With his third nomination, Craig Gillespie scored the Directors Guild of America (DGA) Award this year for best commercial director of 2005. “I honestly did not expect it,” says Gillespie, who was up against three of his fellow directors from bicoastal/international Morton Jankel Zander (MJZ)–Rocky Morton, Spike Jonze and Rupert Sanders–as well as Noam Murro of Los Angeles-based Biscuit Filmworks. “The work was so good from everybody that I hadn’t even gotten my hopes up. So I was surprised [when I won]. I didn’t have a speech or anything prepared.”
Winning was, well, great, of course, but Gillespie points out that the DGA Awards facilitated an opportunity for him to enjoy some social time with his fellow MJZ directors. For example, Gillespie says, he didn’t really get to know Sanders, who only joined the company within the last year, until they got to chat at a DGA-sponsored screening prior to the awards ceremony. He appreciated the chance to bond with his colleagues. “There was a real team spirit,” Gillespie shares. “Everybody was thrilled to be amongst each other.”
Gillespie, who has directed spots for clients including Saturn, Honda, Holiday Inn Express and others in recent years, nabbed the DGA honor this year based on the strength of four spots: Altoids “People of Pain” and “Fable of the Fruit Bat” out of Leo Burnett, Chicago; and Ameriquest’s “Surprise Dinner” and “Mini-Mart” via DDB Direct, Los Angeles.
Asked how he chooses the work he will direct, Gillespie says he looks for spots that will allow him “to try different things visually and not have my stuff look the same.” That said, “I like to figure out what’s best for the idea.”
In the case of the Altoids “People of Pain” and “Fable of the Fruit Bat” spots, which find a bumbling British anthropologist visiting the primitive peoples of Altoidia, Gillespie says he mimicked the look and feel of French documentaries made of Papua New Guinea in the 1960s. “They were really awkward and stiff and felt very staged,” Gillespie says, noting that stilted look and awkward execution supported the wonderfully silly premise behind the Altoids ads.
The director opted for an appropriately slicker and contemporary look for the Ameriquest “Surprise Dinner” spot, which opens on a man preparing a romantic dinner for the lady in his life only to look like a psycho when she enters the apartment and finds him clutching a knife in one hand and her fluffy white cat in the other after the feline knocks a pot of sauce off the stove.
Gillespie recently tackled Ameriquest work again, by the way, directing two new Ameriquest spots, “That Killed Him” and “Friendly Skies,” that proved popular with viewers of Super Bowl XL.
In the darkly funny “That Killed Him,” a doctor and a medical technician are standing over a patient lying in his hospital bed. The tech can’t resist using defibrillator paddles to zap a pesky fly. After the bug crashes into the patient’s chest, the tech says, “That killed him” as the patient’s wife and daughter enter the hospital room. The spot ends with the tag line “Don’t judge too quickly.”
The same tag line accompanies the risqué “Friendly Skies,” which shows a woman trying to get past a fellow airplane passenger who is asleep in his seat. But when turbulence hits, she winds up on his lap, with her skirt hitched up above her hips.
Given the strength of these two latest Ameriquest concepts, Gillespie says he couldn’t resist the chance to work on the Ameriquest campaign with DDB Direct again. “It’s rare that any campaign lasts more than a year, so it was really refreshing to see that they were going with the same campaign and being that they did, I was happy to go with it,” Gillespie says, adding, “I had a great experience with the agency the first time around.”
This isn’t the first time Gillespie has made a return appearance of sorts to take on a campaign that he previously worked on. In fact, the director recalls doing nearly a dozen spots for Washington Mutual out of Seattle’s Sedgwick Road because the work was consistently compelling.
For those of you who might have been turned away by Gillespie last year, he was actually away from spots for about eight months while he shot his first feature film. A dark comedy titled Mr. Woodcock, the film centers on a young man who returns home to try to stop his mother from marrying the gym teacher, Mr. Woodcock (played by Billy Bob Thornton), whom he always hated in high school.
Gillespie enjoyed working on the film, but admits that he was excited about getting back to spot work, which offers him the opportunity to do so many different things. “Today, we’re doing massive crashes [for a car commercial],” he reports. “Last week, we were doing new Ameriquest stuff. I like being able to mix it up.”
Having directed spots for more than 10 years now and built up a successful career, one has to wonder if there is any territory within commercials that Gillespie would like to cover in the future. There is, he says. “I certainly get to see all the comedy boards which is great,” Gillespie remarks. “But in the future I’d like to do something that has more of an epic scale to it.”
How The Hollywood Awards Calendar Has Been Affected By The Wildfires
Hollywood's awards season has all but come to a rare halt as the wildfires continue to disrupt life and work in the Los Angeles area. There are near daily updates from the Hollywood guilds and organizations that put on awards shows as the industry navigates the ongoing crisis.
Here's an overview of the major upcoming awards shows, from the Oscars to the Grammys, including updated dates for nominations.
Producers Guild and Writers Guild award nominations
Postponed, no new dates announced
The Writers Guild of America nominations were to be announced Jan. 8, a date that was pushed to Jan. 13 and then postponed indefinitely. The Producers Guild of America nominations for feature films were to be announced on Jan. 10, which was pushed to Jan. 12 and then postponed to an unspecified date this week.
Academy Award nominations
Jan. 23
The Oscar nominations have been twice-delayed — they were initially slated for Jan. 17, then Jan. 19, before being delayed again. The delay in the announcement accommodates an extended voting deadline, as many Academy members have been affected by the wildfires.
The nominations will be announced via a "virtual presentation," eschewing press on site.
Critics Choice Awards
Jan. 26
Originally slated for Jan. 12, the awards were set to take place at the Barker Hangar in Santa Monica, only miles from the Pacific Palisades neighborhood where fire was raging.
The awards will be broadcast live on E!, hosted by Chelsea Handler.
Grammy Awards
Feb. 2
By virtue of announcing their nominations back in November, the Grammys' schedule has largely been unaffected by the wildfires. Some... Read More