McFadden researched the lineage of the doomed instrument.
“There’ll be a lot of people -ed off we ruined a piano, but apparently the piano was in the graveyard and about to be destroyed anyway,” he says. “No real pianos were harmed in the making of this video.”
The duet, like their previous collaboration Almost Here, is anything but a love song.
“We don’t feel the need to express that in public,” Goodrem says.
“Privately we’re very romantic and very much in love.”
McFadden, meanwhile, is seeing how long it takes to microwave Goodrem’s teddy bear until it blows up a brand new Freedom kitchen.
“Everyone has their arguments,”he says. “This is the biggest one we’ll ever have! HEAR Mistakes (Universal) out September 17.
