Director Michael Haussman’s stylish visual touch has been applied to commercials (Lincoln, adidas, and Bacardi), music videos (Madonna, Chris Isaak, Eric Clapton and B.B. King), and his feature, Rhinoceros Hunting in Budapest. Recently, the director completed a feature-length bullfighting documentary, The Last Serious Thing, and directed a major Vodafone campaign comprising the spots "Stepping Out," "Flirting" and "Lost In Thought"—via his European roost, Serious Pictures, London, through WCRS, London. In March, Haussman is set to direct Take Down, a feature starring Johnny Depp, which Jerry Bruckheimer is producing through Touchstone/Disney.
On top of all that, Haussman and Stavros Merjos, president of bicoastal HSI Productions, launched bicoastal Person Films in June. Why did Haussman decide to launch Person? When the formerly London-based director began working on Takedown, he found himself spending a great deal of time in Los Angeles, and liked the city. "I really enjoyed working in Los Angeles," notes Haussman. "That made me decide to get something more permanent in America."
Prior to opening Person, Haussman directed U.S. spot projects via Serious Pictures, which is represented stateside by Creative Management Partners (CMP), bicoastal and Chicago. He says the arrangement worked out well when he was based in London, but that once he started spending most of his time stateside, he realized he needed a permanent U.S. base. (Haussman continues to direct European ads through Serious, and the company’s other directors continue to garner stateside projects via CMP.)
"I was working in Europe for so long," says Haussman, who is originally from the states. "I think there were a lot of things I needed to get out of my system before I came back to the United States to work. That included doing an independent film and a documentary."
Haussman said he chose to set up Person within HSI because "if you’re a guy like me, who isn’t in America all the time, you want to be with someone who has proven strength [in the market]." The fact that Merjos took a personal interest in his career was key: "that meant a lot," he says.
While Merjos is partnered with Haussman in Person, the company is not a satellite of HSI. Haussman envisions his new venture as being involved in arenas other than commercial production. The company, which recently signed actor/director Dennis Hopper, will be an entity that does commercials, art films, music videos and features. "There are no rules or laws," relates Haussman. "So many times, someone opens a company and it becomes just a money-making venture. At Person, I’m not interested in that."
Some of Haussman’s U.S. work includes ads for Acura, Lincoln and Levi’s. He helmed Acura’s "Voicemail," out of Serious Pictures via Rubin Postaer and Associates, Santa Monica. The ad displays a melancholy sense of drama that gradually shifts into low-key humor. "Voicemail" cuts between images of a man driving an Acura on a seaside road and shots of a woman listening to a message he’s left on her answering machine. At first it appears that the man has dumped the woman, and has left a goodbye message, but it turns out that the woman is his therapist, who’s services he no longer requires now that he has a new Acura. The spot closes with a shot of the car and a voiceover: "The extremely therapeutic Acura TL Type S."
"That was the best script of all of them," says Haussman referring to "Voicemail," which was part of a larger campaign for Acura. "For that one I said, ‘Let’s make everyone think it’s going to be a European love story in the beginning—sad, lonely, cold.’ At first you feel there’s been a break up. The idea was to make this shift, and at the very end, to realize that it’s a psychiatrist."
Another of his U.S. spots, Levi’s "Fix It," out of TBWA/Chiat/Day, San Francisco, also displays the director’s European sensibility. The humorous spot features a good-looking handyman (sporting Levi’s jeans) who is very popular with an apartment building’s female residents. We realize just how popular the guy is when we see various women wrecking their apartments in order to get the handsome fellow to pay a visit. As we hear the guy’s pager repeatedly going off, images of destruction and repair unfold. Eventually, the handsome super is able to go home, and his girlfriend asks him: "Que pasa?" After he answers, "Man, this place is falling apart," there’s more deliberate damage and yet another beep on his pager.
Haussman compares the spot to Marc Cano and Jean Pierre Jeunet’s Delicatessen, a surreal comedy set in an apartment building, and says, "[‘Fix It’] was really about the choreography of these people breaking stuff. The breaking noises almost become musical in a sense."
Haussman’s film career began auspiciously in the mid-’80s while he was a student at the University of Colorado. His student documentary, Shadow Sign, was nominated for an Academy Award in 1986. Haussman went on to make experimental films before directing commercials and music videos.
He got his start in spots in ’87 by directing test commercials for J. Walter Thompson, New York. Five months later Haussman had a reel, and signed with bicoastal The Artists Company, which at the time had a London office. He opened Serious Pictures in ’97 with Donnie Masters and George Klein.
Is there a difference between directing commercials for the U.S. and U.K. markets? "Today, not a lot of difference; five years ago—massive," says Haussman. I originally went to Europe mostly because a director was treated as a director. They let directors they trust go crazy, whereas in America they didn’t.
"Then suddenly I saw it reverse around completely," he continues. "During the dot-com explosion all these crazy creative ideas were coming out of America, and England was turning very American. Now I find it’s all kind of universal."n
