By Bill Dunlap

Tarsem is back. Well actually, he was never really very far out of the mix. But with the Nike spot “Masks” for Wieden + Kennedy (W+K), Portland, Ore., the director helmed his first big American spot in quite awhile.

Tarsem, who directs via bicoastal/international @radical.media, acknowledges that his work has not been seen much on U.S. television lately, but he attributes it to jobs in other parts of the world, work on a long planned movie project and the desire to stay close to a European girlfriend.

“When you work as globally as I do,” he says, “it looks sometimes like you disappear and then you come back. Sometimes the Europeans think I’ve gone on a hiatus because I’ve been doing back-to-back jobs in America. Right now, I just thought suddenly, let’s catch up on some American stuff.”

W+K wanted Tarsem to participate from the earliest point in “Masks,” which is important for him. The agency planned the spot as a visual :60, a length he prefers. In the spot, promoting Nike Pro Apparel, a handful of American athletes–Yankees closer Mariano Rivera, Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, Chicago Bears linebacker Brian Urlacher, Minnesota Twins center fielder Torii Hunter, and St. Louis Cardinals first baseman Albert Pujols–get on their game faces in the form of primordial masks. The spot’s tagline: “For warriors.” “The [creatives] came up with this idea that when you go into a battle it’s all about intimidating the other person,” explains Tarsem. “It’s your little war dance. How you see yourself is one thing, but how your opponent sees you when you’ve got adrenaline pumping out of your ears is a different character altogether. The idea was a play on that.”

 

Game Face

After the W+K creatives settled on the mask concept and five athletes from professional baseball and football for the spots, Tarsem asked them to describe each athlete’s strengths. “I told them to write down five words for each character and we will design the masks around them,” he relates. “For the pitcher from New York”–reliever Mariano Rivera–“he’s a closer, you can’t see where he’s going to sting you from. It’s like a scorpion. And then I got Eiko Ishioka, who is a personal friend, to design them.” (Ishioka is an art director and designer who won an Oscar for costume design for Bram Stoker’s Dracula and worked on Tarsem’s ’00 feature The Cell.)

Because shooting fell around the Christmas and New Year holidays, the production came to the athletes, rather than doing the shoot in one location. “We came up with something real simple, tunnel vision, the corridor you enter when you enter an arena,” Tarsem says. “You’re standing there and then you are given a ball and what would happen? What gets your adrenaline going? Once that happened, a particular character would come out of it.”

Because he was shooting in different locations to accommodate the athletes’ schedules, Tarsem kept the look uncomplicated. “We had to travel to them, so I knew what we were making had to stylistically look very simple,” he relates. “So I went with one set of lighting and we flew all over the country.”

One thing Tarsem was very clear on was that the masks would not be computer generated. “It had to feel very textural,” he says. “For each person, we designed each piece, and in each case we played around a little bit and then put it on the guy.”

Tarsem notes that while he works with CG, it can at times, be a frustrating process. “I love CG when it’s done correctly,” he says. “But it’s so rarely ever done correctly that I can spot it from a mile, and it breaks all the magic for me. When somebody like [David] Fincher does it, it’s great. It just looks brilliant. With most people, the schedules are so tight, you end up with shit.”

Tarsem likes to do as much as possible in camera, but he is no stranger to effects. He is quick to point to a couple of Pepsi spots, “Surf” and “Carlos,” he recently directed for Almap BBDO, Sáo Paulo.

The spots put international soccer stars on a beach, where they combine incredible ball handling with surfing, flying off big waves as they make great shots and passes. “Most of the guys didn’t know how to swim,” Tarsem says. “None of them can surf. I got each guy for three hours on a runway near Madrid. I had to figure out how to make it happen. I had to make it look like we got these guys on a great island and shot it easily. That was the take on it. Anybody who looks at that, I will bet you money, they won’t look at it and say ‘CG.’ “

Although the players are well known in the territories where the ad is playing–Brazil and globally–Tarsem’s goal was to have viewers who don’t know the stars look at it and say, ” ‘OK, a bunch of guys on a beach.’ “

“Then you know you’ve succeeded,” he continues. “The surfing spots, I said, should look like to anybody who doesn’t know them, a bunch of guys surfing and keeping the ball up, and if they do know these guys, it would be, ‘I didn’t know these guys could surf,’ so when you go for a brief like that it’s very difficult because CGI cannot save you if it looks wrong. I challenge anybody to look at those ads and tell me what is CGI and what’s not.”

The director has been busy with Pepsi of late: he recently helmed a package of ads, featuring Beyoncé, Jennifer Lopez and David Beckham. The ads created by CLM/BBDO Paris use music and soccer to promote the soft drink. He also directed an ad meant for the Super Bowl–“Charity,” for Lincoln’s Mark LT luxury pick-up truck, out of Young & Rubicam Detroit, Dearborn, Mich.–that was pulled shortly before the game. The ad shows a priest lusting after a the truck; after complaints, the carmaker opted to not air “Charity.”

 

Video Days

Tarsem, a native of India–his surname is Singh–came to America to study film, ending up at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, Calif. “I wanted to do documentaries first, but I had the worst documentary teacher in the world and I ended up in music videos,” he explains. “I just loved doing music videos first, then I got a little bored with them and I moved to commercials, and just — loved them.”

These days, Tarsem is finishing up his film project, which he is not describing in much detail. “It’s my film, my personal film,” he says. “It will probably be finished by the end of the year. I financed everything and made it myself,” he relates. “It’s a small epic, in a very personal style, but the story is not personal. Everything I’ve wanted to do is in it. I’ve had it for twenty-three years. Ten years ago I wrote it. I’m directing it, producing it, but I’m definitely not in it. I’m not interested in being on that side of the camera.”

    And that’s the way Tarsem envisions working for the foreseeable future: Commercials with an occasional movie. “I’m loving it,” he exclaims. “I’d pay them to do exactly what I do, and fortunately they pay me.”

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