Noted documentary filmmaker and spot director Errol Morris’ presentation during the Association of Independent Commercial Producers (AICP) Lecture Series at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, earlier this month (6/7) was marked by candor, eccentricity, and some very basic advice to the commercial world, which sometimes gets lost in today’s endless line of approvals and meetings.
"If everything is so carefully planned and plotted out, then there’s no room for something amazing happening in the actual process of creating a commercial," he explained. "Then the work is desiccated, embalmed, dead. Some of my very, very best work has actually been produced in a situation approximating chaos and it does take a great agency, a great producer and a great company to pull it all off."
The goal, Morris stated, is to create a situation where unexpected things can happen. He pointed to the first campaign he helmed via his commercialmaking roost, bicoastal/international @radical.media: a Miller High Life ’98 ad package for Wieden + Kennedy, Portland, Ore., in which over the course of four days he and his crew shot 17 spots. Morris said the campaign formed a basis for how he likes to work, citing how much of the material was written and filmed as they went along. "Deviled Egg," he explained was actually filmed after they’d supposedly wrapped. Other commercials, such as "Waiting" and "Champagne of Beer," were also shot last minute, unscripted, after the clients had already left because they were absolutely convinced that the job was done. Those two spots turned out to be among Morris’ favorites.
"It’s creating something that is alive that I believe is my central role as a director," Morris said. Whether it’s people reading copy or speaking in their own words, he emphasized that it was making something believable and real that was the central goal. "The camera sees everything," observed Morris. "The camera’s hypersensitive; it’s that
all-knowing, all-seeing eye and when something real happens in front of it, the camera knows it, you know it and the people watching it know as well. And those kind of moments I’m always searching for."
Another spot he pointed to as an example of containing this real-life quality was adidas’ "Weightlifter" via Leagas Delaney, San Francisco, where initially the boards called for Olympic weight lifter Shane Hamin to act out a scenario in a cafeteria, which had nothing to do with weight lifting. "I thought, my God! You’ve gotta see this guy doing his thing, cause this is wrong, deeply wrong," said Morris. So instead they dragged him into a gym and had him do his thing and came up with something classic. Morris pointed out that you’ve got to be "in a position where you can actually run with the material." He went on, "What’s up isn’t handing you a set of frames on a piece of paper; what’s up is sharing with a director a notion of what you’re trying to achieve … creating a brand."
To overcome adidas’ anxiety over whether its spots were going to be thinly disguised Nike ads, Morris looked to ideas. He explained that it wasn’t about what the spots looked like-whether they were slick or not, in black and white or color or what the aspect ratio of the film was-but rather the idea contained within the ad. "After all, film isn’t a mechanical deal; it’s about expressing ideas," Morris explained. Therefore he pondered over what adidas was trying to say with this campaign and came to the conclusion that sports isn’t only about heroism; "sports is also about obsession, pain, [and] commitment. Let’s get away from the heraldry of sports in this instance and let’s create something really, really different that captures a different set of ideas." This is what Morris feels he does best, and points to the adidas work as an example of the notion of ideas over gimmicks.
Morris, who feels the commercial is the American equivalent of Japanese Haiku due to its compression of filmmaking into 15 to 60 seconds, went on to explain how he felt he excelled at showing both an external world and the world behind it. "You feel like you’re almost inside somebody’s head," he said, describing his commercial work. Pointing to a recent Volkswagen spot, "Parenthood," via Arnold Communications, Boston, in which a man driving reminisces about his infant dropping an Oreo cookie on the floor, and the five-second rule (which is how long the snack can stay there before becoming inedible). Morris said "You’re looking at cars, yes. But at the same time, you’re trying to actually capture the mindset of a driver. You’re trying to put yourself in that driver’s head-of his own ideas about himself. And that’s what I do best. I just love doing that kind of stuff."
This was the second time in recent months that Morris had been honored at MoMA, first for a retrospective of his documentary work (with a smattering of spots) and then at the AICP event. Morris, who describes himself as a crazy, experimental filmmaker who’s willing to try anything in the service of a story, at one point during the lecture went into a detailed explanation of one of the machines he’s invented in order to get at something new. The machine, the Interrotron (named by his wife for combining the words interview and terror), was spawned out of Morris’ obsession with "this idea that if you leave people alone and let them talk, within a matter of minutes they will show you how crazy they really are." He went on to explain, "I think all of us have this deep inherent need to explain ourselves, to give an account of ourselves, and to get feedback of some kind. …. For example, am I doing a good job playing myself, impersonating myself, performing, if you like, the role of myself?" Therefore, to eliminate this self-consciousness, he created the Interrotron: "Freud had the couch, I have the Interrotron," Morris joked.
Stemming from Morris’ idea that interviews should be done in a completely different way, as opposed to the usual speaker- looking-off-camera interviews seen in most spots, Morris sought to eliminate the interviewer. People could talk directly into the lens, as many commercials do, he pointed out, but if you want people to talk at enormous length you just can’t have them look dead into the lens for an hour. So, using prompters the way a text uses prompters, Morris put together two cameras, two prompters, cross connected so that prompter A has the feed from the B camera, prompter B has the feed from the A camera, and, according to Morris-"We’re both looking at each other’s live video images and at the same time staring at each other right down the central axis of both the lenses-the Interrotron." As he put it, "a really really stupid idea that has amazing results. I now think of it as the true first person." Morris now has a series, running on the Independent Film Channel and Bravo, called First Person based solely on this idea. The series has just been renewed for another season.
Although he at one time claimed he would never use the Interrotron in commercials (due to the soundbyte qualities of spots), Morris turned on his word and ended up deploying it recently in the "What’s True" campaign for Levi’s via TBWA/Chiat/Day, San Francisco, and the Dell computers’ "Born to Web" campaign via Ammirati Puris Lintas, New York.
The lecture ended with a spot that hasn’t aired yet for PBS, "Opera Singer," via Fallon, Minneapolis, in which a man poses in a photo booth making strange hand gestures and stranger facial expressions, literally taking hundreds of pictures of himself. He gets home, places a needle down on some vinyl and opera begins to play with a male tenor’s voice bursting with emotion. Then the man places all the photos in a row and flips through them at high speed so that we see a cartoon version of the man singing to the record. A total original, Morris has done it again.
