London-born Matthew Badger was not always a commercial director. Now co-founder of Nocturnal Films, New York, with partner/executive producer Ian Hunter, Badger had his first career in an ’80s punk-rock band called Mission Impossible.
Badger intially left England to study in Cambridge, Mass., where friends acquainted him with the films of cutting-edge directors. "We were watching Jim Jarmusch and Spike Lee and the Coen Brothers," recalls Badger. "I took a night school film class and made a series of Super 8 films. It was so creatively rewarding for me—it was exactly the same experience as I had writing music. It brought focus and purpose to my life."
Badger quit music and took up film when he was 20 years old. "I made a series of films that were very short, with no sound. They were sort of surreal and often edgy, but the undertone was always human." After moving to New York, Badger completed his education at the New School for Social Research, New York, and started making short image films for fashion and cosmetic firms such as DKNY.
"When I got out of school, I met Ian [Hunter] and we formed a company together," recalls Badger. "We started in 1990 and worked our way up the ladder, from weddings to karaokes, to [electronic press kits]." The big break came when Badger met his future wife at Calvin Klein and was asked by that company to film an awards ceremony. "That spread me through the whole fashion world and I got a lot of experience working with the best people in the business. After we formed an alliance with [executive producer] Mindy Goldberg at bicoastal Epoch Films, Ian, Mindy, [Epoch director] Jeff Preiss and I created Nocturnal Commercials. The work I had been doing up to that point was image films for fashion houses. They lent themselves to the commercial world because their visuals were very high-end."
Image Conscious
Badger has been directing spots for three years. Clients appreciate how he can sell a brand of soap to Generation X without mundanely showing how it’s superior to Brand X. "There’s a certain sense of non-structure to the image films," he explains. "They’re very free-form. To create an air of spontaneity on the set is vital for my way of thinking." That thinking shines through in Oil of Olay’s "Wear Sunscreen" via Saatchi & Saatchi, New York. Badger wanted an outdoor portrait of enduring youth. "The agency’s vision was of ‘the last great summer of your youth.’ So it’s a community of friends. When we did the job, we camped out at this house on Long Island’s North Fork, and we had this big barbecue and were playing all these games. It was half-documentary and half-photo shoot and totally chaotic, but the main drive was the great atmosphere that we created on set."
Badger also recently directed two spots for Lever 2000 via J. Walter Thompson (JWT), New York. "Adam & Eve" was set in the pastoral woods of upstate New York. The spot features a nude couple cavorting in a summer rain shower as a narrator wryly comments on how—thanks to the "fig leaf" nonsense—people are forbidden to go about their lives wearing nothing else but a smile. "That was the biggest production of them all," Badger explains. "We had four to five rain towers there, and it was in the forest, so we had to run all the piping there. We had about a hundred people in that shoot."
"Adam & Eve" turned out to be a controversial production. "The religious right got upset about it," Badger says. "It was because of Adam and Eve. They said it was biblical and they really got offended by that. The phones started ringing at Lever, but I thought that was a good thing—at least it was being noticed. Lever and J. Walter Thompson were very pleased with it and hired me for another job."
The next job was "Tub." Set to a languid, tropical samba, the spot shows how a bathtub is a merry home to a cross-section of humanity. Kids, babies, parents, lovers—even some pets—soak, frolic, or snorkle amid whirling bubbles and confetti as the camera eavesdrops from every angle. Badger explains, "You can sing in the bathtub, get sexy in the bathtub, play in the bathtub—it’s a totally different place to shoot a portraiture shot of a person. When you put them all together, it creates a community of the world in one bathtub."
One of Badger’s favorite jobs was Kleenex’s "Sharing" and "Comfort," also out of JWT. The spots depict different families at home, all coping with children who have the sniffles but are still active. Badger’s challenge was to show rapid glimpses of the tissues being a part of the families’ routine, without having a cumbersome production crew blunting the precocious children.
Digitally speaking
Badger opted to shoot in both the digital video and 35mm formats. "One of the advantages of digital is that it’s extremely malleable. You can shoot without light and without crews, so you can get a lot more intimate without people being intimidated by the production," he explains. "We ended up shooting some video and shooting a lot of thirty-five millimeter, but doing it with no lights at all. We had nobody in the house except for the family, the DP, me and a couple of support people. We set up situations around the house and cast these great kids. They were totally uninhibited—we let them into each situation, and they just went nuts. We shot them nonstop for two days. It was a real pleasure, because there was so much spontaneity—so many things the kids did that I would never have thought of myself. I felt like the kids were so punk rock, so ingenious, that their energy came off as very genuine."c
