"Battle" fields AICP Show honor, Emmy nomination, Gold Effie Award
By Millie Takaki
Susan Credle, executive creative director for BBDO New York on Cingular’s “Battle,” sums up best the merit of director Alison Maclean without having to directly refer to her. Credle, commenting to SHOOT soon after “Battle” earned a primetime commercial Emmy nomination this summer, observed, “When the Television Academy recognizes work in the commercial world, it really does validate that what we do does cross the line and ventures into entertainment. It’s a tremendous honor.”
At the same time, Credle noted that “Battle” won a Gold Effie Award earlier this year for its effectiveness in the marketplace. “To have this work acknowledged by the Academy nomination as entertainment and by the Effie competition for attaining results as a piece of advertising communication is the best of both worlds. That’s what I find most gratifying about ‘Battle.'”
And the director who helped attain this best-of-both worlds advertising/filmmaking nirvana was Maclean, who’s with New York-headquartered Park Pictures. “Battle” reflects her affinity for and expertise in comedy, actor performance and dialogue, as well as storytelling sensibilities honed in both commercials and features
“Battle” is indeed a clever comedic dialogue tour de force, further reflected in its garnering a 2007 AICP Show honor in the Performance/Dialogue category. The commercial shows a mother and teenage daughter “arguing”–at least that’s their tone–but the incongruity is that they are conveying positive messages to each other, as the parent entrusts her teen with a cell phone.
“As soon as I read the script, I wanted to do it,” recalls Maclean. “It was clever, funny and had a surprising twist. It was simply an inspired idea and a treat to work on not only for me but the actors. It’s not often that actors have the license to go for it and not worry all that much about being over the top. You don’t get much advertising that allows you to be so emotionally dramatic–but with comedic effect.”
While “Battle” has thrust her into the ad industry limelight–with subsequent Cingular (now AT&T) spots “Talking Text” and the “Family Meeting” sequel, and her latest endeavor, an offbeat, comedic, whimsical campaign for Virgin Mobile–Maclean is wary of being pigeonholed in humor. She would like to take on as broad a range of storytelling as possible in the ad arena.
And the reality is that her first forays into commercialmaking–back in the late 1990s–included some serious poignant stories as best exemplified in a campaign for the Legal Aid Society in New York, with documentary-style spots focusing on such problems as domestic abuse and homelessness.
Yet Maclean remained under the ad biz radar until she directed some edgy, funny FX cable network promos/teasers a couple of years ago for creative guru Chuck McBride who was then at TBWAChiatDay, San Francisco. From there, performance-based comedy dialogue became a genre for which she was best known, eventually leading to “Battle.”
Multiple disciplines
But clearly informing her commercialmaking are endeavors in shorts, features and TV. Maclean took an atypical path into the world of film. Attending art school in New Zealand where she studied sculpture and photography, she got a trainee job in the art department of a feature movie. Maclean was soon hooked and decided to embark on a filmmaking career. She procured film grants in Auckland, N.Z., which enabled her to make a series of shorts, the pivotal one being Kitchen Sink, which she made in ’89. Kitchen Sink went on to win eight international awards and led to her scoring a development deal with Touchstone Pictures.
Though nothing materialized from that development deal, Maclean’s career progressed. She wrapped her first feature, Crush, starring Marcia Gay Harden, in ’92. The film then went on to be an official selection at the Cannes Film Festival. Maclean next scored on the feature front in ’99 with Jesus’ Son, adapted from a series of stories by Denis Johnson. The film, which starred Billy Crudup and Samanta Morton, won the Baby Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
It was in the late ’90s that Park Pictures’ executive producer/owner Jacqueline Kelman Bisbee first saw Maclean’s work, specifically Kitchen Sink. Bisbee then found out that a film that had piqued her curiosity earlier, Crush, was also helmed by Maclean. The Park cofounder sought out the director and committed to helping her navigate a path into commercials.
“Lance [director/DP Acord who’s also a Park Pictures’ owner] and I were just starting the company,” recollects Bisbee, “We loved the idea of introducing filmmakers to commercials. We used Kitchen Sink as a starting point to appeal to agency creatives and producers on behalf of Alison. The first break came from Hill Holliday with a Harvard Health campaign, and then the Legal Aid Society work, which was brilliant in its approach.”
As her spotmaking stock steadily rose, Maclean remained involved in other filmmaking pursuits. In ’04 her documentary Persons of Interest, co-directed with Tobias Perse, screened in competition at the Sundance Film Festival. And Maclean was selected to participate in the ’05 “Dreams” project sponsored by Sony and Young & Rubicam, New York, in which noted commercial directors explored short storytelling through HD lensing. From that came her short Flight, which then spawned a longer version film, Intolerable, an official selection at the Edinburgh, Toronto, Los Angeles and Hamptons International Film Festivals.
Maclean also diversified into series TV, directing episodes of The L Word for Showtime, and Sex in the City, Subway Stories and Carnivale for HBO. In the summer of ’06, she directed two episodes for the upcoming Showtime series The Tudors starring Jonathan Rhys-Meyers as King Henry VIII.
The latter experience entailed filming in London and represented what Maclean described as “my first real opportunity in a big scale, historical, period piece drama.
“It was a great education to immerse yourself in a world from another era. I loved the intensity of it and I think it’s helped me to immerse myself now even more fully into my work.”
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Review: Writer-Director Andrea Arnold’s “Bird”
"Is it too real for ya?" blares in the background of Andrea Arnold's latest film, "Bird," a 12-year-old Bailey (Nykiya Adams) rides with her shirtless, tattoo-covered dad, Bug (Barry Keoghan), on his electric scooter past scenes of poverty in working-class Kent.
The song's question — courtesy of the Irish post-punk band Fontains D.C. — is an acute one for "Bird." Arnold's films ( "American Honey," "Fish Tank") are rigorous in their gritty naturalism. Her fiction films — this is her first in eight years — tend toward bleak, hand-held verité in rough-and-tumble real-world locations. Her last film, "Cow," documented a mother cow separated from her calf on a dairy farm.
Arnold specializes in capturing souls, human and otherwise, in soulless environments. A dream of something more is tantalizing just out of reach. In "American Honey," peace comes to Star (Sasha Lane) only when she submerges underwater.
In "Bird," though, this sense of otherworldly possibility is made flesh, or at least feathery. After a confusing night, Bailey awakens in a field where she encounters a strange figure in a skirt ( Franz Rogowski ) who arrives, like Mary Poppins, with a gust a wind. His name, he says, is Bird. He has a soft sweetness that doesn't otherwise exist in Bailey's hardscrabble and chaotic life.
She's skeptical of him at first, but he keeps lurking about, hovering gull-like on rooftops. He cranes his neck now and again like he's watching out for Bailey. And he does watch out for her, helping Bailey through a hard coming of age: the abusive boyfriend (James Nelson-Joyce) of her mother (Jasmine Jobson); her half brother (Jason Buda) slipping into vigilante violence; her father marrying a new girlfriend.
The introduction of surrealism has... Read More