Daniel Levi

How does a geeky, dinosaur-obsessed kid from Jo'burg make a supercool spot, miss out on discovering his true voice and then find the answers that he seeks in humour? Jordan Mcgarry goes digging for directorial gold.

Daniel Levi has been around long enough to be familiar to anyone with even a faint interest in hot directorial talent. The 32-year-old hit the ground running back in 2002 when his I Am Beat spot for South Africa's Metro FM - only the fifth thing he had ever directed - caught the attention of, well, just about everyone. With it, the young South African director landed a place in shots' New Directors section (issue 70), trousered the IAPI Best New Director award and signed to international production powerhouses Independent in London and Smuggler in the US.

But now, with a good three or so years' hindsight, Levi says that the attention he enjoyed so early in his directing career was perhaps a little premature for comfort. These days, he says, he's feeling much more comfortable in his directorial skin.

"When I did Metro FM there were so many things I didn't understand about film and about myself and what I wanted to do," he says pensively. "The funny thing is that ad was such a success when people saw it - but that success denied me a period as a filmmaker when I could explore and play with things and discover my voice. And, to be honest, I only feel like I'm beginning to discover my voice now."
"Something I've decided in the last year is that a sense of humour is incredibly important in film, especially commercials. It's something I've explored a lot in my art and my drawing. So it's something I've really started to get in touch with." After the slick, perfectly posted radio-station spot, Levi continued - apparently effortlessly - with a spooky music video for LFO's Freak and an assortment of highly accomplished, technologically tricky commercials for high-profile clients including Xbox, Nike and Volkswagen. All the while the industry's eyes were keenly watching every move the fledgling director made.

"I think it is very important for a filmmaker to explore his or her voice, and sort of create who they are," he continues. "During that time I was obviously looking at a lot of other filmmakers and exploring things I had seen in order to understand the craft of it. Somehow people liked some of the things I did, and so they got seen. But a lot of filmmakers go through that before people are watching them; so by the time they get that attention their personality has started coming through. With other directors everyone can see how they've progressed. But what I feel now is I'm only starting to feel who I am, and that I'm at ease with what I want to do."

This directorial coming of age has been marked with a music video that has shaken up everyone's opinion of who Levi is and what he can do. Brit hip-hop rascal Plan B and his record label, Warner Brothers UK, commissioned Levi to make a video for the artist's track No Good (shots 92). The film was, as Levi's work has always been, slickly realised and impressively polished, but in a Levi first, it was stop-motion, created entirely with a stills camera and based on an old UK children's claymation series Trap Door.

"It's funny, a lot of the people who know me say this is my most personal film yet," Levi says. "My friend Damien, a French guy, said 'You know I can really see you in this film, you and all your toys."

The video was a huge hit on the internet, where it clocked up highly impressive viewing figures. "It just went mad," says a still slightly shocked Levi. "We had like 250,000 hits or something in three weeks, and it was double what the rest of the site had ever had put together."

Perhaps one of the reasons for the video's enormous popularity was that it also featured some seriously funny elements - not something for which Levi had ever really been known before.

"The one thing I think I had denied myself during the whole process was kind of an understanding of my own sense of humour. Something I've decided in the last year is that a sense of humour is incredibly important in film, especially commercials. Also, just for myself, my sense of humour is important to me. It's something I've explored a lot in my art and my drawing. So it's something I've really started to get in touch with."
"You really choose your own projects. You can follow a path of doing things that you're interested in but it takes a lot of hard work and is quite difficult. It's quite easy to fall into the habit of doing things just to make money, but it's kind of soul destroying to do things you don't love."
His earlier work was also undeniably posty, a reputation he's keen to shake off. "I did get pigeonholed very quickly as that post guy, but that's definitely not what I am. I like post, but I think filmmaking is infinitely wide. I'm interested in a lot of things in filmmaking, and post is just one aspect of it. I appreciate the work in Metro in retrospect, but it belongs to a different person from me. It's a very different aesthetic and tone from what I'm interested in now - but it's almost four years ago so it would be tragic if I hadn't changed."
Levi was born and raised in Johannesburg, where he enjoyed a happy childhood. "I suppose, in a way, I wasn't that dissimilar to how I am now. I was quite obsessive about toys, model making and collecting plastic animals. Very toy obsessed, rocket obsessed, dinosaur obsessed… your average geek," he laughs.

"We lived quite an insular life. A very middle-class Jewish family leading a very normal, suburban life away from all the horrors of what was going on in South Africa. My parents were kind of left wing and maybe being Jewish they were quite forward thinking and anti-apartheid, but by the time I was born gone were the days of them being involved with politics."

Young Levi was an avid comic-book fan and then, as now, drawing was one of his favourite pastimes. Of all his collections, comics were his biggest. Action comics and superheroes were shunned for the work of underground artists like Robert Krump and Harvey Pekar and mid-20th century American cartoons. He cites Art Spiegelman's seminal Maus as a favourite, as well as Walt Kelly's Pogo Possum.

After studying fine art he became a painter for a couple of years and then a designer, working with print design and typography. That led into animation, and then TV graphics and title sequences. But Levi quickly realised his future was filmic. He signed first with Terraplane in South Africa and then Gateway Films.

He felt the pull to Europe first while still working as a designer, when he thought that more sophisticated projects might be up for grabs over in the UK. "Although another thing I've learned is that the sophistication of projects is really up to you. You really choose your own projects," he says. "You can follow a path of doing things that you're interested in but it takes a lot of hard work and is quite difficult. It's quite easy to fall into the habit of doing things just to make money, but it's kind of soul destroying to do things you don't love."

Late last year Levi announced a new deal with Anonymous Content, who now rep him for commercials in the States, and 2006 looks like it's going to be a busy year for the director. Not only is he dealing with an influx of tracks after the success of his Plan B video (he's currently working on a new video for The Concretes which has got him all excited about miniatures and models) and having a new US production company, but he also has a feature script on the go with a friend, Fallon London's copywriter Laurence Stephtal. He has no intentions of turning his back on commercials and videos ("It's incredible discipline, making commercials, in terms of managing 30 seconds - it really forces you as a filmmaker to be very disciplined about storytelling"), but together they are writing a feature synopsis. The pair met through working in commercials in London, but, bizarrely, it turns out that South African Stephtal's mother taught Levi English at high school.

"I am so incredibly interested in features, I can't wait. It's extremely nerve-racking but really exciting," he says. "We are actually just finishing the synopsis at this point but it's a very detailed synopsis so it will really help us generate the script." He's not sure when it'll be finished he says but it may be some time. "It'll be quite a warm, human tragicomedy. We want to make Chevy Chase famous again," he laughs. "We've written
the lead role for him."