Craig Gillespie used his new-wave sense of humor to build a reputation as a wunderkind of art-directed comedy spots. Lately, however, Gillespie has become a very different kind of commercial director.
"I stepped back one day and just stood there for a couple of months, looking at what I’d been doing," says the Australian émigré, who directs spots out of bicoastal Coppos Films. "I thought I’d been moving along just fine. But I came to realize that I was not going in the direction I wanted to go. So I changed my whole approach."
His approach, perhaps—but not his objective, which still aims to sell a product by getting a laugh. The director’s take on funny business has undergone a drastic shift, as has the way he pitches it to the audience.
Gillespie’s early commercials were lavishly produced trips into the realm of the fantastic. In them, loyal dogs fixed sandwiches for their couch-potato masters; bespectacled female lawyers dressed in suits and heels, wowed juries with Olympic-caliber acrobatics; and bedraggled cowboys used their classic Cadillacs to tow gigantic pop-up toasters.
His recent spots, however, have tended toward a more conventional sort of visual madness. "I’m trying to ground my work in the outrageousness of reality," says Gillespie. "I think the best comedy is that which gets closest to basic truths—you know, kind of overstating the obvious."
His current 11-spot campaign for H&R Block via Young & Rubicam, Chicago, features a man who mistakenly believes he can figure out his own income taxes. In "Dad, Can I Have Some Money?", a man’s teenager hits him up for cash. He is so distracted by his tax returns that he ends up giving her his credit card and permission to stay out all night. In "Worried About Bill," a :60 with the campaign’s most extensive storyline, a chipper family man’s mood descends from enthusiasm to confusion, and finally into raging paranoia. By the end of his struggle to make sense of his 1099, he is wild-eyed and unshaven, confiding in his cat and peering through his front window at unseen predators. When he tosses a mound of paperwork onto the backyard barbecue, his terrified wife phones for professional help.
"The Shining was definitely running through my mind when we were shooting," says the director. "But I can certainly relate personally to some of these things, too. Without admitting they are autobiographical—I’ve never done my own taxes, even when I was dead poor—I will say that I try to bring some of my personal experiences to the spots, maybe a couple of shades removed."
New Angle
Along with the shift in Gillespie’s conceptual approach have come procedural and technical changes in the way he creates commercials. In the past, he came up with detailed storyboards—even before winning a job. Now, he doesn’t compile boards until late in the process.
"I do casting and look at locations first," he explains. "Rather than lots of cameras and angles, I’m doing lockoffs and relying more on actors and their dialogue and reactions to situations to tell the story. I still begin by writing a specific treatment. But in terms of execution, I try to keep things flexible for as long as possible so that I remain free to do what’s best for the idea."
At first, Gillespie says, he surprised himself and his colleagues by tinkering with the formula that made him successful. But he became confident that it was the right move. "This is my own voice," he says. "It takes a while to find that. I’ve been making commercials for four years, not only learning from others, but also learning not to be completely influenced by others. You go through all these stages so you can find your own path."
Gillespie says this dawned on
