Two commercials, one vision: "Tamale," via Square One, Dallas, and Beaucoup Chapeaux, Dallas and New York, features a man competing with a strange, mystical figure in the desert. The contest: eat an extremely hot tamale. The prize: a bottle of Miller Lite. The man eats the tamale but loses, and is incinerated into a pile of ashes. His mysterious opponent laughs maniacally and brushes the ashes off the stool where the man was seated, and awaits his next player. In "Mermaid," for 7UP via BBDO New York, a mermaid recovers a bottle of the soft drink for a fisherman—who promptly captures her and puts her on display.
Such grim visions may be unusual in most commercials, but they’re fairly typical of the man who directed them. Jaume, the mono-monikered director from Spain who is represented by bicoastal The End, makes darkness a selling point in the bulk of the commercials he helms.
"I have a wicked sense of humor," he says. "I do have a dark side; I like that kind of stuff. People have a dark side and I want to show it. It’s more interesting to do that. Clients don’t want to go into that world, but I’m a director who knows how to show it without scaring them, by making the [spots] funny. It’s a fine line I have to follow."
One of his latest efforts, an anti-tobacco spot called "Smoking Drill," via Riester-Robb, Phoenix, for the Arizona Department of Health Services, leaves the humor behind, but keeps the darkness. The ad, which is set in a macabre funhouse, opens on a cigarette moving along an assembly line. The cigarettes are then lowered into the mouths of a group of teens seated in a circle. A match then lights all of their cigarettes, and the youths’ chairs are pulled back and they fall through a trap door. They land in a mirrored room, where the new smokers can admire how cool they look, blowing smoke rings and posing. The situation turns sinister when the group is strapped back into chairs as a moving walkway leads them past decayed lungs and eyeballs rolling into a gutter. (A pail is provided for them to vomit into.) The procession then takes the gang to a room where a man in a white suit, with a skull for a face, drills what looks like a tracheotomy hole into a boy’s throat. The last stop on the ride shows the youth in a wheelchair with an oxygen mask, and he is wheeled into a room filled with his predecessors—who now have hollowed-out skulls.
The 27-year-old director’s early film idols were Alfred Hitchcock, Roman Polanski and Martin Scorcese, three other visionaries who frequently used black humor to make their audiences go along. A native of Barcelona, Jaume knew by the age of 11 that he wanted to be a director. "There was nothing else for me," he explains. He received a scholarship from Columbia Film School, Los Angeles, in ’92. "When it was time to graduate, I was more interested in music videos—that’s how I got involved in commercials."
After graduating in ’96, Jaume started working at post house Nonlinear, Los Angeles, where he cut spots for clients such as Miller Lite and Toyota. (He has maintained his editing skills by cutting some of his own work, including "Smoking Drill.") He directed a music video for the band The Tories five years ago, and was signed by The End on the strength of that clip. Since then he has helmed clips for artists such as Little John and Silver Jet, and has directed spots for clients such as Red Dog and Carl’s Jr., Renault and Fanta.
One apparent theme in Jaume’s work is the idea of risking death for a product. For example, in Labatt Blue’s "Airplane" via Ammirati Puris Lintas, Toronto (which Jaume directed via The Partners’ Film Co., Toronto), passengers aboard a small plane are told that a few of them will have to parachute out of the aircraft in order to reduce its weight. An attractive woman volunteers to take a dive, and three men follow suit. They are visibly frightened as they jump out of the plane, and one guy tries to back out at the last minute. But the parachutists survive, and treat themselves to a few Labatt Blue beers as a reward. "The idea is to have people attracted to a product so much that they will go through great danger to get it," explains Jaume.
As a director, he has had his own logistical nightmares. "Mermaid" was shot in South Africa on a relatively low budget. The director went to three different Cape Town companies to create the mermaid’s costume, which was basically a large tail. "I didn’t trust any of them," explains Jaume of why he went to so many different companies. "I figured I would use the best one." His suspicions were well-founded. One costume looked more like a skirt than a tail, and all of them were much heavier than the actress playing the mermaid. The tail filled with water during shooting, and Jaume had to have scuba divers support the girl for her shots, which were all staged in freezing, choppy water. "I got around [those problems] by the shooting and the editing, and by making it dark with backlighting," he explains.
Jaume says that the scripts he gets usually contain good ideas, but need improvisational, visual touches to enhance the mood. "Mermaid" is a good example of his approach: Only half of it was actually storyboarded; the rest was improvised. "The agencies are always open to stuff like that," he says. "Most of my humor comes visually—it’s something that cannot be written down."
The director is dismissive of most commercials he has seen. "Only ten percent of [the spots] I see are very good," he says. "What appeals to me about commercials is the storytelling and some kind of character. The good agencies push the envelope and show products in an interesting way. I don’t usually like to show the product at all. I like to be conceptual—to offer an emotion instead of a product."
As for the future, Jaume would like to get into features—"that’s why I started directing in the first place," he says. "But I’m not in a hurry to get there. I’m having a lot of fun doing what I’m doing."c
