By Robert Goldrich

Following the advice and campaign mantra unfurled on a banner in last year’s anthem commercial “America” for Levi’s, Wieden+Kennedy, Portland, Ore., has decided to indeed “Go Forth” for the client in search of people who’ve adopted a pioneering spirit to work through incredible adversity. W+K’s search led to Braddock, Penns., a town embodying the demise of the blue collar base that is now mobilizing to again gain traction.
    Mayor John Fetterman has enlisted the help of residents to serve as modern pioneers–artists, craftsmen, musicians, business owners–to rebuild and revive the community. This process has made Braddock somewhat of a model for how any city can pull itself and its people up, providing a semblance of inspiration and hope for other towns hit hard by the recession.
    Thus Braddock is where Levi’s “Ready to Work” multimedia campaign is situated. A centerpiece of the unfolding integrated effort is the launch film “To Work” directed by John Hillcoat of production house Skunk in the U.S. and Stink in London. Feature filmmaker Hillcoat’s credits include such movies as The Proposition and The Road, the latter (based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road written by Cormac McCarthy) having been shot in Braddock.
    With a cast of Braddock residents, “To Work” starts out like a look at yesteryear, spanning the 1830s to 1930s. Then as dawn comes up, viewers begin to see that the pioneers they’re witnessing are real people in a real place and are not only wholly relevant to today, but are today’s people.
    The simple yet poignant narration of a girl takes us through the years. She notes, “A long time ago, things got broken here. People got sad and left.”
    She observes, though, a silver lining: “Maybe the world breaks on purpose so we have work to do.”
    The time for that work is now. The film towards its end offers a reworking of the opening shot from the movie The Searchers, one of the most famous frontier vistas in cinema history. Pushing past the door and onto a Braddock street, the girl tells us, “Some people think there aren’t frontiers anymore. They can’t see how the frontiers are all around us.”
    Similarly and fittingly, “To Work” represents a new filmmaking frontier for Hillcoat, who decided to “Go Forth” into advertising. “To Work” represents his spot directing debut.
    Hillcoat had been looking to extend his reach into the ad arena. With roots in music videos, he diversified into feature filmmaking and in recent years started to become interested in commercials, particularly the work being done by such notables as Frank Budgen and Spike Jonze. “In many ways, commercials are now dealing with more storytelling than music videos. I wanted very much to try my hand at it and that’s how Levi’s came about. My understanding is that the agency was drawn to my film work, both The Proposition and The Road. Both are in a way frontier films, and there’s a heightened realism to them, a lyrical quality. The agency wanted this lyrical feel with real people and real locations. Then there was the additional connection of Braddock when they heard about The Road having been shot there.”
    For Hillcoat, the spot was a chance to reflect a side of Braddock he had to avoid in filming The Road. The feature reflected the town’s urban blight in order to capture what the storyline demanded–a post-apocalyptic world. “The demise of the steel industry and the other businesses that have downsized created a lot of unemployment in Braddock, a city which during its heyday was one of America’s wealthiest,” related Hillcoat. “We saw abandoned areas, homes going for $5,000, with some having signs asking prospective buyers to just ‘make an offer.’ At one point, 90 percent of the population had vacated. But what I remember most about the town is that the people of Braddock and Pittsburgh were brilliant, caring, helpful–without any kind of ulterior motive. Despite the dire sum of circumstances, there is an incredible spirit there. They even showed an uncanny dark humor about the fact that we picked their neighborhood for the apocalypse. We saw another side of Braddock that we couldn’t reflect in The Road. The opportunity to go back there and work with some of the same people and show some of the same locations, the small businesses trying to make a go of it, to show the community in a different light was a real treat. I’m a humanist at heart. What we were aiming for with Levi’s was ambitious–an uplifting emotional resonance in a short span of time. The imagery and the people in Braddock enabled us to do that.”

“The Answer”
    Also uplifting is Hillcoat’s latest music video, “The Answer” for the band UNKLE, produced by his long-time music clip production roost, Factory Films, London.
    In the video, actor Ray Winstone talks about his brush with death when he was struck by lightning at the age of 17. “I had this incredible sense of a bright light, a flash and then I woke up about half an hour later, 20 feet away from where I was struck by lightning,” he says. “I was a lucky boy. And the lightning, it was what they call a splash hit, it… went down my left arm, down my left leg…if it’d come down the middle, then I probably wouldn’t be talking to you today– I’d be somewhere else.”
    As the song “The Answer” begins to play in the background–performed by the band UNKLE–Winstone explains how the near-death experience gave him a new lease and perspective on life. He looks at the daily wonders of life with a new found awe and appreciation.
    The music plays against a backdrop of birds flying, the time lapse blossoming of a flower, a horse galloping free in the wild.
    Winstone concludes, “My life was forever changed. One life had ended and a new life had begun.”
    For Hillcoat, “The Answer” marks a return to video directing. “In the old days, MTV became too powerful. There was censorship involved in what you could do. Then music videos went into a bit of a decline as the record companies went into crisis mode with music downloading running rampant. Budgets were cut dramatically. There was a decline in the number of videos running on an MTV. Now, though, we’ve turned a corner. YouTube has become a far reaching medium for videos, offering a lot of creative freedom. The rules are changing and it’s an exciting time again.”
    Asked how his video work has informed his feature filmmaking and/or approach to commercials, Hillcoat observed, “I see them all as distinctly different mediums. I don’t like the music video aesthetic when applied to movies–eye candy and quick cutting, though, has ironically become popular among a number of big budget films. Also I find certain commercial sensibilities to be distracting in feature films, Obviously all the experiences a director has informs his work. There was a color grading process, for example, in Levi’s that I would like to explore for other projects. But what I see as the shared bond among all the disciplines is collaboration. With Levi’s, with The Road, with the UNKLE video, all of this filmmaking was based on collaboration. The best work is done when there’s true collaboration.”

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