Should my mom have our grandfather move in with us or put him in a nursing home?
Should my brother stay in college if he knows my dad might lose his job?
Should my parents spy on my sister even if it’s for her own good?
There are no easy answers to the complicated questions posed by a little boy in the :60 “Pilot,” the debut spot in the latest incarnation of Liberty Mutual’s “Responsibility. What’s your policy?”-themed campaign, which first broke in 2006.
Created by Boston-based advertising agency Hill Holliday, the Liberty Mutual campaign aims to put the message of personal responsibility out there, according to Hill Holliday creative director/copywriter Ernie Schenck.
“At first, we focused on responsibility from a macro-level, demonstrating how people view responsibility in their daily lives,” Schenck explained. “This new campaign takes a look at responsibility from a micro-level and focuses on one family as they deal with thornier issues that can really challenge our sense of doing what’s right.”
Finding Harmony Thus far, 10 commercials, which drive traffic to the interactive website ResponsibilityProject.com, have been produced as part of the new campaign. All of the spots were directed by Harmony Korine, who is represented by bicoastal/international MJZ. Korine is best known for his film work, having written the screenplay for Kids and directed the feature films Gummo, Julien Donkey-Boy and Mister Lonely.
“Anyone that knows Harmony Korine’s work knows that it hasn’t exactly been without controversy,” Schenck related.
“Very indie. Very surreal. Not the first guy you’d think of for an insurance company.”
But Korine impressed the agency with a fantastic treatment, and they also liked the fact that he’s not “an ad guy, he’s a filmmaker,”
Hill Holliday creative director/art director Rob Rich said. “He has an extraordinary visual point of view in his films, and he’s a writer that understands dialogue. Usually, you don’t find that combo in one director.”
Under Korine’s direction, it feels as though we are observing the daily interactions and struggles of a real family in the gorgeously filmic “Pilot,” which introduces us to each member of the fictional Marlowe family.
Casting a wide net The cast is a mix of semi-professional actors and non-actors found in and around Nashville, Tenn., where the campaign was shot.
Korine, who lives in Nashville. said, “I felt like for this to work everything had to look iconic and classic American. Nothing too modern, things that resonate with a classic American iconography, and I knew these places existed close by where I live.”
Back to the actors, while Chelsea Gunn, who plays the teen daughter Zoe, had never acted before, Richard Cowl, who portrays the grandfather, is a former Borscht Belt comedian.
Korine noted that he took a non-traditional casting approach, sending casting agents to different events and venues like stock car races, amateur wrestling matches and even BB gun championships to find the people who would compose the Marlowe family.
In working with the actors, Korine didn’t over-rehearse them, instead allowing them to be more awkward and raw. While “Pilot” was scripted, the actors weren’t given lines during the dinner scene that concludes the spot. “We explained the idea behind the dinner conversation and let them improv, then we simply turned on the camera,” Hill Holliday creative director/art director Rob Rich shared. “It really wasn’t that easy, but it felt that way because Harmony and our DP [Chris Soos] were brilliant.”
As for the look of the film, Korine says, “There was a conscious effort to make beautiful images. We shot this in Anamorphic 2.35, and I wanted it to be something that was slightly more stylized, slightly slicker. Things are very composed. There wasn’t a lot of hand-held. Everything was center framed, more dolly shots.”
Editors Marc Langley and Adam Robinson of The Whitehouse, which has offices in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and London, cut “Pilot.” “The trickiest part was to make sure we didn’t create a ‘see-say’ spot,” Rich said, “meaning we wanted images onscreen to evoke emotion and add to the story instead of simply mirroring the words spoken by Henry.”
Henry is the little boy in the spot portrayed by Harmon Jones, who also did the voiceover. Why have the kid narrate “Pilot?” “I had seen a made-for-TV series Steven Spielberg did awhile ago called Taken about alien abduction. Dakota Fanning, who couldn’t have been more than 10 or 11 at the time, did the narration. The juxtaposition of this adult language with a kid’s voice was really poignant,” Schenck said.
“So that’s what we were shooting for when casting Henry, the youngest son, as the VO. It is the one and only time, by the way, that we use a VO of any kind [in the campaign]. We thought we needed to do that in the opening spot to set the stage for the rest of the campaign.”
It is also notable that there isn’t any music in “Pilot” but rather what Schenck describes as an “innocuous tone” under the dialogue.
“Yeah, that’s a first for us. Up until this campaign, music has played a huge role for us. The first spot we ever did, ‘What Goes Around,’ featured a song called ‘Half Acre’ from a band called Hem. That definitely played a big part in the success of that early work,” Schenck said. “But this new campaign needed to feel grittier, more authentic, and we didn’t think music would help us achieve that.”
