It’s extremely tiring—mentally, physically and emotionally—to keep jumping across and back again between doing features and spotwork," says Peter Care, explaining why so many directors give up commercials once they begin to work in features.
This may be the case, but if so, Care, who directs spots out of bicoastal Bob Industries and helmed last year’s critically acclaimed feature The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, is either a man perilously close to exhaustion or the exception that proves his own rule. Given the quality and quantity of his recent spotwork, the latter seems most likely.
After wrapping Altar Boys, his first feature film, Care returned to commercials with a vengeance, directing a number of ads for such high-profile clients as MasterCard, Southwest Airlines, Ameritrade, Monster.com, AT&T Wireless and Discover. Though others might have taken it easy for a bit after undergoing the rigors involved in shooting a film, Care couldn’t help but get back behind a camera as soon as possible.
"I really like to shoot," he explains. "I just love being on the set. I really like working with talented people, talented writers and art directors. It just feels good to me to be doing that. I like having new problems to solve."
As Care explains, with features a director is lucky to get a chance to shoot once every two or three years. "That would drive me insane," he says.
Perhaps Care’s favorite work since returning to spots is a series of Ameritrade ads he directed out of Ogilvy & Mather (O&M), New York. "That campaign was actually, I think, one of the greatest experiences of my career," Care says. "And I’m going back twenty-five years now."
The concept behind the spots is a simple one: Average stockholders are mistaken for titans of industry, with predictably hilarious results. In "The Audition," for example, a woman at lunch with her mother mentions that she "owns EMI." She means, of course, that she owns a few shares of the music conglomerate. An eavesdropping waiter, however, interprets the conversation differently, and busts out an impromptu off-key pop medley including the tunes "Working for the Weekend" and "Cherish" in an attempt to impress who he thinks is a record label CEO. In "VIP" a similar misunderstanding leads a hotel staff to fete a lowly business traveler as if he were the chairman of Motorola. And in "The Big League" a little league coach has visions of grandeur when one of his players tells him that his father owns Nike.
When asked what made the Ameritrade package so special, Care cites two things: "The standard of the writing, and the fact that the agency gave me a hell of a lot of room to come up with my own ideas. I felt like I was a kid in a candy store," he relates.
In fact, if Care actually did have a problem with the campaign, it was having so many good takes to work with, that much of it couldn’t be fit into the final cut. "We got material incredibly quickly, so there were a lot of principals and really good actors who just didn’t make it in," he says.
Reunion
The shoot for AT&T Wireless’ "Antique Bandwagon," also out of O&M, was a similarly pleasant experience. The ad, which debuted on the telecast of Super Bowl XXXVII, is a parody of the popular PBS series Antique Roadshow, and depicts a man having his old house phone appraised. The resident expert runs down the phone’s various features, and reveals that at one time "people would actually be tethered to the wall."
"Do you know how much this is worth?" the expert asks the owner. "Diddly squat." At the end of the spot, a voiceover says, "When your wireless phone can be your only phone, that’s mLife from AT&T Wireless."
Remarkable for its technical simplicity and the large number of gags crammed into a tight 30 seconds, the spot stood out from the usual slickly-produced fare on the Super Bowl.
It also occasioned a reunion of sorts for Care, as he was working once again with Chris Wall, who is co-creative head, along with David Apicella, of O&M. Having worked with Wall several years before on a Microsoft campaign out of Wieden+ Kennedy, Portland, Ore., Care had long been interested in collaborating with him a second time.
"I thought that his skill at writing and his attitude toward writing and commercials overall was really sophisticated," he explains. "I really learned a lot from him." That being the case, Care was understandably excited when Wall and Apicella appeared on the AT&T shoot. "I felt like I’d found my old buddy," he says.
With years of stellar spotwork behind him, Care likely has "old buddies" throughout the industry. Having started his directorial career as a film student at the Sheffield School of Art, Sheffield, England, he established the Sheffield Independent Film Company upon graduating, producing a number of documentaries and short films. During that time, Care also worked as a boom operator on the Ken Loach film Looks and Smiles. "I learned more in six weeks working for Ken Loach than I did in three years of film school," asserts Care.
In 1992, after years of shooting music videos out of Limelight Films’ now defunct U.S. operation, Care was one of the original directors signed to now defunct Satellite, a division of the since shuttered Propaganda Films. While at Satellite, his commercial and music video career shifted into high gear. He directed clips for the likes of Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen and R.E.M., among others, and helmed spots for such clients as Coca-Cola, ESPN, Saturn and MCI.
In ’00, partially due to the changing climate at Satellite, Care shifted to Bob Industries, headed by executive producers T.K. Knowles, Chuck Ryant and John O’Grady. Care doubtlessly enjoys having a comfortable place to hang his hat as he continues to pursue spotwork and manage what—with three scripts currently in various stages of development—could be quite a burgeoning feature film career.
"It’s very, very good," he says of life at Bob.
