Bryan Buckley

New York-based director Bryan Buckley is renowned for making humorous, dark-edged commercials, including award-winning spots for American Express, E*trade, ESPN SportsCenter & Orange.

I chose these assassination pictures because as a director I’m always making chimps into idiots [CareerBuilder, E*Trade] and I imagined what would happen if they extracted their revenge for being commercially exploited. I grew up during the whole anti-Vietnam movement and one of the more harrowing images that influenced me was the 1968 photo of a Viet Cong prisoner being executed. It’s obviously had an influence on this chimp’s pay-back.

When I was growing up, it was a pretty normal life in the suburbs: Dad was in the ad business and Mum was a housewife. But then my parents slowly got involved in anti-Vietnam demos, and my father became more and more left-wing. He also started on the weed and booze.

Eventually my dad decided we were going to leave society and live off the land. So he quit his job, picked up the family and started building a house in New Hampshire. He was also teaching, and some of his students helped with the construction, but the money ran out shortly after it was finished and we were forced to sell the house. The whole ‘end of the dream’ caused Dad to spiral into being a fully fledged alcoholic.We went from mid-America respectability to living in a mobile home with literally no money. My mom couldn’t stand to watch Dad drinking and she took over. She went to Harvard night school, got a job as a secretary, and worked her way up to running the direct mail department at a big department store. She was remarkable – a pillar of strength.

We moved nine times in six years and constantly having new school systems and new friends meant that my sister, Diana, and I got very close. She would take a major stand with my father, whereas I was more the diplomat – I just wanted things to work and I didn’t want him to be completely isolated. When I look at what I do now [as a director], I realise it’s the same technique: looking at a situation and saying let’s fix this, let’s just get through it. Other kids have endured situations 10 million times worse than mine and have gone on to do amazing things. Then there are some people who’ve had next to nothing happen to them, but who are entirely debilitated by one tiny incident in their childhood.

If I had to define my work I would say that it’s character-driven, observational humour. I try to find a truth about a character and then shoot it. I want to hit a chord with a viewer that isn’t clichéd, but which makes them think, “Oh yeah, that’s true...” They laugh, or it reaches into them and talks to them somehow.If you look at the Orange ads – which ask, what is a committee? How does that committee work? – those are always fun, because we’ve all been in those meetings.

When I was a junior in high school, I was an incredible underachiever but I thought, I can draw and my dad’s in advertising, so I’ll have no trouble getting into the business. Then I got word one day that Dad had beaten up the president of the design school and got fired. I was like, oh, there goes plan A, what is plan B?

Because of the stuff with Dad, the teachers took a fatherly interest in me and I managed to get a scholarship for an art course at Phillips Academy Andover. It’s one of the most elite schools in America – George Bush went there – but they also take in kids from difficult backgrounds.

I thought that I was hot shit at art, but when I went to Andover I realised that even the average guys could out-draw me and do better design because they were all super-schooled. It was an eye-opener. I realised I had to stop messing around and really focus. The day I got back from Andover, my girlfriend dumped me, so I got really drunk and stoned and ended up racing a tricked-out Firebird through the town with the police chasing after me. I was charged with drunk driving and my world came crumbling down. But it was a very influential incident for me because I almost lost my life through stupidity.

Dad ended up being pretty much at death’s door. Some nights his internal bleeding would be so bad he’d be coughing up blood. The doctors said, “if you drink any more you will die”. Then he got sent to prison for pulling a gun and when he got out he turned his whole world around. He’s now like a poster child for dealing with addiction and he’s helped tens of thousands of people change their lives. I do drink alcohol now, but I am very aware of the fact that I come from a long line of alcoholics. No male in the Buckley family survived past 40 for three generations until my father, and prison was the only thing that saved him.

People think that we do a lot of drugs in this business but I haven’t seen it, except when we’ve dealt with the French. In 15 years I have never had an agency in the US or in the UK say, “Let’s go do some coke”. But in France they do so much cocaine it’s funny. In Cannes I was like, oh my God, this is wild!

I got into directing because when I opened my first agency [with Tom De Cerchio] we would suggest TV spots to clients. But we had little money, so the production companies would send us directors who were absolutely useless. I thought, I could probably do that. The real clincher was when I wrote a screenplay and the studio told me that Chris Columbus was possibly interested in directing it. I knew that even if he was interested I wouldn’t want him. So it came to the point where directing made sense.

The worst star I have ever worked with was Darryl Hannah. We shot an Orange spot with her and she was just so full of herself and so disrespectful to everyone. It was extraordinary, especially because of where she was in her career at that time.The best celebs I’ve worked with have been Nicole Kidman and Ellen DeGeneres. Ellen’s improv’ skills and her comedic ability to turn a line are the best I’ve ever seen.

I love the chimps we work with on the CareerBuilder ads. It’s a fascinating directorial process and they’re so smart. You work with a trainer, but after several days you realise that the chimps have understood that the trainer is taking orders from you, and they bypass the trainer altogether, really listening to what you’re saying.

At the same time, I’ve learnt that you can’t underestimate a chimp’s temper. One time, the actor Griffin Creech took a piece of paper instead of letting the chimp hand it to him. The chimp growled, so the trainer was like, uh oh, that’s a very bad thing, let’s put him back in his cage. The next day we were doing a conference scene and the same chimp is back, and he jumps over the table like he’s ready to strangle Griffin. It was very, very scary and Griffin was incredibly lucky not to have his throat ripped out.

Shooting the What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas ads fucked up my mind. It was a crazy point in my life. I was already a powder keg, and Vegas was the spark. Those ads got criticised for being too real – for admitting that bad things happen in Vegas – but tourism has gone through the roof. They really tap into the mentality of somebody who thinks, I’m bored with my life, I think I’ll go to Vegas.

It’s really frustrating when you run into an advertiser who still feels the need to jam information into an ad – to do heavy lifting with advertising. They’re really living in the dark ages. Now, fortunately, it’s the entertainment that opens things up, and you have to create a voice for the brand. Some of the stuff I see, I think, they’ve got to be kidding – who’s even going to remember that crap? They’ve just wasted six seconds relaying information that no one gives a shit about – or can be found online or from an operator – rather than allowing the ad to breathe and do something special.

It’s actually a pretty good time in our business at the moment for us creative dudes – not economically, but creatively. All the old rules have been flung out of the window over the past couple of years. For example, I’ve just done a spot for Huggies that is quite radical for them. Instead of going for 32-year-old moms with a mini-van who are in front of the TV ironing, they’re now aiming at YouTube-surfing 24-year-olds. So you have to do something funny and interesting that those women will send to their friends.

We launched hungrymantv.com a year ago, so that we could provide another creative outlet for both the company and our directors. We thought that, at best, our programmes might get picked up by TV; at worst, the directors could put the work on their reels. But we’re already getting calls from the networks to do pilots.

What makes me laugh? I guess it’s still what got me into trouble in school: pranks like the one at the end of Jackass Two, when there’s a hostage situation and they put a guy in a trunk. It’s one of the funniest pranks ever because it’s so layered with irony. And Team America was a brilliant film. Like South Park, it just cuts through all the bullshit and tells it the way it is. It’s the whole irony/honesty/truth thing.

The way that my work is judged is much more important to me than how people see me as a person. I want respect for the fact that I’m innovative – that I’m not resting or doing something that’s already familiar. If my work lacked originality, that would be death.

I judge women by their balls and men by their breasts. I use the internet to play fantasy baseball. I’m a total addict – that’s my vice. I don’t look at any porno’, it just doesn’t interest me, but fantasy sports get my competitive juices going.

My kids [Kara, 19, Ty, 13, and Liam, 12] are not that interested in advertising – they live on YouTube. They’re total film heads and both my boys want to be directors. The middle one, Ty, did something on YouTube and was getting more hits than my website. He does these little strange videos, like his friends being kidnapped or other practical jokes, and they’re very funny. That’s definitely where the new generation of filmmaker is emerging from. I put a huge amount into my work, but I think the most complete moments of joy are when you’re with your children – watching them grow and succeed. My kids still rule my universe.

I have a love/hate relationship with money. It’s important to have it in the sense of having security. If I don’t have it or if I’m worried about debt, I feel sick. I’ll scrub floors or whatever it takes – but I will never go into debt. I’ve been there, I grew up with it, I know how it erodes relationships. And when you do have money, you can help people, which I love. Having said that, I live pretty modestly. My only weakness is cars.

I would never work on an advertising campaign for the US Army. A military spot came up a couple of years ago, but I just couldn’t do it. Of course I understand the need to have a defence system, but I can’t glorify a decision to send someone into battle. I was against the Iraq war from the beginning, and found it remarkable that some people let anger rule their rational behaviour. The media who fed that should be lynched.

Bush has done a disastrous job. When he got elected for the second time I swear I couldn’t talk about it for days; I was numb. It’s not only about Iraq, it’s about kids and families and long-term repercussions. That UK Daily Mirror headline the day after the election hit it right on the head: ‘How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?’

When we go overseas to shoot ads, people look at us differently now. We’ve gone from good guys to bad guys. It’s amazing how quickly things have turned.

If I could relive my life I would avoid the hurt that’s happened with my kids and my exwife. I don’t regret anything, but during my midlife crisis I should have been a little smarter.

If I could change the world I would ensure that those who have worked hard and deserve rewards would gain credit and those who have cheated and manipulated would fail.

I’m definitely afraid of dying. It freaks me out because I love life. I don’t believe in an afterlife; this is it, there’s nothing waiting for me. That’s why I’m driven by the idea of living every moment really hard, right now, living every moment like it’s your last.

In the end, the most important thing is what memories you leave in the living.