In a business that can be a haven for egomaniacs, director Chris Hooper is something of an aberration. He doesn’t take himself, or his job, too seriously. "This is the best job I’ve ever had. I’m really enjoying it," says Hooper. "That sounds like a good quote, doesn’t it?"
The self-described "spry, lithe forty year old" is repped by bicoastal Tool of North America and recently directed spots for clients such as IKEA, FOX Sports and MasterCard. He’s also benefited from the dot-com boom, helming "Jack" for Urbanfetch.com via SSK, New York, and "Man" for uBid.com out of Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners, New York, among others. Indeed, his oddball sense of the world seems to be a good fit for quirky Internet clients.
"God bless the Internet," says Hooper. "Everybody said the Internet would kill advertising on television. In fact, the opposite is true. Any Internet company, once they go public, has to advertise to compete. They need to get ads out there to ultimately add value to their stock. And if they don’t have something good, something interesting, they’re at a disadvantage to the guys who are using smart agencies and doing smart work."
Hooper has been directing for three and a half years now. He’s wanted to direct since he was sixteen and saw Franaois Truffaut’s Day for Night. "I thought, ‘I could do that.’ I liked the sort of spontaneous world this guy lived in, the organic process of creating something, building something, and the idea of having little adventures along the way. Of course, because I shoot commercials, my adventures are only two days long."
Growing up in Vancouver, B.C., Hooper prepared for his future advertising career by watching a lot of TV. "I watched I Love Lucy, Ed Sullivan," he says. "But Looney Tunes probably had the biggest impact on me. Chuck Jones. That taught me comic timing."
You can see that comic timing in action in "Blind Date," a :30 for Luden’s Cough Drops via DDB, New York. A plain-looking man holding daisies walks the length of a hallway to an apartment door. He looks nervous, but clearly he’s trying to muster the necessary confidence to meet a woman he’s never met before. He knocks.
"Just a minute," she says through the door. "I’m just freshening up." But what a voice she has! It sounds like it belongs to a 300-pound truck-stop waitress. Cut to a close-up of the man, clearly unnerved. His eyes shift. His brow shines with sweat. "I can’t wait to meet you," the grating voice says. Suddenly the man drops the flowers and runs. The apartment door swings open, revealing a gorgeous woman wearing a black cocktail dress. "Okay, I’m ready," she says to the empty hallway. Voiceover: "Irritated throat? Try Luden’s cherry-flavored cough drops."
"My spots are generally about performance," explains Hooper. "My primary thing is to get out of the way of the idea, make the performances believable, and since my stuff is comedy-dialogue, hopefully it’s funny. So much humor can be so broad and bad. My idea is, if you have an absurd script, you play the actors straight and believable, no matter how absurd the situation is. This inspires empathy in the audience-then they can sort of associate with anybody, even if their dog is exploding or their head is exploding."
Hooper likes working with actors, though he admits they can be difficult. "I call them ‘meat props,’" he says. Does he call them "meat props" on the set? "Mostly in private. This is probably going to tank my career, but … you know how it is. You have two seconds for a certain type of reaction. It’s very rare that you get an actor who really gets it, really understands what you’re asking for."
Hooper discovered a talent for drawing as a child. He names Mort Drucker at MAD magazine, and editorial cartoonists like Edward Sorrell and David Levine, as great influences. He even earned a living for a while drawing portraits at county fairs, and still refers to himself as a "carny." "[My booth] was in between the guy selling blenders and the guy who takes photos of you in western clothing-you know, those fake sepia prints," he recalls. "I started at five bucks a pop. By the time I was finished, I was charging people up to twenty-five bucks a piece. They actually ended up being pretty good."
After his experience on the midway, Hooper enrolled at the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, Calif., graduating in ’90. He spent the next five years working as an agency art director, first at Chiat/ Day (now TBWA/Chiat/Day), Los Angeles, then at San Francisco-based Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. "I gave myself a five-year plan," he says. "After five years, my plan was to try directing."
Now that he’s on the other side of the fence, his art director background comes in handy. "It’s easier to put the minds of ad guys to rest when they feel like you understand their problems," says Hooper. "I’m basically a shrink to the guys. I don’t mind that. I do a lot of counseling. I’m saying this a lot: ‘I know, I know, I totally understand.’"
Hooper needed his sense of humor when a recent shoot became difficult. "The set blew away," he says. "We were on a racetrack shooting IKEA’s ["Race Car Pit Stop" via Deutsch, New York], where they decorate a pit stop. We were shooting at this racetrack in Bakersfield, and it was approximately one thousand degrees out there. We were looking at the set with the agency people, sort of getting a thumbs-up or whatever, and suddenly in the distance off to the east, this brown wall of I don’t know what was coming our way. Within about five minutes there was a gale blowing, and the set was sort of chattering across the tarmac. Everything was full of dust and weeds or whatever the hell blows off the desert east of Bakersfield. Everything survived, but it had to be all cleaned-it was full of locusts and dirt, and whatever-but it was OK. Disaster averted."
A feature film could be in Hooper’s future; he’s regularly reading scripts and looking for a project. "There are unfortunately a lot of diabolically awful scripts out there," he says. "But I’d love to do features. Or just be a billionaire."c
