was three spots for the Super Bowl. And the day before we were supposed to start [pre-production], they killed it," he remembers. "The [agency creatives] said, ‘The client freaked out at the last minute because they thought it was too negative, but we have this other thing.’ And they faxed us a page with a bunch of those lines from the kids. So that was the spot. We had no idea what the feel was supposed to be. … But from that one page, we began to build the spot."
The building process was fast. "We had to shoot it in two weeks," explains Buckley, "and it was around Christmastime. I started thinking, ‘Okay. How am I going to make this a Super Bowl spot?’" In order to set the commercial apart from "the million other talking-head" ads, Buckley chose to film it in black and white. "We stayed on the same lenses; I wouldn’t go wider," he adds. "If I went wide, I wouldn’t allow the subject to get close to the lens, so it wouldn’t get goofy. No extras, either. I always work with extras, but I wiped that out [this time]. I wanted all the scenes to be like postcards."
He opted to shoot and cast the spot in New Orleans, Minnesota and New York. "We shot twenty-seven kids in total, and I think eight made the cut," he says. As is the case with many of his projects, none of the children were professional actors. "To me, one of the great things about this business is giving people a chance, be it Anna Nicole Smith or the kid down in Louisiana who, when I asked him what he wanted for Christmas, said, ‘a bed.’ You can find interesting people who aren’t necessarily spoiled or obnoxious. They can give to you, and hopefully you can help their lives change a bit."
Both "Friends" and "Broker" featured lead actors who are not professionals. The old man shown egging a car in "Friends" was "homeless a few months before" the shoot, Buckley says. And the sad-eyed, ’70s throwback who plods through a miserable day in "Broker" "really is that character [physically]." (The "Broker" star’s non-actor father, who accompanied him to the shoot, was tapped by Buckley to play the older man in E*trade’s Super Bowl ad, "Monkey," also for GS&P.)
Buckley recently completed work on a series of Miller Lite commercials via Ogilvy & Mather, New York. Still, he appreciates the creative freedom that the dot-com category can provide. "They don’t have to worry about what the interior of their place looks like—it doesn’t matter," he explains. "The entire perception of them is in their site and in their advertising. It makes them more willing to take chances."c
