As a featured speaker at the Museum of Television & Radio in New York last month, director Kinka Usher of Santa Monica-headquartered House of Usher Films touched upon several subjects, including director Joe Pytka of Venice, Calif.-based PYTKA, the problem with storyboards and the pitfalls of moviemaking.
David Bushman, the museum’s curator of television and advertising, moderated the question-and-answer session titled, "Directing Commercials: The Rise of the House of (Kinka) Usher," as part of The One Club for Art & Copy’s weeklong festivities.
Usher has been directing spots since ’92, and opened House of Usher Films in ’96. In ’99, the Directors Guild of America honored him for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Commercials.
Usher has a hands-on approach to filmmaking that reflects his background as a cameraman. He said, "For my first four years that I directed, I was my own cameraman, though I have given that up to some degree. Now I use cameramen to light the set, [but] I choose the lenses. I do a lot of the operating myself. But the more I got away from the camera, the better I got at directing the actors."
When he started out in the industry, Usher assisted director Joe Pytka for a year. Usher recalled, "I saw the way he was able to shoot, direct and run his whole operation, and I thought it was pretty inspirational to watch. He shot all his own stuff. I hadn’t seen that before, where the director and the cameraman were the same person. So I thought to myself, ‘That’s the way to go.’"
Usher praised Pytka’s expertise: "One of the great things about working with Joe Pytka is his style is really based in very solid storytelling and performance. There’s an emotional element to his work, which I was very interested in." According to Usher, "Story will always be king and that is one of the things that I learned early on-to pursue the storytelling aspect of filmmaking and to be very diligent and focused on it."
Last year, Usher made his feature film debut with Mystery Men, a comedy about bumbling "superheroes" starring Ben Stiller, Janeane Garofalo, William H. Macy and Geoffrey Rush. The filmmaking process was a disappointment, Usher admitted. "When I read the script, I thought it wasn’t very good, but that it was a good idea. I met with the producers and told them everything I didn’t like about it." At which point, Usher recalled, "The producers said, ‘Great! We want to hire you!’" The film’s producers promised to make the changes in the script, but as preproduction wore on, Usher grew increasingly nervous. "Finally, about a month before shooting, I went to them and said, ‘Look, we’ve got to stop spending and get the script right.’ "
But then, Usher continued, "Larry Gordon, (Lawrence Gordon, producer of Die Hard, Die Hard 2 and Field of Dreams) said, ‘Boy, we’re going to make this movie with or without you,’" which effectively halted any further alterations. So Usher resigned himself to making a movie with a script he had serious reservations about. He added that he and some of the movie’s actors, including Stiller, Garofalo and Hank Azaria "were writing scenes in the morning and shooting them in the afternoon-you don’t ever want to be doing that!" Usher said ruefully. "It’s insane that the studio will spend $70 million with that kind of disorganization going on."
After Mystery Men wrapped, "I came back to advertising with so much vigor," Usher laughed, "because I realized that advertising was an organized process-you have a script, a budget, a shooting schedule and a post schedule. If I ever made another movie, it would be a very small movie, and I would work [on the script] with people I know in advertising." He added, "I find the movie business to be almost as bad as the record business. Advertising is a very clean [process]; we don’t know how lucky we are. It’s far more interesting to be in this world as far as focusing on an idea, producing it and getting it right."
While devoted to directing commercials, Usher deviates from the advertising industry norm in that he attempts to reverse the bidding and storyboard processes in some instances. "When you do a really complicated story with complicated special effects," Usher commented, "I try to do it [my own shooting storyboard] before the bidding process-which is not industry practice but is extremely important. It would save producers tremendous headaches in trying to do a budget." He explained, "If you do the board first, then budget the board, you have a much smoother process because you’re actually budgeting the shots you’re going to do."
However, Usher noted that "I try to do storyboards only when I’m doing effects work." Admitting that he’s "not a good sketcher," Usher, for other jobs, often instead devises "descriptive shot lists, with a header describing the camera, the lenses, where the camera is moving. Underneath [each header], everything that is going to happen in the shot is described."
Usher offered advice to aspiring directors, urging them to collaborate with ad agencies. He himself took advantage of agencies’ "dead boards," or unused scripts, when making his initial reel. Usher pointed out: "A big mistake for a lot of first-time directors is that they’ll write a script and produce their own Levi’s ad. The problem with that is that they’re missing a critical element-the agency." When making his own reel, he recollected, "I called up a couple of agencies that I liked, where I knew a few guys, and I offered to produce their dead boards. The agency said ‘Great!" So they came to the shoot and supervised me. I actually had the whole thing-their script, collaboration, crew (colleagues who had volunteered to work on the reel with him). They [the spots] looked really expensive. So I only had to do two commercials before I got my first job."
While he is often iconoclastic in terms of storyboards and budgeting, Usher’s approach to filmmaking tends towards the traditional. When it comes to the digital revolution, he claimed, "Format and delivery systems don’t really matter." However, Usher is not ready to switch to digital cameras: "I love film; I’m a romantic. I love that it’s something you can touch and scratch and screw it up. The look of film is so inherently organic, and I don’t think the new chip cameras have that warmth yet."
