I haven’t ever considered my gender to tell you the truth," says Anthea Benton, who directs spots out of bicoastal/international Believe Media. "I just apply myself to every project, and try to make it the best it can be."
Still, in the male-dominated world of spot making, Benton’s gender put her at a unique advantage for "Moms Have Changed/Loading" and "Girls’ Night Out," two recently launched ads for the Nissan Quest minivan, which she directed via TBWA/Chiat/Day, Los Angeles. Geared toward modern, active mothers rather than traditional soccer moms, the spots show the many surprising ways in which the new minivan can be used. In "Moms Have Changed/Loading," atypical moms load a Quest with unexpected items, including a saddle, a surfboard and a violin. The spot ends with shots of disparate women morphing into each other and the voiceover, "Moms have changed. Shouldn’t the minivan?"
In "Girls’ Night Out," a group of fashionable moms cruise the streets of Los Angeles in a Quest, shooting each other with a digital camera and watching the footage on the vehicle’s built-in monitor. The last image is of dad with the sleeping kids, waiting for his wife to come home.
Benton, who has a six-year-old daughter, says it was easy for her to relate to the material. "I can put myself in a position of what exactly would be the practical [uses for a minivan]," she explains. "Also, I know from experience that all sorts of different, unexpected people are mothers."
She was drawn to the project from the start—not just because of the scripts, but because of the creative team at TBWA/Chiat/Day. "The team said at the outset, ‘We want to try and do something that’s utterly fresh, something that has a feeling to it that you wouldn’t associate so much with this type of car advertising,’ " she recalls. "I think they wanted it to be completely character-led, which is important because that’s what I do best."
Benton shared a collaborative relationship with the creatives, who included executive creative director Rob Schwartz, associate creative director/art director Juan Perez, executive producer Elaine Hinton and assistant producer Aileen Baliat. Instead of storyboards or a script, the director says she received "a sort of detailed synopsis. It’s great because you’re working from a blank canvas."
Though it tends to be rarer in America than in her native U.K., Benton says the creative team allowed her to "go a little bit further with the casting, and make unusual choices." They also gave her a lot of creative input. "I really like to work in a collaborative way with creative teams," she notes. "I like to have a lot of discussions so that we can get to the best point for all of us."
connections
The memorable morphing visual at the end of "Moms Have Changed/ Loading," was Benton’s suggestion. "I was trying to suggest a ‘universal [woman]’ out of many different women," she states.
Deep stuff for automotive advertising, but that’s the way Benton looks at the world. Whether she’s shooting spots for couture, credit cards or cars, she likes to appeal to viewers on a personal level. "I think the one way that you can communicate in car advertising is to hit the proper emotional spots," she relates. "There are so many cars on the market, and people have so much of a choice. I think it’s better for [viewers] to have a connection with a human, rather than, ‘Look, you can have this different type of wing mirror.’
"I think in all of my work I’m very careful, because we all know what the worst aspects of advertising can be," she continues. "I’ve always tried hard to make everything I do have a credibility about it. And I make sure that if there are actors involved in it, they’re not overdoing anything or overstating a case. They’re just being as natural and as fundamentally real as they can be."
Benton’s career began back in the early 1980s, when she began helming music videos with Vaughan Arnell as the co-directing team Vaughan & Anthea. Involved both professionally and romantically, the duo worked with such prominent ’80s artists as Simply Red, George Michael and Terrence Trent D’Arby. In ’91, they began directing spots, out of Lewin and Watson, London. Though their romantic relationship ended around the same time, Arnell and Benton remained a team for another five years, signing with the now bicoastal/international Chelsea Pictures for U.S. representation from ’93 to ’95, and co-founding their own production house, Federation, in ’95.
While she admits it was hard to maintain the working partnership after the relationship had cooled, "I didn’t want the world to be able to say that something was only happening because there was a frisson," Benton says. "I wanted to be able to prove we could still do work together and be creatively as strong without that."
Prove it they did, making such acclaimed spots as Levi’s "Creek," a sexy, black-and-white period piece via Bartle Bogle Hegarty, London, which scored a Gold Lion at the ’94 Cannes International Advertising Festival, and "Reflections" for Smirnoff through Lowe Howard-Spink, London, which scored a Silver Lion in ’95.
Ultimately, however, their differences prevailed. "Vaughan has always been a much more shoot-from-the-hip, go for the vibe, have-the-moment type of director—he’s quite rock ‘n’ roll in that aspect," observes Benton of Arnell (who is now a partner in London shop Pagan Productions). "I never really was. I was always much more about the acting and the emotional connection, and more introspective about how I viewed things. Our needs and what we wanted from work became poles apart.
"In the end analysis, I was actually the one who broke the partnership," she says. "I needed my freedom. I think, in fact, he needed his as well. He just didn’t realize it at the time."
Benton shifted to Concrete, London, where she directed spots like "Starfish" and "Shoes" for Barclaycard via BMP DDB, London, and Sony’s "Penguins" through Saatchi & Saatchi, London.
She signed with bicoastal/international Partizan in ’00, and shifted to Believe Media at the beginning of this year. "Partizan has a very particular position in the marketplace," she explains. "I didn’t really fit the brief there, and I think that they just didn’t know what to do with me."
Believe clearly knows what to do with Benton. In addition to the Quest spots, the director has been busy with stateside campaigns for Hanes, via The Martin Agency, Richmond, Va., and Target, through Peterson Milla Hooks, Minneapolis, not to mention several projects in the works in the U.K. "[Believe executive producers Luke Thornton and Liz Silver] are very optimistic people, and I’ve never been made to feel anything other than utterly positive in their company," Benton praises. "Whereas in the past, it’s been, ‘Can’t you be a bit more like this person?’ Or, ‘Can’t you do work like that work?’ Luke and Liz have let me be me. That’s a really very uplifting thing."
