In describing the work of director/cameraman Eric Saarinen, the phrase that most often crops up is "visually striking." Saarinen, a founding partner of Plum Productions, Santa Monica, has captured images of people "driving" lions, elephants, and giraffes through a busy street, and of an automobile creating massive sand dunes in a desert landscape. The wildlife traffic jam of "Animals," an international :60 for Fiat via Leo Burnett, Milan, won a first place Mobius Award for direction and production in ’99, while the desert-set "Drifts" for Chevy Tahoe out of Campbell-Ewald Advertising, Warren, Mich., took several ’98 Mobius and New York Festival awards for production, cinematography, and camera work.
"I’m fascinated with the image," says Saarinen, who has directed several more Chevy ads, including "Lighthouse" and "Lifeboat" for Chevy Blazer, again via Campbell-Ewald. "If you’re at a certain place and a certain time and you take a picture, there is some kind of permanence about that; you’re memorializing the moment in a way no one else can do it. I’m half-blind, which they didn’t find out until I was eight years old. Since my eyes were screwed up, I studied a lot of tricks of depth to compensate for that. I think it gives me an unusual vision."
Saarinen’s visual dexterity comes through in "Lighthouse." The spot opens on a foggy shoreline and a lighthouse. A foghorn sounds, and light sweeps across the water. As the camera moves in on the lighthouse, the punchline becomes apparent: Rather than a bulb, the lighthouse’s warning light is actually the headlights of a Chevy Blazer. The spot unfolds without dialogue, except for the voiceover at the end: "Chevy. A little security in an insecure world."
Artistic Genes
Saarinen, 57, inherited his artistic sensibilities from his mother, the sculptress Lily Saarinen, and his father, Eero Saarinen, an architect. His father’s prominence in his field drove the younger Saarinen into the film world. "My dad was a famous architect," says Saarinen, "so I felt that I had to do something close to [the arts]. But I didn’t want to directly compete with him. Still, in a way, I was always competing with my dad. I wanted to do something that he didn’t do. It was exacerbated because everyone was sort of bowing down to him. He was a great man."
That sense of competition pushed Saarinen to create as much as possible-"overachieving," he says-in a variety of areas. As an undergraduate at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vt., Saarinen studied painting and graphic design. He later earned a master’s degree of fine arts from UCLA’s film production program.
Saarinen’s first professional jobs were for low-budget producer Roger Corman, who was mentor to both George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola. Among Saarinen’s more colorful credits were: second-unit camera work on Corman’s Death Race 2000, and serving as cinematographer for The Hills Have Eyes, one of horror-meister Wes Craven’s earliest films. (Craven is currently repped for commercials through bicoastal The Industry.)
Saarinen has since shot over a dozen feature films, including Albert Brooks’ Lost In America, Real Life and Modern Romance. He worked on documentaries such as the Academy Award-nominated short Exploratorium, and a film about artists Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenburg and Andy Warhol for the Los Angeles County Museum. Saarinen also did camera work on the Rolling Stones’ concert film Gimme Shelter, the TV series The Underwater World of Jacques Cousteau, and several National Geographic specials.
In ’81, Saarinen circumnavigated the globe two and a half times in 13 months to shoot Symbiosis, a 16-minute, 65mm film for Walt Disney World’s Epcot Center, Orlando, Fla.
Through those assignments, Saarinen learned to search for the perfect visual. "I do my own camera work," he says. "Since I do a fair amount of scenics, I need someone on camera who is stubborn enough-or stupid enough-to wait for when the lights are good."
Saarinen co-founded Plum Productions in ’83 with president/executive producer Chuck Sloan. Saarinen was the company’s sole director for many years. Plum eventually expanded its spot directorial roster which now also includes Bob Rice, Nick Piper, cinematographer and feature director Jan de Bont (Speed, Twister) and documentarian Nick Broomfield (Kurt & Courtney; Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam).
Over the past six years, Saarinen has directed scores of commercials, including Jeep’s "Snow Covered" out of Bozell Worldwide (now FCB Worldwide Detroit), Southfield, Mich., which won the Grand Prix at the Cannes International Advertising Festival in ’94. The spot features an unseen Jeep-created in CG by Digital Domain, Venice, Calif.-burrowing under layers of snow, and stopping and turning at a stop sign that pokes above the snow’s surface. "Since that spot, I’ve become well-versed. You learn all the tricks."
But he doesn’t believe a director should rely on those tricks to the exclusion of ideas. "The story is what attracts me," Saarinen explains. "You always face the challenge of trying to cut through the clutter to get something interesting that hasn’t been seen before."
Though he feels that agencies have typecast him as an automobile director-"I’ve been placed in the car box"-he also believes he has helped change the look of those commercials: "[They] used to show the sheet metal and tell you about air bags and mileage. That’s no longer valid. People don’t care. What they care about is the image."
One of Saarinen’s most challenging spots was "Animals," the Fiat commercial which showed a harried commuter-astride a tiger-trying to beat a traffic light by passing a man riding a lion. Amid the chaos, a man cruises by in his Fiat Punto. "A city full of people riding animals," sighs Saarinen. "That was a huge effects job, hugely complicated."
But he was not daunted by it and never says never to a new demand. "In terms of work, you have to be flexible. I’ve been in several situations where it’s all been worked out beforehand and then everything changes and you have ten seconds to say the same thing in a different way. I think I know how to improvise, especially after doing all those Roger Corman movies. As long as the story drives how you do it, there’s always a way."c
