Carlsberg: The Crate Escape

When it comes to Hollywood remakes there are two general rules. The first is that if the original film was any good (Planet of the Apes, The Italian Job, Godzilla, Get Carter,) it really should be left alone. The second is not to cast Mark Wahlberg.

But perhaps an even more daunting challenge than recasting a classic feature is turning one into a commercial, and that’s exactly the challenge that Peter Lydon, director with London production company 76ltd, was faced with when he received the script from agency Fold7 for Carlsberg spot The Crate Escape.

“When I first saw the script I thought, ‘yeah I want to do it but it’s a challenge. You could really shoot yourself in the foot if you don’t pull it off’,” he recalls.

An homage to the 1963 film The great Escape, starring Steve McQueen, the spot (above) follows the plight of a young man who’s found himself thrown into the spa weekend from hell at the behest of his girlfriend. He quickly realises the employees are ‘torturing’ the other ‘captive’ men and hatches a plan to tunnel out and retrieve some Carlsberg to ease their collective pain.

Was Lydon a fan of the original film? “I revisited it and I loved it actually. It’s got such a playful charm even though it’s dealing with something so serious. This is a POW camp and these are Nazis, but it’s so of-its-time and those incredible characters’ faces are etched in our brains. It just hits the ground running and it’s a cat and mouse game. It held up better than I expected,” he says.

It’s that playful charm that really makes the spot, as the ‘prisoners’ sneak around, trying not to raise the suspicions of the ‘guards’, who are hell-bent on punishing them with hot stone massages and back waxes. “The tone of the humour was something we needed to work out what it really meant and how far to push it. Once we started to throw out ideas and references we’d find things we liked and push them further,” says the director.

“That’s how the guards became slightly sort of sci-fi characters, slightly ‘James Bondian’. The joke is that the men bring beer in rather than escape, which is a nice twist. Throughout we kept asking; ‘how do the women come across? How does the relationship come across? They [the men] can’t be running away from the girlfriends, they can’t not like being with them’. It’s; how can they have the best of both worlds? How can they have their beer and drink it? That was the line we always trod and our protagonist had to be a hero and not a victim.”

The Great Escape had one of the most famous theme tunes in the history of cinema, and using it in the commercial meant that the 90-second spot could be almost completely dialogue-free. “You play that music and most people understand what you’re dealing with immediately. It has a kind of shorthand to it,” says Lydon, who started his career in TV (Shameless, Teachers, Garrows Law) before moving into commercials and hence knows a thing or two about dialogue. “I do a lot of dialogue and I enjoy that but it was nice to do something on a purely visual level. I loved that.”

So if your better half books you in for a spa weekend any time soon, be prepared to endure some pain and remember that underneath the drinking fountain is a good place to start digging to freedom… or the off licence.