I'm a big, fat Jewish man," says Noam Murro, "and I go through life like it's a very narrow tube that has sandpaper on it."
Ouch. Tactile imagery aside, however, a larger point is being made: The effusive director, despite many of his spots having voyeuristic visuals, participates in the world around him. "I don't sit on the periphery," he notes. "If I put the camera adjacent to where the action's happening, very little has to happen to make a point."
Murro has been making exceptionally resonant points since he broke into directing in 1994. He's helmed commercials for a long list of top-tier clients, including FOX Baseball, Lexus and Evian. More recently, he helmed "Ants," an ad in the long-running Got Milk? campaign for the California Milk Fluid Processors Board, out of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco; "No Hands" and "Keep Out" for adidas via Leagas Delaney, San Francisco; and Toyota's "Shrinking Head" and "Victory Dance," out of Saatchi & Saatchi LA, Torrance, Calif.
This past year has been a big one. In November, Murro and executive producer Shawn Lacy Tessaro left Stiefel+Company, Santa Monica, to open Hollywood-based Biscuit filmworks—a move, Murro says, whose time had come. "I guess there is a point in every person's career where you have to make a decision whether you want to be part of a large mechanism, or create your own and have other people join it," he explains. "We're not reinventing the wheel. We're not going to be a 'new' voice. We're going to be another voice, and we hope a good one."
Production companies, he adds, can be a bit like sweatshops." The idea here is not to create a [place] where you don't know who's working and who the directors are—a place where you're just making money."
Mostly comedic, Murro's work is deliciously, and often bizarrely, understated—so much so that the humor tends to hit hardest as the spot fades to black. His skills are such that even his dot-com work conveys, quickly and efficiently, what a company does—no mean feat in that genre.
For FreeAgent.com's "Company Man," via Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners, New York, and produced through Stiefel+Company, Murro shot a nostalgic montage—using still photos and flickering footage—that looks back on the life of a suit named Bob, now retiring after a decades-long career at a large corporation. After watching him age, bald, and tire, the montage segment ends with a retirement cake, smoky with candles. Then Bob leaves the office with that depressing box of stuff under his arm—but the second he hits the outside, the spot does its turn: Bob has a heart attack and falls to the ground. The tag: "The company man. May he rest in peace. Freeagent. com." It takes a second for the "joke" to kick in—but it's worth the wait. Which is, of course, the point.
Murro says he's worked with some of the best creatives in the industry, and the result is that from pre-production on, the "level of conversation is intelligent and includes all aspects of art and filmmaking. I work on stuff that's quite good to begin with on the page." The trick, he adds, "is how you bring to life things that are [often] cerebral or elusive. It's the director's vision or the director's touch that can bring an agency's vision to life."
A loony, surreal spot promoting the Sacramento Kings—"Dog," via Publicis & Hal Riney, San Francisco—is a great example. A woman in a near-empty supermarket parking lot, dressed in Versace overdrive—leather pants, chain-link belt, wild, unbuttoned blouse—is sashaying through the lot when she happens upon a small dog yapping away in a closed-up station wagon. The camera is set back so that we're watching her watching the scene as she tries to figure out how to help free the doggie. Hearing a male voice offering aid, she turns to see a pack of out-of-shape men in the team's jerseys—"Sacramento Kings fans, section 110," to be exact—in bizarrely formal formation. They chant until a sufficiently high pitch smashes all the car windows, enabling the dog to jump happily into the woman's arms. The tag: "Sacramento Kings. The most powerful fans on earth." It doesn't only take a minute to get the joke; it takes a minute to get the spot. But when you do, it's hard to forget.
"That script was open to so many interpretations," Murro says. "Who is that woman? Her look wasn't on the page. That's when this becomes an incredibly satisfying process. How do we elevate a specific script into something that we've never quite seen before?"
Many factors, of course, are needed to pull this off. His umbrella theory, however, is quite simple: "Move the camera for a reason. Everything you do needs to have a consequence in front of the lens and not behind it."
Murro was born and raised in Jerusalem. He moved to New York in '86 after deciding that architecture, which was what he'd been studying, was a discipline that required undo patience. "I want to do stuff when I'm still young," he says. "I didn't want to move somebody's bathroom and wait until I was sixty to have my say."
A film lover, he decided to follow his heart, moving to New York to direct spots—first honing his skills on the agency end as an art director, and later as associate creative director, at now defunct Goldsmith-Jeffrey.
"I thought to start on a conceptual level, to understand what it's like sitting in front of an empty page and trying to come up with an idea and then having to sell it, would be a good way to get into directing," Murro explains. He began directing while at Goldsmith-Jeffrey, moving from there to bicoastal HKM Productions and then to Stiefel+Company, before launching Biscuit filmworks.
Murro recently wrapped three spots for Polaroid—"Locker," "Girl Ready" and "Paper Airplane"—via Leo Burnett USA, Chicago. As for features, Murro says they're in the cards. Meanwhile, he's doing his best to create spots that "get you. If you look at a lot of my work, you probably don't know where it's going and you kind of scratch the back of your head—but you can't not look at it," he says. "You have to wait until the end, and that's where I'm going to get you. But that little tour is going to respect your intelligence. It's not going to use the same clichés. It's going to be fresh. And as long as I can continue to do that, I'm going to do it."
