It was a letter that most creatives could only imagine receiving—particularly from a heavyweight automotive client like BMW. But there it was, in black and white. And when Fallon Minneapolis associate creative director Bruce Bildsten saw it earlier this year, he knew that he and his team were in for a rare challenge.
"We’d told them, ‘There are so many restrictions on us. We have to show the car for this amount of time. We can’t do this, we can’t do that,’ " recalls Bildsten, who has been with Fallon for 17 years. "In response to our plea, they sent us this letter that was just amazing. They were telling us, ‘Take off the gloves. Do whatever you want. We want you to really stretch.’ "
The BMW mandate resulted in The Hire—not an ad campaign, but a series of short films in which the company’s cars play a prominent role. Helmed by such well-known feature film directors as John Frankenheimer and Ang Lee, and viewed via www.bmwfilms.com, the shorts star Clive Owen (Croupier) as a driver-for-hire who finds himself in various suspenseful situations. Since their debut this spring, the films have proven extremely successful. "We’d hoped for a good response, but we never thought it would be as strong as it was," Bildsten reports. "BMW recorded over eleven million film-views. And according to their research, it really worked. [The films] got people to not just pay attention, but to buy cars."
Art director David Carter and copywriter Joe Sweet conceived The Hire after working with Tim Burton—who is represented for spots by A Band Apart .35mm, Los Angeles—on the Timex spots "Mannequin" and "Kung Fu." Carter and Sweet credit the Timex ads, among other factors, for prompting them to think in cinematic terms. "[Timex] was a great experience, and there was some of that leftover feeling of ‘Isn’t Hollywood cool?’ " Carter recalls. "We were in L.A. finishing those when Bruce called us and said, ‘We need to start working on the new brand campaign for BMW.’ "
After the client rejected a more traditional campaign, "Bruce just said, ‘Think along the Timex lines. Think cinematic.’ The next morning, we came in with the idea pretty much worked out."
Concepts
Creating downloadable films and publicizing them with movie posters, theatrical trailers and the like was an advertising concept tailor-made for BMW. "What really got us going is the fact that about eighty-five percent of all their buyers in the last year spent time on the Web before buying a BMW," Bildsten explains. "Their audience is very technologically savvy, and they tend to have computers with good connections. We also knew they were hard people to reach with traditional television."
True to their (written) word, BMW execs were receptive to the unorthodox approach. "They were like, ‘This is so great. This is brilliant.’ " remembers Carter. "The hard part came in figuring out how we were actually going to do it."
Instead of sending out scripts, the creatives flew to Los Angeles, where they spoke to directors Frankenheimer and David Fincher. "We had a list of very famous people," Bildsten says. "One of them was John Frankenheimer, because his car chase scene in Ronin had been a big inspiration. In fact, we had showed that when we presented the idea to BMW, and they wanted to watch it twice."
Fincher, who helms spots out of bicoastal Anonymous Content, has directed several well-known features (Se7en, Fight Club). "David really embraced the idea," relates Bildsten. "Even though he was doing a feature and couldn’t direct the work, he asked to act as a producer on the project." With Fincher executive producing out of Anonymous and Frankenheimer aboard as a director, the Fallon team embarked on the project.
The creatives’ initial idea had been a serialized film, running anywhere from 45 to 60 minutes. But Fincher suggested individual stories, featuring one recurring character. "It was a stroke of brilliance, because it gave us access to much better and more diverse talent in Hollywood," Bildsten points out. "Directors, when they do films, get tied down for a long time. So the idea of doing a short film, and maybe taking a month out of your life, was really attractive to people."
Before signing on directors, however, the team needed to script the films. As preparation, Fincher and the creatives did some background work on the BMW-driving hero. "We put this whole dossier together on who this guy was, with fake FBI files and CIA files," recalls Carter. "It was something that we used internally to figure him out."
Bildsten says that "a lot of hard work was done" developing the scripts, two of which were written by Carter, one by Joe Sweet and two by feature screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, who had penned Se7en. "That’s where [BMW] chose to exercise their control," notes Bildsten. "They were going to be hands-off with the directors, but they wanted to make sure we had the right scripts going in."
After the scripts were approved, Carter remembers, "We all just sat around—Fincher, and some of his partners at Anonymous and us—and made a list of directors. And then [Fincher] made some calls and tried to get those people." Bildsten notes that they were looking for diversity in style.
They got what they were looking for. Frankenheimer signed on to shoot the Walker-penned Ambush, a full-throttle car chase in which thieves pursue The Hire and his diamond merchant passenger. Lee was tapped for Carter’s graceful actioner Chosen, which centers around a Buddha-like Tibetan child whom the driver protects from a series of villains. British director Guy Ritchie (Snatch, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) took Sweet’s comic Star—Ritchie is also credited with co-writing the script—in which The Hire takes a bossy music diva on the roughest ride of her life. The team chose Hong Kong native Wong Kar-Wai (In the Mood for Love, Happy Together) to helm Walker’s The Follow, a moody piece involving a movie star who hires the driver to spy on his wife. And Carter’s Powder Keg—in which the driver transports a wounded photojournalist in a war-torn Latin American country—was handed to Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu (Amores Perros). Working with the directors, Carter enthuses, "was like five semesters of film school."
Iñárritu enlisted Amores Perros scribe Guillermo Arriaqa Jordan "to help bring the Mexican mindset into the script I had written," reports Carter. "That was a nice collaborative process."
The other directors had different approaches. "I would say that John pretty much took the script and went with it. He did his storyboards, went off and shot it. And Ang Lee did the same thing," Carter recounts. "Won Kar-Wai was amazingly collaborative. He does not follow the script. He’s always thinking of ways to make it different and better. We would have five or six different script revisions a day."
Ritchie convinced his wife, Madonna, to headline Star. "When he signed on, we didn’t think she’d be along—we just desperately wanted him," Bildsten says. "There were other options [to play the role of the diva], but they were a little more washed-up than her."
Mickey Rourke agreed to play the movie star in The Follow. Forest Whitaker, who appears as Rourke’s agent, "happened to be shooting David Fincher’s feature The Panic Room, so David was able to talk him into doing it."
Other respected actors, like Stellan Skarsgård, who portrays the photojournalist in Powder Keg, signed on for reasons similar to the directors’: It was a unique project that didn’t require a huge time commitment.
Interestingly, one of the hardest actors to pin down was the series’ star. "At Fallon," reports Bildsten, "our goal was to find someone who’d make James Bond look like a twit."
A Croupier fan, Fallon producer Robyn Boardman suggested Owen. "But he had signed up to shoot a feature with Robert Altman, and he was very busy," the creative director recalls. "He was also afraid that this would be too commercial." The team persisted, however. "We signed him the day before we started shooting. When he arrived from London, Frankenheimer was already shooting other scenes for his film, hoping we’d have Owen."
All in all, the creative team enjoyed working on The Hire as much as BMW appreciated the end result. But the events of Sept. 11 and the softening economy were factors in stalling another series. Also, BMW has new models to launch before it can consider a second set of shorts. "The nature of these films is that they reverse your usual spending," Bildsten explains. "We spent very little on media, and a lot more on production. But the difficulty with that is it requires you to make a commitment, way up front, a lot sooner. You can produce a spot, and if the economy goes bad, you can pull back and not run it. You can’t do that with this type of thing."
Lately, Bildsten has been working on a launch for BMW’s Seven Series. Helmed by Lawrence Dunmore of bicoastal RSA USA, the ad is slated to debut during the 2002 Winter Olympics. "It’s pretty epic," he hints.
