Director Daniel Kleinman is living large. Not only did he have an another award-winning year as a director, but Spectre, his London commercial company, recently merged with Stark Films, London, to form Large.
Kleinman’s work this year, which scored numerous accolades, underscores the variety of genres—comedy, dialogue, visual effects—that the director is able to do. Johnnie Walker’s "Fish," out of Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH), London, which scored a Gold Lion at this year’s Cannes International Advertising Festival, illustrates Kleinman’s prowess with visual effects. The spot features a school of humans acting like fish in the water; one "fish" eventually walks onto land, presumably in pursuit of Johnnie Walker.
Another effects-laden commercial, "Champagne," for Xbox out of BBH, also did well at the awards shows. The ad, which shows a baby shooting out of his mother’s womb and aging as he flies through the sky, eventually landing in his own grave, has scored numerous awards, including a Gold Lion at Cannes in 2002, an ’03 ANDY Award, and silver at this year’s British Design and Art Direction (D&AD) Awards.
Kleinman’s campaign for John Smith’s, featuring the spots "Monsters," "Ball Skills," "Babies," and "Diving," showcases the director’s comedy and dialogue prowess. The package, out of TBWA London, humorously illustrates the honesty of John Smith’s drinkers. In "Monsters," for example, two couples are out to dinner, when the babysitter calls to inform one couple that their daughter is afraid of wardrobe monsters. The father gets on the phone and tells his daughter that she shouldn’t be afraid of closet monsters—it’s the burglars outside the window she should fear. And in "Babies," the same dad tells his companions that his daughter wanted to know where infants come from. When his fellow diners ask what he said, he goes into a detailed explanation, using a sausage to illustrate. The campaign won a Gold Lion at Cannes, as well as silver at D&AD; additionally, Kleinman earned silver for directing at D&AD for "Babies."
Kleinman, who began his career as an artist and illustrator, is comfortable in just about any genre, so long as it’s the right concept for the spot. "I’ve been directing for about twenty years, and I finally worked out how to do it—a lot of preparation, and trying to make a project as interesting as I possibly can," he relates. "For me, I don’t particularly care what genre something is. What I’m interested in is whether I like the idea or not. Then the methodology that you need in order to make the idea the best it can possibly be is the one you need to use. And because most good ideas are different, that means the methodology will be different, which means I need to have a lot of different types of abilities in different areas. And the added bonus for me is that it makes it constantly interesting because I’m not repeating the same stuff."
While Kleinman certainly appreciates getting awards, he’s not fixated on that aspect of his job. "I have a healthy attitude in that I don’t care about it when I don’t win, and I do care about it when I do win," he says. "When you work hard, it’s nice to get a pat on the back every now and again, but I certainly don’t do something in order to win an award. If somebody happens to say, ‘We really like this so much, we’re going to give you an award for it,’ I think, ‘That’s quite nice. Thank you very much.’ It’s certainly not an end to itself, and I think I’d be more than happy carrying on what I do without winning any awards."
Larging It
Large represents Kleinman, Jeff Stark, Anthony Easton, John Greenhalgh, John Lloyd, Colin Gregg, Simon Green, Enda McCallion, Dominic Savage, Sandra Goldbacher, Simon Cracknell and the duo of Tash and Tanya. For Kleinman, who formed Spectre in ’97, the merger made sense on a creative level. "The main reason for doing it is that I actually like being in a production company where I know the directors, and we chat to each other," he explains. "It’s a creative sounding board, and it’s really great if you’ve got quite a few people with different strengths, different talents. … We’re two companies, we’re about the same size, we do slightly different types of work and have different strengths, and I think that the pool of directors is very complementary."
The company’s name stands for a couple of different things. It refers to the term "director at large," and is also a play on the British expression "larging it," which basically means to do it up. And while Large currently doesn’t have U.S. representation, Kleinman doesn’t rule out directing stateside. He was formerly represented in the U.S. by now defunct Ritts/Hayden, through which he directed Chrysler’s "Golden Gate Bridge" and Audi’s "Wakeboarding." "I like doing American work," he notes. "It’s really dependent on the quality of the scripts I get. If a shoot takes me abroad for a long time, it will be because I really love the script."
Currently, Kleinman is finishing up a Lynx spot for BBH, and will likely embark on a Boddingtons project next, also out of BBH. The director has no plans to abandon spot work anytime soon. "I do get offered quite a few films," he says, "and my way of choosing a feature film would be exactly the same way I choose a script for a commercial—[do] I like the idea or not? For a director, [doing a film] is an awful lot of time to spend on one project, so you’d have to really, really love the idea. At the moment, I haven’t really found the project I would give up commercials for because I enjoy them. I’ve always thought I’d rather make a great commercial than a bad film."
