Thirty Seconds To Mars released “From Yesterday” as a digital single on November 7, 2006. The radio edit ran three minutes and 52 seconds. In the film Jared Leto directed for it, a young emperor makes a birthday wish, the band gets called out of its dressing room, and four musicians find themselves walking between ranks of soldiers, all before Leto sings the first verse.
Listeners had a chance to get to know the song well before they saw the emperor. “From Yesterday” appeared on the band’s second album, A Beautiful Lie, in 2005. “Attack” and “The Kill” were its first two singles, and Virgin sent “From Yesterday” to U.S. alternative radio on October 17, 2006. Written by Jared Leto and produced by the band with Josh Abraham, the recording opens with a repeating guitar figure. Shannon Leto keeps the drums moving underneath a low, measured vocal. When Jared finally stretches out the title in the chorus, the guitars and his voice seem to fill all the space the verse left open.
By then, the band had already found one way to give a song a second life on film. For “The Kill,” Leto borrowed the empty hotel and unsettling doubles of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. For “From Yesterday,” the point of reference was Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor. This time the musicians begin somewhere they know well. They’re dressed in white, waiting to be told it’s time to go on. Someone comes to collect them, the lights go out, and the next entrance they make is through a palace gate.
The band traveled to China for the October shoot. In an interview with YRB Magazine, Leto recalled 500 extras, period costumes and 40 men on horseback. One of the most effective uses of all those people is also one of the simplest. As the four musicians walk down the lane the soldiers have left open, Jared catches sight of a woman in a white mask moving along the edge of the formation. For a moment, in a frame full of people, there’s only one face to look at.
The scale helped start a rumor that followed the band for years. In 2010, JUICE asked Leto whether the video had really cost $12 million. He put the figure at a few hundred thousand dollars. “I just made it look like it cost 12 million dollars,” he told the magazine. The full cut runs 13 minutes and 30 seconds, with room for the band members to wander separately through the palace before they meet again in armor. Virgin also shot the production in high definition, an unusual enough choice in 2006 that Billboard featured it in a report on how record labels were preparing videos for HDTV.
MTV scheduled the premiere for November 20, with MTV2 airing the video throughout the day. On radio, the climb took longer. In its 22nd week on Billboard’s Modern Rock chart, “From Yesterday” rose from No. 3 to No. 1 on the chart dated March 31, 2007. “The Kill” had spent a year on that chart and peaked at No. 3. Its follow-up spent two weeks at the top.
