Third Time's The Charm For DGA Award Winner
By Christine Champagne
With his third nomination, Craig Gillespie scored the Directors Guild of America (DGA) Award this year for best commercial director of 2005. “I honestly did not expect it,” says Gillespie, who was up against three of his fellow directors from bicoastal/international Morton Jankel Zander (MJZ)–Rocky Morton, Spike Jonze and Rupert Sanders–as well as Noam Murro of Los Angeles-based Biscuit Filmworks. “The work was so good from everybody that I hadn’t even gotten my hopes up. So I was surprised [when I won]. I didn’t have a speech or anything prepared.”
Winning was, well, great, of course, but Gillespie points out that the DGA Awards facilitated an opportunity for him to enjoy some social time with his fellow MJZ directors. For example, Gillespie says, he didn’t really get to know Sanders, who only joined the company within the last year, until they got to chat at a DGA-sponsored screening prior to the awards ceremony. He appreciated the chance to bond with his colleagues. “There was a real team spirit,” Gillespie shares. “Everybody was thrilled to be amongst each other.”
Gillespie, who has directed spots for clients including Saturn, Honda, Holiday Inn Express and others in recent years, nabbed the DGA honor this year based on the strength of four spots: Altoids “People of Pain” and “Fable of the Fruit Bat” out of Leo Burnett, Chicago; and Ameriquest’s “Surprise Dinner” and “Mini-Mart” via DDB Direct, Los Angeles.
Asked how he chooses the work he will direct, Gillespie says he looks for spots that will allow him “to try different things visually and not have my stuff look the same.” That said, “I like to figure out what’s best for the idea.”
In the case of the Altoids “People of Pain” and “Fable of the Fruit Bat” spots, which find a bumbling British anthropologist visiting the primitive peoples of Altoidia, Gillespie says he mimicked the look and feel of French documentaries made of Papua New Guinea in the 1960s. “They were really awkward and stiff and felt very staged,” Gillespie says, noting that stilted look and awkward execution supported the wonderfully silly premise behind the Altoids ads.
The director opted for an appropriately slicker and contemporary look for the Ameriquest “Surprise Dinner” spot, which opens on a man preparing a romantic dinner for the lady in his life only to look like a psycho when she enters the apartment and finds him clutching a knife in one hand and her fluffy white cat in the other after the feline knocks a pot of sauce off the stove.
Gillespie recently tackled Ameriquest work again, by the way, directing two new Ameriquest spots, “That Killed Him” and “Friendly Skies,” that proved popular with viewers of Super Bowl XL.
In the darkly funny “That Killed Him,” a doctor and a medical technician are standing over a patient lying in his hospital bed. The tech can’t resist using defibrillator paddles to zap a pesky fly. After the bug crashes into the patient’s chest, the tech says, “That killed him” as the patient’s wife and daughter enter the hospital room. The spot ends with the tag line “Don’t judge too quickly.”
The same tag line accompanies the risqué “Friendly Skies,” which shows a woman trying to get past a fellow airplane passenger who is asleep in his seat. But when turbulence hits, she winds up on his lap, with her skirt hitched up above her hips.
Given the strength of these two latest Ameriquest concepts, Gillespie says he couldn’t resist the chance to work on the Ameriquest campaign with DDB Direct again. “It’s rare that any campaign lasts more than a year, so it was really refreshing to see that they were going with the same campaign and being that they did, I was happy to go with it,” Gillespie says, adding, “I had a great experience with the agency the first time around.”
This isn’t the first time Gillespie has made a return appearance of sorts to take on a campaign that he previously worked on. In fact, the director recalls doing nearly a dozen spots for Washington Mutual out of Seattle’s Sedgwick Road because the work was consistently compelling.
For those of you who might have been turned away by Gillespie last year, he was actually away from spots for about eight months while he shot his first feature film. A dark comedy titled Mr. Woodcock, the film centers on a young man who returns home to try to stop his mother from marrying the gym teacher, Mr. Woodcock (played by Billy Bob Thornton), whom he always hated in high school.
Gillespie enjoyed working on the film, but admits that he was excited about getting back to spot work, which offers him the opportunity to do so many different things. “Today, we’re doing massive crashes [for a car commercial],” he reports. “Last week, we were doing new Ameriquest stuff. I like being able to mix it up.”
Having directed spots for more than 10 years now and built up a successful career, one has to wonder if there is any territory within commercials that Gillespie would like to cover in the future. There is, he says. “I certainly get to see all the comedy boards which is great,” Gillespie remarks. “But in the future I’d like to do something that has more of an epic scale to it.”
Carrie Coon Relishes Being Part Of An Ensemble–From “The Gilded Age” To “His Three Daughters”
It can be hard to catch Carrie Coon on her own.
She is far more likely to be found in the thick of an ensemble. That could be on TV, in "The Gilded Age," for which she was just Emmy nominated, or in the upcoming season of "The White Lotus," which she recently shot in Thailand. Or it could be in films, most relevantly, Azazel Jacobs' new drama, "His Three Daughters," in which Coon stars alongside Natasha Lyonne and Elizabeth Olsen as sisters caring for their dying father.
But on a recent, bright late-summer morning, Coon is sitting on a bench in the bucolic northeast Westchester town of Pound Ridge. A few years back, she and her husband, the playwright Tracy Letts, moved near here with their two young children, drawn by the long rows of stone walls and a particularly good BLT from a nearby cafe that Letts, after biting into, declared must be within 15 miles of where they lived.
In a few days, they would both fly to Los Angeles for the Emmys (Letts was nominated for his performance in "Winning Time" ). But Coon, 43, was then largely enmeshed in the day-to-day life of raising a family, along with their nightly movie viewings, which Letts pulls from his extensive DVD collection. The previous night's choice: "Once Around," with Holly Hunter and Richard Dreyfus.
Coon met Letts during her breakthrough performance in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?" on Broadway in 2012. She played the heavy-drinking housewife Honey. It was the first role that Coon read and knew, viscerally, she had to play. Immediately after saying this, Coon sighs.
"It sounds like something some diva would say in a movie from the '50s," Coon says. "I just walked around in my apartment in my slip and I had pearls and a little brandy. I made a grocery list and I just did... Read More