NEW YORK– Steve Horn’s mother told him that his first word was "Hasselblad," and the rest was destiny, the director said before an audience gathered for the third of the AICP/MOMA directors lecture series, held in conjunction with the recent AICP national convention here. Though he admitted it was daunting to follow directors Ridley Scott and Joe Pytka in the series, he said the most challenging part of the series ("and of my career") was making this speech.
But Horn began by saying he considered himself lucky in his career. He was a poor kid from Brooklyn, who like other poor kids from Brooklyn wanted to be a baseball player. Instead, he got into art school, majored in advertising and started to take pictures. By the early ’60s Horn and his Hasselblad were entrenched in the world of high-fashion photography.
In the early ’70s he traded in his Hasselblad for an Arriflex, and what followed was enough to make him one of the "legends of the business," as Jordan Kalfus, chairman of the AICP/MOMA Show, said in his introduction. True to his legendary form, Horn also has a reel with spots for clients as diverse as diet Coke, G.E., Gillette, Nike, United Airlines and Apple Computer.
COVERING ALL THE BASES
"Variety is the most important thing in my work," Horn said. "I’ve been through the front-lighting phase, the backlighting phase … the British invasion, the feature invasion, shooting it grainy and shooting it slick, and with every project I had to make it look like no one had made it look before. (But everything seems easy now, except for this speech.)"
Because Horn said that directing and operating the camera always went hand-in-hand for him, he helped create the VTR mirror system that made directing from the side of the camera possible. "Then my wife Linda got me one of those things that football coaches scream through so I could hide behind the camera and still roar like a lion," he said.
Horn said he could not give enough praise to Linda, his wife and business partner, saying that she is "the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to me." The Horns opened Steve & Linda Horn Inc. in 1974 and have since become the most visible husband-and-wife production team.
In response to a question about their "fairly unique" working and living situation, Horn smiled and said that they have never had a disagreement, which prompted laughter from the audience. "We both have two personalities and we try to keep the home personality separate from the one at work. Still, differences of opinion will happen every once in a while," he said, and looked out into the audience to address his wife. "And for every difference of opinion– I apologize."
Another question about the United Airlines’ "Immigrants" spot that was honored in the AICP/ MOMA Show, shed light on the Horns’ working process. Horn said Linda actually cast and put together the spot while he was away on another job, and that they brought their daughter on board as the stylist. He added that the archival look of the footage was achieved through a series of happy accidents.
"We used various exposures and film speeds and kept changing the f-stops. We also didn’t process it at the best lab– in fact the lab ruined the next job we did. Everyone thinks its really old footage, but the truth is we did it by hook and by crook, by changing stops and screwing up the film and doing everything we could to make it not good."
The result, however, was very good. Horn had similar anecdotes for other spots on his reel including a mock Top Gun spot for Diet Pepsi, which in spite of his fear of heights had him hanging off the edge of a mountain; and a spot for Nike Air Jordan, in which Michael Jordan said he couldn’t jump because his back hurt and they had to lower the basket.
These were a few examples of what Horn said he liked about making commercials. "I enjoy doing this," Horn said in response to the question of what was left for him to do. "I really like coming up with different ways of doing things, that little swish or camera turn that makes a spot. I don’t really have a desire to do anything else."
