Most directors would be thrilled to have just one spot running during the Super Bowl. Bryan Buckley had half-a-dozen commercials for clients including Burger King, CareerBuilder.com and Sprint-Nextel, in Super Bowl XL. Is that a record for the director? “I think it tied a high for me,” Buckley, a partner in bicoastal/international Hungry Man, muses. “I’m not sure. I think it did, though.”
Buckley says he enjoys being part of the Super Bowl advertising extravaganza (he has seen his work air during the big game since 1999), but notes it’s not like he sets out to do as many spots as he can. “It’s not about sheer numbers of spots. It is really about making sure that all of the spots I do are at a certain level, and each one of them has its own thing going,” Buckley says. Referring to this latest round of Super Bowl commercials, Buckley adds, “I didn’t feel like I was doing the same thing six times over. There was a good range in there.”
Some highlights: For the Burger King “Whopperettes” spot out of Crispin Porter + Bogusky (CP+B), Miami, Buckley staged an elaborate Busby Berkeley-style musical featuring performers dressed as the ingredients–tomatoes, onions, etc.–that go into the making of a Whopper; he whipped up a Benny Hill spoof involving a couch on fire in the Sprint-Nextel spot, “Couch,” out of Cramer-Krasselt, Chicago; and he took viewers inside wild offices literally inhabited by monkeys and jackasses in two spots for CareerBuilder.com, “Sales Graph” and “Jackasses.”
Of course, it isn’t only Super Bowl fare that Buckley has directed as of late. Campaigns for Bud Light out of Chicago’s DDB Worldwide starring daredevil Ted Ferguson, and Ace Hardware via Goodby Silverstein & Partners poking fun at home improvement shows are also among the attention-getting work Buckley has generated.
THE APPROACH
While all of the aforementioned spots vary widely in look, tone and execution, Buckley applies the same basic approach to each job. “I try to go layer by layer into something and push it. You have to because if you don’t, you end up with something pretty generic,” Buckley says. “Everything matters.”
Take the “Whopperettes” spot, for example. It was “a logistical nightmare,” Buckley says laughing. So, of course, he had to invest a great deal of time in choreographing the action of the dozens of dancers and acrobats featured in the spectacle. But that didn’t keep Buckley from honing in on other details such as casting.
How much time and effort could possibly go into the casting of performers to play the roles of tomatoes and mayo? Quite a bit, actually–Buckley put serious thought into what each character would represent. “You had to have a mayo that people could identify with, the everyday girl. The ketchups were statuesque and strong and beautiful because ketchup dominates,” Buckley explains, adding, “Character, even in that piece, played a major role.”
It was also an important consideration in the Sprint-Nextel “Couch” spot, which opens on a guy showing his friend how his new Sprint phone has a song for everything–in fact, when his couch catches on fire, the phone plays the wacky theme from The Benny Hill Show. Cut to a bunch of crazy characters a la Benny Hill entering the apartment and running around the burning couch in a panic.
Buckley knew the kicker, with the flurry of action and offbeat 1960s era characters, would be funny. But he was concerned that the opening sequence with the two guys could be boring if the casting was, say, your typical 35-year-old businessmen. Looking for different types, Buckley ultimately chose a little Russian guy (he’s the owner of the new Sprint phone) and paired him with a middle-aged, sort of emotionless man. The stiff guy represented for Buckley the expressionless person so prevalent in the advertising of the ’80s; the Russian guy played off the late ’80s, early ’90s Russian guy gag. The casting of these two characters “adds a layer of texture to a front end that otherwise would have been a little dry,” Buckley says.
Buckley shot a total of three spots for Sprint-Nextel, by the way, agreeing to take on the project after a getting a phone call from Gerry Graf, executive creative director at TBWA/Chiat/Day, explaining the concepts. “No matter what Gerry calls about, I want to do that job,” Buckley shares. “It’s a combination of, I really enjoy working with him, and I know we’re going to end up in a good place.”
Buckley, who has been directing for 11 years, enjoys working with longtime collaborators like Graf with whom he has a solid relationship, but he is also happy to work with newer creatives like he did in the case of the Bud Light Ted Ferguson campaign, which has DDB copywriter Jeb Quaid playing the character of Ferguson.
The great thing about working with Quaid and his art director partner Aaron Pendleton is that they–as well as the rest of the team at DDB–came up with a great idea and were willing to run with it. “Everybody just got rid of all of the over thinking and just did it,” Buckley says, pointing out that he was awarded the job and four days later was shooting the campaign.
Buckley shot the Bud Light campaign in Los Angeles and the previously noted Sprint work in New York. But he is shooting more and more of his spots in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where Hungry Man opened an office last year. In addition to the aforementioned “Whopperettes” spot for Burger King, Buckley has traveled to Brazil in the last year or so to shoot, among other spots, a Starburst ad out of TBWA, New York, called “Fiesta” that finds a mariachi band struggling to escape from inside of a Starburst eater’s mouth as well as “Counterfeit,” a commercial for MINI Cooper via CP+B that warns consumers about the fake MINI Coopers being sold on the black market.
By his own admission, Buckley is in love with the country. “It’s a different mindset in Brazil, more free,” he says. “People are happier down there.”
Those good vibes are infectious, and aside from offering him access to enthusiastic, artistic people, Buckley says Brazil offers a look–in both people and environs–that is different than what we traditionally see on American television and in film. “We haven’t seen a tremendous amount of films with Portuguese/Brazilian influence–with City of God being one thing–in the world. So I like working there because it does bring me to a different place,” Buckley says. “It allows me as a filmmaker to suddenly start creating something that’s different without even trying.”
