Commercial production company Original has added David Wild and James Moll to its directorial roster. Wild brings more than 20 years of experience in commercials and documentaries, the former including recent work for AT&T, Pert, Toyota and Brut. Moll is an Academy Award-winning and two-time Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker who is entering the commercial field for the first time.
“Bruce and I have admired David’s work for a long time. He has a unique sensibility and a wonderful ability to tell stories and create memorable characters,” says Original partner/ executive producer Joe Piccirillo. “James’ accomplishments as a documentary filmmaker speak for themselves. His style and visual approach we believe will translate well to commercials. We are thrilled to welcome them to Original.”
Previously represented by Dallas-based Directorz, Wild is highly-regarded as a visual storyteller. Although stylistically wide-ranging, his work often draws on his experience as a documentarian and his gift for capturing the idiosyncrasies of his subjects. His recent work includes Brut’s wry “Essence of Man” campaign in which a guy impregnates his unsuspecting spouse simply by slapping on some after shave.
In a 2012 campaign for AT&T, Wild’s inventive camerawork and restless curiosity resulted in fascinating portraits of obscure business operations, including a Texas heavy-equipment operator. “We visited a number of firms selected by the client. We conducted interviews and spent a lot of time with the people in order to understand what they do,” Wild recalls. “We then went back to the agency and began coming up with scenarios. We didn’t want to impose scripts onto these operations, but rather find the scripts that were already there.”
Wild began his career as an editor and broke into directing when he was contracted by MTV to produce a series of ten second films. The ultra-short format became a signature style for Wild who has since directed more than 100 of the micro-features. Wild segued into commercials and operated Wild Scientific as a satellite of GLG for 16 years. He went on to direct classic campaigns for Saturn, Ford, White Castle, Washington State Lottery and others that brought him two Cannes Silver Lions, as well as Clio and London International Film Festival awards, and a Director-of-the-Year nomination from the DGA.
Moll is the director of more than a dozen documentaries including Foo Fighters: Back and Forth, which brought him a Grammy Award in 2012. He won an Academy Award in 1999 for Best Documentary Feature for The Last Days, executive produced by Steven Spielberg, about the extermination of Hungarian Jews during World War II. He is also the recipient of two Emmy Awards for Inheritance and Survivors of the Holocaust. Moll was the founding executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education and inaugurated its program of videotaping testimonies of Holocaust survivors.
Moll has had a long interest in advertising. “I have always been in awe of the creativity in advertising,” he said. “I love the challenge of telling a captivating story in a matter of seconds.” Moll adds that he expects to apply his experience in “telling real stories with real people” to advertising work, but does not want to limit himself to “documentary style advertising.” “A lot of my storytelling is very visual,even in non-fiction” he says, “and I can’t wait to apply that organic visual style to commercials.”
About Original
Original is led by executive producers Bruce Mellon, Joe Piccirillo and Marc Lasko The company’s post produc
