Ask Elias Merhige, who has the feature films Begotten, Shadow of the Vampire and Suspect Zero to his credit, about the differences between working on a feature film and a commercial, and he will tell you there aren’t any that are all that significant. “I put the same kind of care and the same kind of detail into both,” says the director, who is represented for spots by Santa Monica, Calif.-based Independent Media.
That’s evident in his reel of spot work. Merhige, a native of Brooklyn who learned the craft of filmmaking at The State University of New York at Purchase, made a big splash in the advertising industry last year with his first commercial effort, a :30 for PBS called “Bucket Brigade.” Created by Fallon Minneapolis and part of the television network’s “Be More” campaign, the spot finds a group of villagers banding together to save their beloved library from burning to the ground. They do so in a wonderfully unique way, scooping the fire out of the building in buckets and bringing the fire down the hill to a well to extinguish it.
Merhige’s spot credits also include a :30 for Genworth Financial titled “House Rules.” The spot has married tennis superstars Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf accepting an invitation to play tennis in a mythical land far, far away where the rules of the game are vastly more complex. Being the good sports they are, Agassi and Graf quickly get the hang of it, of course, and excel.
With both “Bucket Brigade” and “House Rules,” Merhige had to create compelling worlds from scratch. He ventured to Chile to make “Bucket Brigade,” scouting out the perfect hilltop setting in a rural town, then building a rustic stone library that looked like it had stood upon that hill for centuries.
For “House Rules,” Merhige searched long and hard for a location with spectacular mountain views that would feel like it was on the edge of the world. He found it in Simi Valley, Calif., and with the help of production designer Nathan Crowley (Batman Begins and Mission Impossible: II), Merhige constructed a monolithic tennis court in the round that, like the library in “Bucket Brigade,” felt like it had existed for centuries.
In the case of two gritty, black-and-white Nike basketball-themed spots, “I Can” and “Slam,” which finds a mix of pro athletes (NBA stars Kobe Bryant, Amare Stoudemire and Vince Carter) and everyday folks playing the game they love, Merhige didn’t have to so much create a world as he had to find it. “I really wanted to find basketball courts [in Los Angeles] where there was some real street ball going on, and I cast real street ballers,” Merhige says.
While the Nike spots play as though Merhige and his crew just stumbled upon people playing basketball, the spots were carefully storyboarded. Merhige is meticulous when it comes to crafting all of his work, personally getting involved in every element from location scouting to storyboarding. “I storyboard everything very precisely, and I handpick my team in terms of my director of photography and in terms of the people that I surround myself with,” Merhige shares. “And then I invite them over for dinner, and I have numerous conversations with them.”
Merhige is equally as collaborative with the agency creatives he works with. One has to imagine that the complicated Genworth Financial spot “House Rules” was a seriously collaborative effort, and it was, Merhige confirms. “It was me responding to the idea and to the original script, and then taking it further and presenting possibilities in terms of costume design, production design and the direction that I really wanted to take it in, and the agency responding to that,” Merhige says.
Without this kind of back and forth during which he and the agency creatives could feed off of each other’s ideas, the Genworth Financial spot wouldn’t have had the depth it ultimately had, the director adds, but could have rather felt gimmicky.
Like with most of his work, the bulk of the effects in “House Rules” were created in camera, with the only digitally created effect being the ball on fire. “CGI does not give you the same visceral quality that optics and film does,” Merhige maintains, noting. “How many times have you seen a feature film, and you see these battle scenes, and you just know that they’re all computer generated? It takes you out of it. But whereas you look at the battle scenes in Lawrence of Arabia, and you know that those are all real people, and it has a whole different effect on you completely.”
As for his most recent spot work, Merhige had just completed a launch spot for a new Toyota Camry campaign out of Saatchi & Saatchi LA, Torrance, Calif., at the time of this interview. Merhige recalls immediately being drawn to the idea behind the commercial, which allows us to observe a Toyota Camry parked outside of what looks like a Soho or Tribeca art studio falling into a déjà vu-like dream.
“I really wanted to do it, and I’m very selective about the kinds of things I do,” Merhige says of the inventive Toyota Camry commercial, pointing out, “The things that I love to spend time on involve really working with actors, working with performances and creating a world, and if a spot creatively doesn’t offer that, then it doesn’t really turn me on.”
Steven Soderbergh Has A Multi-Faceted “Presence” In His Latest Film
Steven Soderbergh isn't just the director and cinematographer of his latest film. He's also, in a way, its central character.
"Presence" is filmed entirely from the POV of a ghost inside a home a family has just moved into. Soderbergh, who serves as his own cinematographer under the pseudonym Peter Andrews (his father's name), essentially performs as the presence, a floating point-of-view that watches as the violence that killed the mysterious ghost threatens to be repeated.
For even the prolific Soderbergh, the film, which opens Friday in theaters, was a unique challenge. He shot "Presence" with a small digital camera while wearing slippers to soften his steps.
The 62-year-old filmmaker recently met a reporter in a midtown Manhattan hotel in between finishing post-production on his other upcoming movie ("Black Bag," a thriller Focus Features will release March 14) and beginning production in a few weeks on his next project, a romantic comedy that he says "feels like a George Cukor movie."
Soderbergh, whose films include "Out of Sight," the "Ocean's 11" movies, "Magic Mike" and "Erin Brockovich," tends to do a lot in small windows of time. "Presence" took 11 days to film.
That dexterous proficiency has made the ever-experimenting Soderbergh one of Hollywood's most widely respected evaluators of the movie business. In a wide-ranging conversation, he discussed why he thinks streaming is the most destructive force the movies have ever faced and why he's "the cockroach of this industry."
Q: You use pseudonyms for yourself as a cinematographer and editor. Were you tempted to credit yourself as an actor for "Presence"?
SODERBERGH: No, but what I did is subtle. For the first and... Read More