Martin Granger is on a roll. Since joining bicoastal/international Moxie Pictures for American representation in 2003 the Canadian native has directed several high profile, humorous spots for the U.S. market.
The director, who maintains representation in Canada through Avion Films, Toronto, and in the U.K. via Bikini Films, London, makes very funny commercials that show quite a range, but he’s clearly drawn toward the absurd. Why does his odd brand of humor work so well? “I don’t know,” he muses, “maybe it’s because it’s different than everything that’s out there. People are so savvy to commercials now that anything’s that’s slightly different than what they’ve been set up to expect often pays off.”
Granger first caused a stir in the U.S. with a round of spots he directed for Burger King via Crispin, Porter + Bogusky (CP+B), Miami that were inspired by the popular television comedy series, The Office. Since then, he’s gone on to direct ads for Holiday Inn Express, Citibank, Comcast, and others. Recently, Granger helmed a Skittles Smoothie Mix campaign through TBWA/Chiat/Day, New York, and the ads are good examples of just how weird and funny he can be. One of the spots, “Sheep Boys”–which one a Bronze Lion at this year’s Cannes International Advertising Festival–shows two creatures with human faces and sheep’s bodies as they chat and eat Skittles off of a tree stump. The pair, apparently oblivious to their own hybrid nature, marvels at the fact that the goodies they’re eating contain a mix of two fruit flavors. When one sheepboy remarks that the blend of peach and pear is really unusual, the strange twosome bursts into paroxysms of crazy laughter. Their good times are interrupted when a farmer tells the pair to quit gabbing.
“It was one of those scripts that I immediately knew I had to do,” says Granger of “Sheep Boys”. And the director instantly felt a rapport with TBWA/Chiat/Day creatives Scott Vitrone and Ian Reichenthal. “From the first phone call, our senses of humor meshed nicely.”
The spot, heavy on effects, was challenging for Granger. At the time, he had never worked on that sort of ad, although he has since gone on to direct a number of effects-heavy jobs. “I really wasn’t that familiar with green screen work,” he says. “It was a tremendous amount of work to create a spot that looked so simple.” (The Mill, New York, created the effects.) Granger details a process that involved shooting plates of an actual farm; filming matching angles of the actors, complete with wigs, wooly bibs, and green screen jumpsuits; lensing a real sheep, and then combining all of the material. “I like to work closely with actors and get a nice performance and suddenly there’s people with a green screen wheeling into the shot,” he says. “It was a whole different approach.”
Granger also recently directed two rounds of American Legacy Foundation anti-tobacco ads out of CP+B and Arnold Worldwide, Boston–three of those were awarded Bronze Lions at Cannes. The spots draw material from actual tobacco company marketing plans, but the scenarios all take place in the context of an imaginary sitcom called Fair Enough. The ads, which include “Gumballs” and “Fatboys,” portray high-level meetings where executives hatch tobacco-marketing schemes, and come complete with laugh tracks, sitcom timing, and the sort of acting you’d see on a real show. The text that runs at the end of each spot belies the humor: “It might be funnier if it wasn’t true.”
The work is an effective blend of humor and expose. “What the actors are saying is not funny, but the writers decided to put it in a sitcom scenario,” explains Granger. “We shot it exactly like a sitcom. We cast the way you would cast a real sitcom.
“The thing about those spots which is most amazing to me is that they’re completely based on real transcripts,” continues Granger. “We’re not putting words into the mouths of these executives, it’s what they actually said.”
Funny Business
It’s no surprise to learn that Granger got his start in comedy. In the late ’80s, he acted with the well-known theater group Second City in Toronto, where he was an understudy in a cast that included comics such as Mike Myers, Ryan Stiles, and Colin Mochrie. “Watching those guys work [made me think,] ‘Maybe I should find something else to do,’ ” he jokes.
So Granger moved to Vancouver, B.C., to study filmmaking at the Vancouver Film School, and then headed back to Toronto, where he landed a job as a production assistant on the comedy series, Kids in the Hall. Granger got to know some of the show’s actors, who later performed in a couple of comedic shorts that he directed. The films got attention, and Granger was offered spot work by Avion Films, a company the director has been with for a decade. He joined Bikini Films in ’02, and he joined Moxie a year later. Granger’s recent Moxie work includes a Comcast campaign he helmed through Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco, and Holiday Inn Express ads via Fallon, Minneapolis
When asked to discuss his influences, Granger muses on some of the sources of Canadian humor. “When I was growing up in Canada, there was a lot more British influence back in the ’70s and ’80s when the CBC aired endless British sitcoms,” he says. In addition to soaking up a British sensibility through shows like Faulty Towers and Monty Python, Granger soaked up American humor, too, by way of Saturday Night Live, Mad Magazine and National Lampoon. “We had this sort of weird hybrid sense of humor,” he relates. “There are a disproportionate number of Canadians in American comedy,” referring to Mike Myers, Jim Carrey, and many other comic performers who work in the U.S. “If you equate North America to high school, America is the big football jock and Canadians are the comedy nerds who get by on making the girls laugh.”
