With a reel that features everything from exploding land mines to a naked grandpa, Paul Gay is, above all, versatile. He’s worked as a creative as well as a director, as half a team and as a solo act. He’s shot dialogue-driven narratives and wordless, strikingly visual spots for a wide range of clients in Europe and the U.S. But there’s one thing Gay cannot do: "I can never, ever make a good commercial out of a bad script. No director can do that."
For the amiable Londoner, quality material is key. "If you have the ability to spot a good script, half your job is done in terms of success," he says. "It’s very difficult to mess up a good idea. You have to be pretty stupid for that."
Gay has been getting more and more good ideas from U.S. agencies. Represented stateside by bicoastal Omaha Pictures (he directs in Europe out of London-based Outsider), Gay has worked on such spots as Nordstrom’s "First Impressions," "Compliments," "Feng Shui," "Protest," "Doorway" and "Pick-up" via Fallon, Minneapolis. He also helmed the hilarious Church’s Chicken ads: "Grandpa," "Bad Son" and "Late for Dinner" via Cliff Freeman and Partners (CF&P), New York. "Grandpa," in which an old codger shows up at the family dinner table in the buff in order to get banished and avoid his daughter-in-law’s cooking, picked up a Gold Lion at the this year’s Cannes International Advertising Festival, while "Bad Son" scored a Bronze Lion.
Helming spots for American agencies has been a somewhat distancing experience for Gay. "Most of the work that I do in Europe comes from London. So, I tend to speak to people face to face," he explains. "But the U.S. is such a big place. Even if [agency creatives] work with a director who lives in the States, they might not meet him face to face, because of the distance involved. That’s kind of unusual for me—to get jobs basically just on the telephone."
Nonetheless, Gay has forged some strong stateside relationships. While he notes that "a lot of agencies in America tend to storyboard and go to the client quite a long time before they meet the director," he says creatives at Fallon involved him at the earliest planning stages of the Nordstrom’s spots. All of the ads present people outfitted in clothes from the upscale retailer, and show how others react to them. In "Compliments," a frantic man interrupts an outdoor wedding, claiming to have loved the bride from the moment he met her. It is soon revealed that the man is a member of the catering staff, who first laid eyes on the bride a few minutes earlier, "right by the cheese platter." After the screen fades to black, the smitten waiter adds, "My name is Bill, by the way."
"The dialogue was still being discussed when I was brought on," recalls Gay. "Also, where the wedding was set, what kind of a wedding it was. All those kinds of things hadn’t really been resolved. I was able to have a lot of input, which I appreciated."
Gay, who at press time was scouting locations in Brazil for a United Airlines spot via Fallon, which will include shooting in Rio, Amsterdam and Prague, describes the agency’s creatives as "very open minded." He says that’s also true of stateside shops like CF&P, and Leagas Delaney, San Francisco. For the latter shop, Gay helmed three spots—"Admiring Glance," "Passionate" and "Tug of War"—for Bluenile.com, an online diamond and fine-jewelry retailer.
"I love working with agencies that are very flexible, and don’t just want to shoot what was said from the outset," he relates. "The [creative team] may say, ‘I want to shoot a detached house with a tree next to it and a driveway.’ But you go on a location search and find something much, much better. If you work with a good agency—a creative agency—they will try to push for the new house that you found, even though it
