No director worth his salt wants to get pigeonholed into a certain style, and Errol Morris is no exception. The problem for Morris is that he is so well known for his feature documentaries, that it’s sometimes easy to overlook his diverse and voluminous output of commercials.
Morris’s credentials as a documentarian are impeccable. His most recent feature film–The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara–won the Oscar last year for best documentary. The film, and previous documentaries like his first, Gates of Heaven in 1978, and later efforts like The Thin Blue Line in ’88, A Brief History of Time in ’92 and Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control in ’97 have had some of the film industry’s most prestigious awards heaped on them.
He’s done pretty well in the commercial arena, too, operating out of bicoastal Moxie Pictures, which he joined at the beginning of the year after six years with bicoastal/international @radical.media. Morris left @radical.media for Moxie in part to continue working with Moxie partner/executive producer Robert Fernandez, who had previously been with @radical.media.
Among the accolades his spot work has earned in an Emmy Award for best primetime commercial for the 2001 PBS spot “Photobooth”–built around an opera-loving guy with a talent for flip-card animation–out of Fallon, Minneapolis.
“In advertising, people like to imagine that you do one thing or that your work represents one skillset,” Morris says. “I think of myself as a filmmaker. For a while I was trying to avoid material based on real people [in commercials] just simply because, you know, I can do that, and I think I can actually do it as well as or better than anybody. But, is that what I want to be doing all the time? The answer is no. I would rather have the opportunity to do a whole variety of different work.”
The kinds of jobs he likes to point to include the PBS work for Fallon, the “Miller High Life Man” campaign for Wieden + Kennedy (W+K) Portland, Ore., and the more recent Sharp Aquos spots that anchor the integrated “More to See” campaign out of W+K, New York. “What I do primarily in advertising is tell stories,” Morris says. “I tell stories in a believable way. Sharp is visual storytelling. The PBS material is a perfect example of material that is classic storytelling with pictures. It’s much more like a feature than a documentary. Sharp is exactly the same way. I enjoy it. You could even say that Miller is visual storytelling. It’s across the board.”
The Sharp spots–“The Key,” “The Pool” and “The Tooth”–were part of an integrated campaign for the Sharp Aquos television set. The spots weave a cinematic mystery, set in a country estate, involving a beautiful woman, an older man in a swimming pool and a careless driver in a Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, and are designed to lure viewers to Sharp’s Web site, moretosee.com, where users were able to read blogs written by three characters involved in a hunt for three mystery urns, as well as review product information on the Aquos LCD television. There is absolutely nothing in the Sharp spots to suggest they were directed by a documentary filmmaker.
And the Miller spots, while using the distinctive voiceover of Doug Jeffers and offering manly vignettes with real-life insights, are clearly not cinéma vérité; Morris isn’t just a director who has done some High Life spots–he done literally hundreds, all for W+K, Portland. “How many people,” he asks, “can say they’ve worked with the same campaign and more or less the same people for seven years? I think we’ve shot, my guess is, well over one-hundred spots now. I’ve got forty or fifty on my website.”
He’s also helmed some 60 spots for Citibank and Fallon that he characterizes as “pure visual storytelling.” Morris’s reel also includes the Nike spots “Myzel” and “Bernard” out of W+K, Portland, and Apple’s “Ellen Feiss” and “DJ Qbert,” part of the “Switchers” campaign out of TBWA/Chiat/Day, Los Angeles, all of which are straight, into-the-camera testimonials. “I would say that represents a small part of my work,” Morris says of spots like those for Nike and Apple, which involve real people, and more closely resemble documentary-style efforts. “I get calls for it very often, but I rarely do it–for variety’s sake, if nothing else. There are certain clients for whom I want to do it, where I know there are going to be stylistic opportunities in what we’re doing to make it an interesting job. Apple is one of them that I’m delighted to be involved with.”
And last year, Morris put himself in the spotlight with a series of political testimonials for MoveOn.org from real people who had voted for President George Bush in 2000, but who were voting for John Kerry in 2004.
Docs to Ads
After graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and doing graduate work at Princeton University and the University of California at Berkeley, Morris started making documentaries, but it wasn’t until his third film that he started getting ad work.
“I never really thought about advertising until people approached me following the release of The Thin Blue Line,” he says. “I wish I had known about it a lot earlier. It would have made life a little bit easier.”
He didn’t pursue it avidly though until 1998. “When I joined @radical.media everything changed,” he says. “I went from shooting two or three campaigns per annum to doing many, many, many. I have lost count.”
Interestingly, it took a while for most agencies to catch on that Morris could do spots in a straight documentary style. The awakening came with his post-9/11 campaign for United Airlines and Fallon. “I went through years and years of advertising work before people realized I could interview people,” he says. “That happened almost accidentally. I was shooting a campaign for United Airlines. This was the weekend that Bush invaded Afghanistan and we lost all of our locations at O’Hare airport. We were going to be paid and sent home. I suggested, ‘Look, let’s bring these people,’–real people that we had cast–into the studio. This is a historic moment. Without any doubt these people have strong feelings about their airline, their jobs, what’s happened to the country. We should talk to them and make a campaign based on this material.’ I’ve been doing this for years in my films, but this was the beginning of an awareness in the advertising community that I did this kind of work.” That, and a short intro of interviews he did for the Academy Awards in ’02, registered with Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Morris was hired for “Switchers” campaign.
Morris’s most recent work is a campaign for State Farm Insurance out of DDB Chicago. “It involves real State Farm agents, real stories and actors,” Morris explains. “It’s a combination of a lot of the things I do–real people, actors, visual storytelling–and I think they’re very funny.”
At 57, Morris plans to continue to do spot work, but the big news from him is that he is in development on some non-documentary features. “My intention is to branch out into dramas,” he says, declining to elaborate much. “I have a horror movie in development that we’re anxious to do.”
And in truth, it’s not a stretch for him. “Many of the techniques used in all of my documentary films are much, much more familiar to feature filmmaking,” he says. “The reenactments in The Thin Blue Line are what caught people’s attention. I often describe my films as having three parts, sick, sad and funny. It’s not one thing to the exclusion of everything else.”