The director's the same. The production company hasn't changed. The story looks familiar too, but the budget has shrunk tenfold and it ain't BA. It's Silverjet, the new business class airline that flies London Luton to Manhattan and Dubai.
Yep, those cheeky chappies at IS, part of M&C Saatchi, have tempted Hugh Hudson back to commercials to film a pastiche of his iconic 1989 BA ad, Face, made through Saatchi & Saatchi. The 60-second spot broke at the weekend during coverage of the Rugby World Cup quarter finals.
Hudson has shot the ad - his first in five years - through RSA Films, but this time on a budget of £300,000 not £2 million, and with a cast of four rather than 1000. It breaks, too, at a time when BBH's first big production number for BA, Life Upgraded, is hitting the nation's screens - BBH, of course, won the BA account from M&C Saatchi in September 2005.
So what's the story? Is it really as mischievous as it seems?
"It's the same ad. A copy. Or a close variation," Hudson tells shots.net. "It's tongue-in-cheek, it's David and Goliath, and that's what appealed to me. Plus self-parody is always interesting."
Michael Moszynski, CEO of IS, who also happened to be the BA account manager at Saatchis when the original Face was made, adds: "The creative solution was simply to use the judo approach of using your opponent's weight against them. As Hugh says, it is a classic David versus Goliath story."
Hudson was flown by Silverjet, naturally, to the US to film at the same location as Face, at a white salt lake in Utah. Unlike the BA version, which was shot over three weeks, this took just three days.
"The challenge was to make it near to the original but not quite," says Hudson. "The original had a cast of 1000 people, no CGI, and the challenge was also to make this work with only four people. I remembered the original really well, and we tried to repeat it frame by frame as near as we could."
The similarities don't end there. The soundtrack is the same (the Flower Duet from Delibes' Lakme), as is the name (this, too, is called Face) and it would appear there's nothing BA can do about it.
"It's the same music - BA don't own it. We just had to use another recording. There's nothing they can do. Plagiarism is the best form of flattery. I enjoyed doing it very much. They were quite sensible to come to me! It's just great to be back doing ads again," adds Hudson.
Click here to view the spot.
