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.
JON WATTS
Things have been breaking Jon Watts’ way for a while now.
Some short films he made in high school near Colorado Springs, Colo., earned him a full scholarship at New York University. A classmate was director Brian Beletic’s sister and Watts impressed Beletic enough to land a job as his assistant after graduation in 2004. Meanwhile, Watts was making a video for a Brooklyn neighbor Jason Forrest, “Stepping Off,” which played at ResFest in Los Angeles. It got seen by the right people and led to the Fatboy Slim videos for “Wonderful Night” and “The Joker,” and not long afterwards a contract with bicoastal Smuggler. His first job for Smuggler was a campaign for 24-Hour Fitness by Publicis & Hal Riney in San Francisco keyed to the Winter Olympics in Turin. And as SHOOT went to press, he was off to South Africa for an under-wraps project.
“I had my first commercial experience doing the 24-Hour Fitness spots and I had such a great time,” Watts says. “The videos are great because it’s your idea and all that, but it’s solo, it’s pretty much all on you. I really enjoy the back and forth that happens when you’re working in commercials. They have the idea and I love coming up with variations on the idea, like getting a really good collaboration back and forth. Everybody feels like they have a part of it and I really like that.”
The 24-Hour Fitness spots feature athletes from the U.S. Winter Olympics team in different situations, with the tagline “Whatever it takes to make you better.” The three spots are clearly part of a single campaign, but they each take a different approach. “Visually, they kind of let me do what I wanted,” Watts says. “The creatives, it was like one of their first commercials too. We were all greenhorns, so it was great.”
The Fatboy Slim videos illustrate the breadth of Watts’ visual style. “Wonderful Night” starts off as a Fred Astaire-like night on the town in tux and spats, but takes a supernatural turn, while “The Joker” masquerades as a homemade amateur-contest video starring kittens.
“After I did ‘Wonderful Night,’ I was so young, people were kidding me, asking, ‘What, did you win a competition?’ That became the idea for the second video,” Watts explains. “I come from a narrative background at NYU. The storytelling element is most exciting, whether it be funny or straight or whatever.”
Watts intends to continue doing videos as well as commercials and not long ago he finished a short film called The Invisible Dog. It’s a story written by Watts about a boy who can’t have a dog because his mother is allergic. His father brings home an empty pet carrier and tells him it contains an invisible dog.
“It takes a dark twist toward the end and becomes more like a thriller,” Watts says. “That’s what I like, mixing up genres and people’s expectations. Right now, it feels like everything is game, especially in commercials. There are no real rules. That’s what’s so exciting.”
The next step may well be a feature. “I want to make a movie set in Colorado. I’m working on something right now but I don’t want to give it away,” he says. “I love the videos because you can do crazy, weird stuff and experiment. I like the commercials because of the collaboration and movies, too. It’s all part of the same thing. I just like telling stories.”
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