Mike Mills likes to make things. It’s the underlying principle that drives everything he does, which might be why he does so much. Mills is a noted commercial and music video director, graphic artist and documentary filmmaker. He’s also co-founder, with director Roman Coppola, of bicoastal shop The Directors Bureau.
"People always ask me how my graphic design background informs my commercial work, but to me it’s all the same," Mills explains. "It’s about the idea, not about the medium by which you make the idea."
It’s a concept he says he learned from Charles and Ray Eames, who are best known as furniture designers, yet spent their lifetimes exploring filmmaking, architecture, photography, toy making and exhibition design. Inspired by the Eameses’ boundless curiosity, Mills decided he wouldn’t stop at graphic design and picked up filmmaking in the mid-’90s.
He started by directing music videos and soon moved onto spotmaking, initially through now defunct Satellite. He has directed spots for memorable campaigns such as Nike’s "What Are You Getting Ready For?," adidas’ "Forever Sport," as well as ads for the Gap, including "Khaki-A-Go-Go" and "Mambo," which were done client direct, and produced by The Directors Bureau.
In 1998, Mills and Coppola opened The Directors Bureau to give themselves the creative freedom to explore all the mediums they were interested in. Today, when one looks at something that Mills has directed, there is a sense that all his talents are coming together. There’s an attention to detail and composition that speaks to his design sensibilities, an understanding of human emotion that’s been sharpened through his documentary work and a pacing that gives one the feeling that music videos are somewhere in his background. All this can be said of "Bubble," the spot Mills directed for the new Volkswagen convertible Beetle out of Arnold Worldwide, Boston.
The :60 tells the story of Bill Briggs, a guy in his mid-20s who works for a semi-large corporation. He’s a few years out of college and at the point in his career when the dreams he had as a younger person are giving way to the harsh realities of working for The Man. The job affords Bill his own apartment, yet he brings his lunch to work every day in a Tupperware container. He makes photocopies and coffee and stares longingly out the window at a woman in an adjacent building who he will probably never meet. Then one day, Bill—whose longish hair seems to be the final remnant of his youthful optimism—spies a vehicle of freedom outside the window of his office’s skywalk: the new VW convertible Beetle. For a moment, his face shows a glimmer of hope—there’s a chance that he may one day escape the monotony of his life.
This entire plot about Bill’s life—his hopes, failures, desires, even what he brings to work for lunch—is gleaned from the spot without dialogue. Instead, it is a visual tale told in split-screen fashion to the bubbly tune "Mr. Blue Sky," from Electric Light Orchestra. According to Mills, the spot closely reflects Arnold’s initial storyboards, including the music choice. What Mills brought to the ad was his ability to capture the loneliness and malaise of Bill Briggs’ life through hundreds of small details.
With the screen split into four, the spot moves quickly. Mills used a looping device to reinforce Bill’s sense of routine so when we see Bill pass his office building’s security guard three times, a subtle change in the guard’s actions lets us know that this is happening on different days. Bill ascends the escalator in the same repetitive way, but his tie and blazer are different each day.
Stylistically, the office has the requisite beige walls and fluorescent lights, but in the hands of Mills, this world is slightly more sterile and alienating. Some of Mills’ favorite moments in the ad champion the banal because they are the things that don’t normally make it into ads, like the sequence of shots where we see the inside of Bill’s refrigerator or the photocopied papers that move across the screen. Perhaps the loneliest moment of all is a close-up shot of Bill at his office window that pans back to reveal the metropolis he works in.
"I connected with everything [about the ad], from the way it was shot to the tone," says Mills. "It was sad, but in a sincere way." A lot of the muted emotion associated with the spot came through the actor, whose name really is Bill Briggs. "[The character] is this loveable misfit who’s not annoying or dangerous, but kind of sad," Mills notes. "It’s something I could identify with, and I was able to bring out his internal malaise."
Character driven
A look at some of Mills’ other work also reveals a world of lonely characters. His semi-fictional film, The Architecture of Reassurance, is about one person’s alienation growing up in an upscale housing development in Santa Barbara, Calif. The music video for Divine Comedy’s "Bad Ambassador" tells the story of a misfit man-beast who fantasizes about running away from his factory job with the lovely woman who works on the assembly line. The pseudo-documentary-style clip for Air’s "All I Need" features a skateboarding couple discussing what love means to them—both feel that no one in the world understands them so they conclude that they only need each other. And the documentary Paperboys explores newspaper delivery as a rite of passage by following five paperboys on their bicycle routes in Stillwater, Minn.
In general, Mills likes to keep one foot in the world of documentary and the other in storytelling. "Hopefully I’ll always do both," he says. "Things that are a hybrid—but are somewhat contradictory—excite me. "
Lately, Mills has been working to extend his range as a commercial director, and his latest Volkswagen projects have been a step in a new direction. He notes that many agencies ask him for the style he developed early in his career, something Mills believes has been overdone. "For the past year, people have been coming to me for ‘downplayed realism,’ " he states. "It’s easy to shoot and it’s trendy, but it’s going to be the fall of the Roman Empire."
Just before Mills shot "Bubble," he helmed another VW ad for Arnold called "Chain Reaction," where the contagiously positive effect of the new convertible Beetle is revealed through one continuous shot. The commercial is happy and stylistically different from some of Mills’ other work. At press time, he was also working on a "dark and odd" music video for Martin Gore (lead singer of Depeche Mode), and prepping a six-spot package for Time Warner, but perhaps the ultimate new experience on Mills’ horizon is going to be directing his first feature film, Thumbsucker, about a teenage boy who still sucks his thumb. Mills adapted the script from Walter Kirn’s novel of the same name.
Recently, Mills received some sage advice about filmmaking from one of his heroes, director Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; The Ice Storm). "I’d always wanted to meet Ang Lee so a friend of mine set it up," explains Mills. "[Lee] gave me all this great advice, and just as he was leaving the room he turned around and said to me, ‘It’s very important—everything I just said could be totally wrong.’ "
