God of the Gaps, Bryan Buckley

With an Oscar nomination for his short film, Asad, and a major Hollywood feature in the works with Reese Witherspoon, Bryan Buckley is riding high. And with some forty Super Bowl spots on his CV, this god of the gaps between the sporting action talks to Tim Cumming about the art and dynamics of the big sell, and why he’s with the brand.

There’s so much on Super Bowl King Bryan Buckley’s plate right now, we’re talking Desperate Dan portions. There’s his 2013 Oscar nomination for short film Asad, the imminent production of his first feature, an adaptation of John Gray’s bestseller Men Are From Mars, Women are From Venus starring Reese Witherspoon, and when I talk to him over the phone from London to LA, where the New York-based directing dynamo is holed up in the cutting room, he is about to finish what he calls “an unbelievable spot” for the Oscars. “It’s a two-minute spot,” he enthuses, “a two-minute movie. I strongly recommend looking at that before your deadline…”

He’s got reason to be jazzed by this riotous reprise of the 1981 Grey Poupon Pardon Me mustard campaign – famous enough to be parodied in Wayne’s World – featuring two Woosterish chumps exchanging a spot of mustard between vintage Rolls-Royces. But in Buckley’s The Lost Footage, made through Crispin Porter + Bogusky, it’s a case of anarchy rather than Oxbridge rules and the Highway Code, with a riotous car chase through town and country club and a deadpan, roof-raising pay-off. “There are very few ads that have come along over the years in the States which have had the pop culture impact of the original Grey Poupon spot,” he says. “People still quote it here 30 years after it first ran. So when I saw the board, I knew we had a pretty high bar to get over. And the piece had to be absolutely epic but in an 80s sort of way.”

Subscribers to shots.net can read the full interview here or in the new issue of shots magazine, issue 141. To subscribe to shots click here.