When you’ve seen the two worlds, you can bring them together," says Gary McKendry, who directs commercials through bicoastal Go Film. McKendry, a former associate creative director at Margeotes|Fertitta+Partners, New York, has no problem bridging the gap between production companies and ad agencies. Before joining Go Film in 1999, the native of Ireland spent many years working at ad agencies in Northern Ireland, England, Australia and the U.S.
McKendry feels that his first-hand experience makes it easy for him to work well with agency people. He’s also aware of how creatives are sometimes perceived on the shooting set. He’s seen situations where "the production people didn’t really understand that the agency guys, who seemed to be sitting around doing nothing, had worked their asses off for three months to get there."
Last summer, McKendry directed a campaign for New Balance, via Messner Vetere Berger McNamee Schmetterer/Euro RSCG, New York. "We shot that at the end of the summer in Dublin," he recalls. "It was great fun to go home and actually shoot in Ireland."
The spots—"Obstacle Course" and "Elevator"—are good examples of McKendry’s specialty: taut, finely crafted stories. In "Obstacle Course," a runner, presumably in training, makes his way through the streets of Dublin. Shots of a ticking clock are intercut with and superimposed on images of the runner trekking along. Along his route he dodges a hose and hurdles over a couch. As it turns out, the man has been racing to pick up his daughter at school. The tag: "Victory is measured in miles, minutes or if you’re really lucky, hugs. Achieve New Balance."
McKendry likes to give the actors he works with latitude to improvise. An example is Carlsberg Beer’s "Knowledge," which was done for Canadian television and cinemas; McKendry directed the spot through Ammirati Puris Lintas, Toronto. Set in a lounge, the ad shows two young women asking a third woman about her new boyfriend. The woman with the new man says a couple of nice, but not very revealing, things about him. The two women probe further—one of them wants to know if the boyfriend likes to perform a certain sexual act; the answer is, yes. Not long afterwards the new beau joins the women. The two friends smile and stare at him. Confused, he says, "What?" They say they’ve heard a lot about him, and laugh. "We came up with it on the set," explains McKendry. "We improv-ed. A lot of what I try and do is to keep it loose so that you get some really unexpected bits. I like to shoot pretty long takes and let actors bring in their part of the process to the idea. They can bring it to life."
McKendry also recently helmed a Lucent Technologies campaign, comprising the ads "Soccer Dad," "The Game" and "Getting Ahead," out of McCann-Erickson, New York. In "Soccer Dad," a man in a hotel room watches a soccer match on his laptop’s screen. The man is deeply engrossed because his son is playing. A room-service attendant knocks on the door, but the father asks him to wait. The father’s immersed in the action: When the son kicks the ball, the father kicks some newspaper; when the kid scores a goal, the father falls back onto his bed in ecstasy. The annoyed attendant continues to wait. Towards the end of the ad, we hear the voiceover: "Change the way people communicate and you change the way they live. Lucent Technologies."
"I really enjoyed art-directing all those things," says McKendry, referring to the Lucent spots. "For ‘Soccer Dad,’ I wanted to give a certain feel to the hotel room. It certainly feels like an odd hotel room, but it works.
McKendry believes that set design helps actors. "I like to give [a spot] a really tight look and set the framing with the elements," he explains. "And then let the actor loose in that and see what he can come up with: The actor kicking the paper, the actor falling back. I like to go in with as few expectations as possible. Of course, you shoot the board and get it in the can, but I’m very clear in the pre-production that I believe improv is going to give us great stuff.
"There are all those meetings that gradually knock the edge off an idea," he continues. "All the quirks and twists and unexpected moments are rubbed off an idea in the process of its going through the agency and through the client and through research. To a certain extent, I think our job is to chisel it back on."
McKendry grew up in a village just outside Belfast. He feels that the ’70s American movies he grew up watching, like Three Days of the Condor; Taking of Pelham, One Two Three; and The French Connection, were a major influence on him. "Those films are about the story; they’re about the character; and they’re not over gilded," he says.
The director studied design at St. Martin’s School of Art, London. After a stint as an armored-car driver, he broke into the agency side with an art-directing gig at Creative Image Associates, Belfast, and later moved to Sydney, Australia, where he served as an art director at Schofield Sherborne Baker.
TBWA/Chiat/Day, New York, was McKendry’s next roost, followed by a four-year stint at Ogilvy & Mather, New York. "Film school for me was when I was at Ogilvy & Mather," relates McKendry. "I worked on the American Express account, which went all around the world. I was on the road for one hundred eighty days one year. It was great to work with people like Jeff Lovinger, Jeff Preiss and Paul Cade. It was total immersion."
McKendry began directing spots at Margeotes|Fertitta+Partners. "Margeotes was fantastic and very supportive [of my directing]," he says. "It was tough to leave, because it’s a great agency. In many ways it was the job you’d always dreamed of. But I had another dream."
