AI69 Production · Music Video Treatment

The Devil in Me

Suzi Quatro

Prepared for Suzi Quatro

The Concept

The Devil in Me

The film begins in 2020, when the world has suddenly gone quiet. Touring has stopped, stages are empty, and Suzi is at home making music with her son Richard. It is here that The Devil in Me begins to take shape.

But the story reaches somewhere else.

Back to 1975. Suzi is twenty-five, already living inside a world of stages, backstage rooms, cars, night roads, friends and rock ’n’ roll.

Connecting these two versions of the same woman is one simple object: an old mailbox.

Suzi records the song onto a cassette, writes a letter to her younger self and sends both through the mailbox, addressed simply:

SUZI — 1975

Against all logic, it arrives.

What begins as a message to the past becomes a conversation across forty-five years — between the woman who has lived the life and the girl who is only beginning it.

01–05

The Story

Suzi Quatro and Richard making music in 2020

The World Stops

The film opens in stillness.

It is 2020. Empty streets, closed venues, quiet roads. A life built around movement, touring and audiences has suddenly contracted to the walls of a home.

Inside, however, music continues. Suzi and Richard work together in the studio — bass, microphone, headphones, fragments of vocals, small exchanges between mother and son. Slowly, The Devil in Me emerges from the silence outside.

Among the modern equipment sits an old cassette deck. Suzi records the finished song onto tape.

Later, surrounded by photographs from another life, she begins to write. The letter and cassette go into a yellow envelope marked simply:

SUZI — 1975

She carries it outside, places it into an old mailbox and closes the door.

Young Suzi Quatro receives a cassette in 1975

The Mailbox

The mailbox opens again.

But now it is 1975.

The restrained stillness of 2020 gives way to something warmer, rougher and alive — grain, movement, imperfect light, the texture of film that might have been sitting undiscovered for decades.

Twenty-five-year-old Suzi receives the strange yellow envelope. Inside she finds a letter and a cassette labelled:

SUZI Q. THE DEVIL IN ME 2020

At first, it feels like an elaborate joke.

Then she plays it.

Through the speakers comes a voice she recognises immediately — her own. But older. Singing about mistakes, darkness, instinct and survival that, for this Suzi, still belong to the future.

She rewinds the cassette.

And listens again.

Young Suzi Quatro on stage and on the road in 1975

The Girl She Remembers

The cassette comes with her.

We follow young Suzi into a world that feels less like a reconstruction of 1975 and more like lost film from her life: stages, backstage corridors, bass guitars, friends, dressing rooms, cars, roadside stops and long drives after dark.

She performs. She travels. She laughs. She sits quietly in the passenger seat watching the landscape disappear behind her. The future voice follows through all of it.

Certain words carry echoes of something older — the voices and advice of her parents, memories already embedded inside her long before the life ahead of her unfolds.

Gradually, the impossible cassette stops feeling like a warning from the future.

It becomes something much more intimate:

a message from the only person who already knows where this road leads.

Herself.

Suzi Quatro’s question and reply across the mailbox

The Question

Eventually, young Suzi decides to answer.

She writes one question:

DO I LOSE ANYONE?

The note disappears into the same mailbox.

In 2020, Suzi finds it.

She sits down to reply. She writes for a while, stops, looks at the page and crumples it. Another attempt follows. That one goes too.

There are forty-five years of life behind the answer, but almost none of it needs explaining.

Finally she takes a clean piece of paper and writes only:

YES. LOVE THEM NOW.

The message returns to 1975.

Young Suzi reads it.

Nothing around her has changed — the same people, the same road, the same music, the same life rushing forward.

But now she looks at all of it differently.

Suzi Quatro’s Polaroids and message to her future self

Don't Forget Her

Young Suzi picks up a Polaroid camera.

She begins photographing the things around her — not milestones, but ordinary pieces of a life that still feels permanent. Friends. Musicians. The road. Her bass. A car. A backstage room after the show. Someone laughing.

Small moments she has no reason yet to think she might one day miss.

Finally, she turns the camera toward herself.

The photograph develops: Suzi at twenty-five — confident, defiant, alive, with the whole road still ahead of her.

On the back she writes:

DON'T FORGET HER.

The photographs travel through the mailbox to 2020.

Older Suzi spreads them across the table until she reaches the final portrait. She turns it over, reads the message, then looks back into the face of her younger self.

MATCH CUT.

Twenty-five-year-old Suzi becomes Suzi today.

As the final “Mama always told me…” comes through the song, forty-five years collapse into a single image.

Key Visual Moments

Key visual moments

The Cassette

A song written in 2020 becomes a physical message to 1975.

Inside the Mailbox

The same simple POV connects two moments separated by forty-five years.

Lost Film

Young Suzi’s world feels discovered rather than recreated — grain, movement, backstage rooms and roads at night.

The Question

A single note crosses time: Do I lose anyone?

Love Them Now

Forty-five years of experience reduced to three words.

The Polaroids

Ordinary moments in 1975 become precious evidence of a life already lived.

The Emotional Arc

The emotional arc

The film begins with an older Suzi looking backwards and a younger Suzi looking only ahead.

The cassette brings those two perspectives together. At first, the connection is impossible and playful. Then one question changes its meaning.

Do I lose anyone?

From that moment, the story stops being about travelling through time and becomes about what time does to the things we assume will always be there.

The younger Suzi receives one piece of knowledge from the future: love them now.

The older Suzi receives something in return: a reminder not only of the people and places she has carried with her, but of the fearless young woman who began the journey.

Neither changes the other's life.

They simply help each other see it.