Federico Brugia has certain … obsessions. Obviously, there are the bewilderingly beautiful women who drift through his spots, each often wearing as little as a bra, panties and fur coat, and occasionally decked out in shimmery, sensuous steel. But when the Italian director gets behind the camera, he’s got other things on his mind: water and wind. He calls them "floating elements."
"Shooting water at 100 frames per second, you can see things that your eyes cannot see," says Brugia, who is repped in Italy by BRW & Partners, Milan, and by Nursery, Milan, for the rest of Europe. He recently signed with bicoastal/international Partizan for representation in the U.S.
Here’s what your eyes can see, thanks to Brugia: Thick pellets of rain pound slowly on sweaty, muddy Frenchmen in Diadora’s "Rugby," for No, an agency in Milan. Impossibly lightweight cars from the future glide on rails, ferrying the above-mentioned metal-clad beauties around a spotless cityscape in "Bar Code" for Visa out of Publicis, Madrid. And in "New York," via D’adda Lorenzini Vigorelli, Milan, a BMW coasts past Packards and DeSotos in postwar Manhattan, fascinating and frustrating men in fedoras and their dames—all in luscious black-and-white.
The BMW ad is among Brugia’s favorite recent work, but it had an unintended consequence: He was pigeonholed by agencies. "That’s maybe a thing that I hate in the European market," he explains. "You do a beautiful car commercial in black-and-white, and you receive a thousand storyboards of black-and-white commercials. You do something about a beauty product and they say, ‘Here is the man who has the right vision for the women.’ "
Which is partly why Brugia recently came to Partizan for U.S. representation. He now hopes to get more work in the U.S., where he says the "top commercials … are much better than the European ones.
"European directors sometimes have a more innovative and artistic approach," he adds. "One of the reasons why I chose [Partizan] is the European touch of their commercials."
Brugia was also attracted to Partizan by its president/partner Stephen Dickstein, who first discovered the director’s work late last year. Dickstein was obsessed with the Florida recount of the presidential election, and playing during just about every commercial break on CNN and MSNBC was Brugia’s "There Is No Better Way To Fly" for Lufthansa, via McCann-Erickson, Frankfurt.
"It was so brilliant that I just had to track down the director," recalls Dickstein. In early February, Brugia signed up with Partizan, which Dickstein says will represent him as "one of the star directors. We have a number of projects," says Dickstein, "but really we want to be selective in the type of work in order to shape his career, to set him up as an A player in this marketplace—not just a turnover director."
Brugia says he’s "open to everything that is strong and with beautiful concepts." But Brugia doesn’t want to jump too quickly into the American spot world. He isn’t shopping for Manhattan apartments, though he would consider a transatlantic move in the future; and he wants to take some time to see how stateside agencies and clients react to his reel.
"Of course I would like the States to be an ‘upgrade’ for my career, and not just another place to do what I’m already doing in Europe," he explains. "When I’m thinking about my style and career, I always prefer to talk about what I see in the future. At the moment, my style is evolving into a more narrative and storytelling area."
That evolution away from the montage of floating images is evident in perhaps the most unusual spot on Brugia’s reel. In "Anticipation" for Cable Galliego via Leo Burnett Co., Madrid, a narrator describes his precocious childhood over "documentary" footage of his youth in the ’60s: He produces Warholesque drawings in art class, DJs a high school party and starts scratching on the turntable, invents the airbag by stuffing a balloon into a car’s dashboard, and, during anti-NATO protests, carries a sign that says "Salvad las Ballenas"—Save the Whales. In fact, the only time our narrator has ever been taken by surprise is when he tunes into Rai, the Italian cable channel that has now moved into Spain.
Does this new stab at a narrative structure mean that feature films are in Brugia’s future? "Yeah, of course," he laughs. "A director isn’t a director if he doesn’t tell you ‘Yes, of course.’ But I also have to tell you that I prefer commercials for now."
