Back in May, Lisa Fields received a rather unusual assignment: Casting a series of SUV spots designed to spoof the casting of SUV spots.
Fields, a casting director who heads up Lisa Fields Casting, Los Angeles, was called on by director Michael Haussman of bicoastal Person Films, and Volkswagen agency Arnold Worldwide, Boston, to find the talent for the spots "MJ," "Goatboy," "Windy Zen," "Cargo Plane" and "Spring Water," a series of teaser spots that broke in advance of the launch campaign for Volkswagen’s first sport utility vehicle, the Touareg.
With nary a Touareg in sight, the five teasers tout the soon-to-debut SUV by showing actors auditioning for Touareg commercials. Diverse in appearance, the performers share an appealing enthusiasm as they follow the (very strange) requests of an unseen director. In "MJ," for instance, the eponymous actress pretends to be behind the wheel of a Touareg as the director shouts, "You’re the quintessential soccer mom mountain lion. Pick up the kids."
MJ responds with, "Rrrraaaurrgh! Come on, kids!"
"You’ve never felt more alive, soccer-mom-mountain-lion-wearing-designer-sunglasses," yells the crazed helmer. "Just another day in the SUV."
A far cry from the typical automotive launch but, as Fields points out, Volkswagen wouldn’t have had it any other way. "They were the last holdout of the [automobile companies] to come out with an SUV," she relates. "They wanted to poke fun at themselves a little bit, and to look at just how crazy it can be in the casting of SUV [commercials]."
Adding to the irony, all five teasers are taken from actual Touareg callbacks, with Haussman himself portraying the off-camera director. Though the original intent was to reenact a casting session, "the [real] casting came out so spectacular that they just decided to use that footage," Fields shares. "Why try and recreate it when it was so perfect the way it was?"
One of the main reasons for that perfection was, of course, the cast. "The actors were all so wonderful and patient because Michael had them all over the map," Fields recalls. "Going from being mountain lions to bottling their own water, to being in the pyramids—he ran them through everything. And the actors really rolled with it."
Finding those actors took some work. "For the initial call, we probably saw one hundred and fifty people," remembers Fields, who worked closely with Haussman from the start, and only considered professional actors. "What we originally did with people was to do what we call ‘personality checks.’ We’d ask them a silly question, like ‘Who is the first person you ever kissed?’ or ‘What is the worst job you’ve ever had?’ Something to get a spark out of them."
Haussman and Fields had no specific look in mind for the Touareg talent. "Not outside of the fact that [the agency] gave us an age range, which is the market for the car buyer," she notes. "What Michael really needed was the right personality type—people who would be good to go and very spontaneous."
By callback time, the field had been narrowed considerably. "Michael very much knows what he wants, and he’s pretty confident in his decisions," Fields notes. "So when we brought everybody in for the callback, we had people who could handle all that craziness."
Collaboration
It wasn’t the first time Haussman and Fields had worked together. "I met [Michael] around three years ago on a project called Take Down," Fields recalls. "It was a film that Jerry Bruckheimer was producing [with Haussman slated to direct], right before a potential writers’ strike, when everybody was scrambling to get film in the can. We decided to put it off for a while because the actors we wanted weren’t available, but we have done other projects together since then."
Those projects include a slew of spots, as well as Blind Horizon, a recently wrapped film helmed by Haussman and starring Val Kilmer. As well as she knew him, Fields saw a whole new side of Haussman during the Touareg callbacks. "He’s usually so visually oriented; his spots are beautiful," she remarks. "But for him to turn a casting room into an actual [set], and to become this outrageous character, I think he deserves probably ninety percent of the credit for the spots turning out the way they did."
For Fields, the hardest part was keeping a straight face during callbacks. "There were times I was laughing so hard, I was tearing up," she shares.
Fields got her start more than a decade ago, as the in-house casting director at the now defunct Propaganda Films. "I worked with the likes of David Fincher and Michael Bay, Dominic Sena, Simon West and Antoine Fuqua," she relates. "In the beginning, we were a music video company, and then we went to commercials. Everybody took care of each other. We were all very comfortable, and those guys were extremely loyal."
After she left Propaganda to launch Lisa Fields Casting in 1995, many of those directors kept in touch. Fields says Bay has hired her to work with him, "on every project in some capacity"—from the commercials he directs out of his Santa Monica-based Institute for Development of Advanced Perceptual Awareness, to his big-screen efforts like Pearl Harbor and Armageddon.
"We just finished the remake of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which was [Bay’s] first producing job," reports Fields; Marcus Nispel, who helms spots via bicoastal/international Morton Jankel Zander (MJZ), directed the film. Fields divides her time between casting commercials, feature films and television shows like WB’s Fearless. "I enjoy all the mediums," she notes. "I really enjoy commercials for the directors that I meet, and the intensity of it—how it’s quick and fun. I enjoy film for the obvious reason of meeting a different caliber of actor. And I like television because I think it’s a little of both."
Next up for Fields is an Acura campaign, directed by Haussman, which she’ll begin casting this month. Though there are no immediate plans for future Touareg spots, "the ones on the air are getting a lot of attention," Fields notes. "I’m sure that the agency will come back to Michael."
