Harvesting The Crop of Up-And-Coming Directors
By Bill Dunlap
This spring’s five directors picked by SHOOT as up and comers in the commercial world arrived from a number of different directions. Two came through MTV’s “college of production knowledge,” one was an agency creative, another started in the music video arena, and the fifth came from a fine arts background.
Whatever their similarities and differences, all five are promising commercial directors who are making their mark in the field.
ADAM GOLDSTEIN Directing has been on Adam Goldstein’s radar screen since grade school, but it wasn’t until he did his first spec spot a little over a year ago that he realized it was what he should be doing full time. A few weeks ago, he left his job as senior creative director/copywriter at BBDO New York and signed with bicoastal/international RSA Films.
Goldstein, 38, got started in advertising with an internship at DDB Washington while still studying English and creative writing at the University of Michigan. He went on to do multiple tours of duty with Ammirati & Puris, New York, a stint with Ogilvy & Mather, Paris, and the past six years at BBDO, where he did award-winning work for FedEx and Pepsi.
“I was always gravitating toward wanting to direct,” he says. “Finally, I shot a spec spot piggybacking on a job to see if it was as much fun as I imagined, and if I was as much of a fit for it as I was telling myself and everybody else around me. Mark Pellington [of Crossroads Films] was directing the spot I piggybacked on. I told him, ‘If I had any doubts that this is what I should be doing, they’re gone now.’ He looked at me and said, ‘What’s not to love?'”
Goldstein’s actual first job was a PSA in sixth grade, part of a promotion by a local TV station in Silver Spring, Maryland. “We wrote it, submitted it and they called us, and I basically directed a couple guys in their studio,” he recalls.
Goldstein leaned toward comedy in his spec spots. The spot with Pellington, “Hitchhiker,” was for Sirius Satellite Radio. In it, a young hitchhiker is so attracted to a driver’s Sirius radio that he accepts a ride even though there is another guy tied and gagged in the back seat. In two spots for BBDO client Levitra, Goldstein set up romantic moments at home that are ruined by a crotchety old geezer in the room. The tagline is “Tired of living with ED?”
Two client-direct PSAs for New York’s Coalition for the Homeless feature a real estate agent using jargon from high-end sales pitches to describe out-on-the-street accommodations to a homeless person.
“The Coalition for the Homeless work was just before I signed with RSA and everything else on the reel was through a few different production companies and financed through the New York State real estate bubble–I sold an apartment,” he explains.
“I really enjoy doing comedy and dialogue and performance,” Goldstein says. “I love working with talent and finding those little moments in scripts and ‘funnyisms’ that just come out and make people smile a lot. Right now I’m just loving doing performance-driven comedy.”
As he indicates, the decision to leave a good agency career wasn’t difficult. Among those offering encouragement and inspiration was Craig Gillespie of bicoastal/international MJZ, who made the same transition with great success. Former art director Gillespie was Goldstein’s creative partner at Ammirati.
“Craig Gillespie is terrific,” Goldstein says. “There is certainly no shortage of agency guys becoming directors. What I felt was that regardless of that, there is kind of a shortage of people who concentrate and focus on dialogue.”
Review: Writer-Director Andrea Arnold’s “Bird”
"Is it too real for ya?" blares in the background of Andrea Arnold's latest film, "Bird," a 12-year-old Bailey (Nykiya Adams) rides with her shirtless, tattoo-covered dad, Bug (Barry Keoghan), on his electric scooter past scenes of poverty in working-class Kent.
The song's question — courtesy of the Irish post-punk band Fontains D.C. — is an acute one for "Bird." Arnold's films ( "American Honey," "Fish Tank") are rigorous in their gritty naturalism. Her fiction films — this is her first in eight years — tend toward bleak, hand-held verité in rough-and-tumble real-world locations. Her last film, "Cow," documented a mother cow separated from her calf on a dairy farm.
Arnold specializes in capturing souls, human and otherwise, in soulless environments. A dream of something more is tantalizing just out of reach. In "American Honey," peace comes to Star (Sasha Lane) only when she submerges underwater.
In "Bird," though, this sense of otherworldly possibility is made flesh, or at least feathery. After a confusing night, Bailey awakens in a field where she encounters a strange figure in a skirt ( Franz Rogowski ) who arrives, like Mary Poppins, with a gust a wind. His name, he says, is Bird. He has a soft sweetness that doesn't otherwise exist in Bailey's hardscrabble and chaotic life.
She's skeptical of him at first, but he keeps lurking about, hovering gull-like on rooftops. He cranes his neck now and again like he's watching out for Bailey. And he does watch out for her, helping Bailey through a hard coming of age: the abusive boyfriend (James Nelson-Joyce) of her mother (Jasmine Jobson); her half brother (Jason Buda) slipping into vigilante violence; her father marrying a new girlfriend.
The introduction of surrealism has... Read More