The main thing I look for when doing a spot is that somehow you can relate to the characters," states Craig Gillespie, who directs through bicoastal Morton Jankel Zander (MJZ). "You’re trying to get the audience to be in the situation. It’s not just a punch line or a gag [that makes a spot work]; underneath that you feel some of what the character is feeling. That makes it funnier."
Gillespie says that his comedy leans a little towards being dark. You can certainly sense that tone in a spot like H&R Block’s "Worried About Bill," which he directed while at his former roost, bicoastal Coppos Films; the ad was done via Young & Rubicam, Chicago. The commercial, which depicts a family man’s descent into madness in the course of doing his taxes, humorously recalls horror films.
Two spots that Gillespie directed for Citibank—"Delivery Room" and "College Tuition"—out of Fallon, Minneapolis, are also darkly humorous. In "Delivery Room," a woman in labor is aided by her husband, but instead of helping her through the Lamaze routine, he is attempting to cut costs in the delivery room—by suggesting that one of the nurses take her coffee break, and asking his wife if she wants ibuprofen rather than an epidural. After that remark, she threatens to kill him. All this is meant to illustrate that couples fight over money, and that perhaps Citibank and its many financial services can reduce the number of arguments.
In "College Tuition" a teenager sleeping in his bedroom is repeatedly disturbed by his father’s increasingly odd activities. At first, the dad just appears to be annoying, noisily hammering a nail, then barging into the boy’s room with a whirring vacuum cleaner. Things take a strange turn when the father dips his sleeping son’s hand into a container of water; later, things get even odder when the man releases a squirrel into the teenager’s bedroom. Cut to the next morning, where the kid’s parents are wishing their haggard son good luck, as he heads off to his college entrance exams. When the ad’s closing text appears on the screen, why these desperate folks want their son to do poorly on the test becomes clear: "eighty percent of parents worry about paying for college. Maybe Citipro can help."
"I wanted to give [the agency] a lot of options and explore things that were a little more offbeat," explains Gilliespie of "College Tuition." "We brainstormed about sixteen scenarios. I wanted the scenarios to be strange, as opposed to necessarily being funny. We tried to keep a certain reality to them."
The helmer, who wound up shooting several of those scenarios, points out that the agency creatives "had a lot of choices in the edit. There had to be a sort of build to the strangeness of what was going on. That dictated which scenarios ended up in [the spot]. It came down to pacing and how each scene played off the next."
The director says that finding the right actor to play the teenager’s father was tough—casting went right down to the wire. "The father character sets the whole tone of the spot," he states.
Gillespie praises the subtlety of the actor who played the father. "He gives you nothing [in terms of a set-up]," notes the director. "You have no idea where he’s going with it. That was the goal: to not figure out what he’s doing until the big payoff at the end."
Holiday Inn Express’ "KISS Reunion," another spot that Gillespie helmed for Fallon, opens on the closing seconds of a big arena rock show, apparently a reunion performance by the group KISS. After the finale the band exits the stage, as security guards hold adoring fans at bay. In the dressing room, the group soaks up the attention of a foxy groupie and a pumped-up promoter, who proclaims the band is ready for a world tour. But then the promoter slowly realizes that the four performers are only KISS impersonators. Stunned, he pulls a wig off one faker’s head and says in disbelief, "You guys aren’t KISS." Another impersonator responds, with a smile, "No, but we did stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night," implying that since the group is able to make such a smart choice in their lodging, then they shouldn’t have a problem imitating KISS. The whole band breaks out in laughter. At commercial’s end, a voiceover intones, "Stay smart. Stay at a Holiday Inn Express."
It’s clear that Gillespie wanted the spots to have a certain authenticity. "I engrossed myself in so much KISS history that my wife was literally embarrassed," he laughs. "I got all their documentaries and watched the way KISS interacts with the camera when they’re backstage. We got the KISS pyrotechnics guy. We had the people who do the KISS outfits do the [costumes for the ad].
"Once we picked the actors, I gave them DVDs of KISS concerts," continues Gillespie. "I made them do their homework. We actually shot handheld 16mm to keep it spontaneous [and] to keep [the backstage footage] in the gritty [rock documentary] style you see all the time."
Agency Side
Gillespie, who is originally from Australia, came to directing from the agency side, where he worked as an art director in the New York offices of DMB&B and BBDO. He served as associate creative director at other New York shops, including Deutsch and Ammirati & Puris/Lintas (now Lowe Lintas & Partners). He transitioned into directing, joining now defunct Fahrenheit Films in 1996. He then shifted to Coppos, finally going over to MJZ in the spring of ’00.
How has Gillespie’s agency background influenced his directorial work? "I have a lot of empathy for what the agency is going through," he states. "I know exactly how the structure works and where their comments are coming from, and whether they’re client driven or creative driven. I know which battles you can fight and which ones you shouldn’t fight."
Because of his background, the director says he also knows what his role is. "The spot’s not done when they bring [the boards] to you," notes Gillespie, who recently completed work on SBC’s "Neighbor," out of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco. "I never shoot what’s given to me. I always try to make it better, by [working] with [the agency]. As we’re shooting I always want them right next to me, instead of back in video village. That way if something hits us, we can just try it. There’s still the opportunity to keep making it better."
