Martin Werner: Director of Stars
Martin Werner reckons it's safer to be hard-working and passionate than a natural talent who may fizzle out.
This star director and director of stars (from Clooney to Walken) tells Tim Cumming you have to kill your darlings: “They want to see your latest, not your best.” Yet with constant renewal he aims for timeless work.
Want to know how to succeed in advertising? Here’s Danish director Martin Werner: “You have to be disciplined. You really have to work hard. And you have to be passionate. If you can do that, you will definitely get there. Talent comes after that. There are two kinds of talent. I represent the hard-working, disciplined craftsman who polishes his skills and finds what could be a talent. And there are those that have a talent and it just shines. It’s tough to be like that because it comes very easy and they might end up in trouble. That’s why you have really big stars who suddenly lose themselves, because it’s too easy. So if hard work and passion is driving you more than the talent, you’re probably safer.”
It’s been hard to locate a gap in Werner’s schedule for a shots tête-à-tête, so we grab him en route between one shoot and the next at the King’s Cross Eurostar terminal. We meet on the terrace of The Booking Office restaurant, nestled between the upper platform and the lovingly restored St Pancras Hotel. The soundtrack around us is a pungent one of noises of arrival and departure, of the ceaseless movement of humanity and its plans, dreams, deadlines and schemes.
Werner loves the sound of sound: what you hear, he says, is just as important as what you see. It’s a lesson he learned as a ten year old growing up in the provinces, raiding his parent’s video tape stash. “They were shrinks,” he says. “Freudians working with Gestalt therapy, which is a mirroring therapy. And they were among the first to film sessions with their clients. I wasn’t allowed to look at the tapes, but I sneaked in and watched them.”
That was his first lesson in film’s impact. “It’s very powerful to see a person talk about themselves on camera. I realised film’s power and intent. It’s raw and simple – it’s about a character, and it’s about moving images and sound.”
It’s a basic lesson he’s kept close throughout his career. “When someone is honest on camera and something comes up unexpectedly, when you hear something that makes you sit up and listen – that’s really powerful.”
As we sit on the terrace, an hour before he leaves for Paris, on his way to a job in South Africa, he talks about working with stars, with cars (his new spot for Volkswagen, Winter – poking fun at our constant surprise at snow, with people gazing wonderingly at this new white stuff swirling in the air – has just hit) and recounts what it was like working with Robbie Williams, after spending that afternoon shooting the singer at Abbey Road. A blast, apparently.
“Aaaah, brilliant!” he exclaims. “What’s interesting about these stars, the best of them are often really, really good on all levels. You’d never know what you’re going to get before you meet them in person, but a guy like him, he’s just really good, and he’s good with people.”
The new spot is a joint venture between Universal and a big mobile phone company. “It’s one of those rare occasions where they get together and try to get the best out of the money they’ve got and the possibilities they have.” The one constraint was time.
“We had two-and-half hours to make a lot of footage. In that situation, if the chemistry’s not there, or he’s not really on it, then you’re fucked. There’s no way you can save it. So, knock on wood, he was great. And Abbey Road is legendary. You feel it. They’re enormous, the studios,” he adds. “Impossible to light.”
Werner never went to film school – “They didn’t want me. I wasn’t good enough,” he laughs. “At least, that’s what they said. So I had to move differently. And advertising became a wonderful school to me.” He came in to the industry as a trainee and shot his first spot in 1992, just four years after advertising appeared on Danish television. “So it was learning by doing. The media was young, and there was a demand for shooters. Today it’s more difficult. You don’t just go in and shoot a commercial at the age of 18 with very little on your CV. Back then you could. The training was in directing, pure directing. Working with a crew.”
Some people are just lucky
He’s developed a rep for witty, brilliantly executed and visually sumptuous work. His first shots appearance came in 2002, with Bowling, for Synoptik opticians (think Specsavers), about a man with poor eyesight mistaking a bowling ball rolling down a steep road for a football, and breaking his foot kicking it back. That won him his first awards and brought in his first international work. It was funny, sharp, concise and memorable, – a clear indication of the work to come.
That includes his brilliant campaign for DnB Bank, featuring George Clooney and one lucky lady who wakes up with the queen of confused hangovers to find out she’s Clooney’s new missus, with the tagline: “Some people are lucky in life. For the rest of us, saving up can be smart.”
“There’s two details in that which are important,” he says. “One is that she is not hot like you would expect. And I’m not sure George at first thought she was right, but when she started to act, she was hot. As a spectator you can mirror yourself to her, and she’s funny. He responded to that very quickly. He saw that she would actually make him a bigger star, that she was the real deal.”
Then there’s the series of five films for clothing brand Premium by Jack & Jones, starring Christopher Walken as a tailor-designer-trickster, conjuring clothing seemingly by the cut of his jib alone, wordlessly allowing his cachet and aura to suffuse the brand. Walken barely moves in the spots; it’s the rest of the world that moves about him. “We built the set and we really rehearsed hard,” says Werner. “We shot in Denmark, built the set there, and what’s good about Walken is there are so many references, there are so many movies. So you just watch a lot of his movies and find out what works.”
What worked best was having the star stay silent, all angles, cheekbones and presence – something between remotely smouldering and acutely withering. “You want him to talk,” exclaims Werner, “but you fall in love with the idea that he doesn’t.” He leans forward and asks emphatically: “Can you watch that guy for 40 seconds without him opening his mouth? Yes you can. Do you dare to do that? Do you believe less is more? To simplify and amplify?” He sits back again. “Yes you do. Fuck, yeah.”
Though Walken’s silence was scripted beforehand – part of the brand’s aim of creating a campaign that worked in every territory, and on every platform – Werner had to guard against the creatives’ desire to make him speak when it came to the actual shoot. “But my role as a director is to stay focussed, to say, we continue. So less was really more there. Him, the lights, the sets. And we got a plus with Nick Cave, who came in with the beautiful music [We Real Cool].”
Secure and sustainable
As well as Walken, Clooney and Williams, Werner has worked with Eva Longoria (Sheba cat food, Follow Your Passion, through AMV BBDO), Antonio Banderas and Le Mans legend Tom Kristensen. Has he become the go-to guy for handling big star names?
“Advertising is funny like that,” he says. “People will hire a guy with a lot of celebs on his reel, because he proves that he can do that, which is the name of the game, because you spend a lot of money and you need security. And you have very little security with filmmaking, because you never really know what will happen – so you buy in to as much security as you can.”
And what kind of security is Werner looking for? “For me, it’s not so much that it’s a car or a known person, but that the script seems fun to do. Of course it seems more fun if you have someone like Christopher Walken doing it. When he steps in front of the camera he just communicates. And George Clooney communicates instantly. And so does Robbie Williams.”
But even with the best-laid plans in place, says Werner, “a lot of the real magic happens on set. It’s often a tiny detail that you can’t even predict, that ends up being the real moment of it all.” Werner’s job is to look out for and recognise these details, and catch them as they pass.
Since 2001, Werner has been with Bacon, which he co-founded as “a place where we could get LA to come to us rather than having to abandon our lives and families in Denmark to forge international careers. To do that we needed a company that had all the right team around us – the researchers, the producers.” Bacon has since expanded to encompass in-house production and effects from Bacon X. “We are as one and we can control and maximise everything we do,” says Werner. “We have people who’ve stayed with us from the beginning, really good directors, people who grew up together and we all share. We compete, but in a social way, instead of being a collective like Traktor. It’s a very wonderful muscle to have.”
Werner’s own inspirational muscle was flexed early on by big hitters such as Tony Kaye and Jonathan Glazer, whom he describes as “probably one of the most iconic directors around”. Joe Pytka and Michael Haussman also come into the frame.
Then there’s Coco Chanel, whose little black dress is the epitome of style that never goes out of fashion. “She said what is fashionable is what goes out of fashion, meaning that she wanted to do timeless design. And I really admire that angle. It’s not about whether you’re hot or cold or young or old, it’s about whether you really believe in longevity and sustainable creativity, something that has a timeless notion to it rather than something that’s really funky right now.
“I don’t consider myself necessarily as good as that” – he’s not claiming his own Little Black Dress – “but that’s my aim. And when I see work from someone like Chris Palmer, or Ridley Scott, or David Fincher – when once in a while he does a commercial he will still do it so bloody well. He’s consistent. Whether he makes features, TV or commercials. And that’s powerful.”
Werner, too, has an eye on features in his future. He’s worked with the Danish Film Institute – big brother to the film school that once turned him down – on two acclaimed shorts: Bosphorus, a Turkish co-production, which mixed realism with a touch of magic and enchantment in its story of an old man, Murat, rising to the challenge of isolation and making human connections; and 2012’s Øresund. Perhaps inspired by his parent’s work, it’s about a hyperactive, demanding little boy, his father’s search for treatment and the troubling issue of medicating ‘difficult’ children in the West.
“I haven’t done a motion picture yet,” Werner reveals, “but we’re working on that. It’ll be an entertaining, radical film with a happy ending… and it’s going to happen really soon.”
Out with the old
Werner’s own departure on the Eurostar is coming really soon, too, but he’s got one more piece of advice for up-and-coming directors to share before he has to leave.
“You have to throw away your films. You have to constantly change your reel. Some directors have a hard time doing that. They want the best on there, but the market doesn’t necessarily want the best, it wants the newest. So that forces you to move on and show what you are doing right now.” He pauses. “That’s the demanding part, to provide new stuff all the time.”
He shrugs, smiles and, with a wave, he’s off. Werner’s track record shows he can provide the new stuff in spades, and that, along with the three graces of discipline, passion, and talent, is what keeps him in demand and on the move.
Connections
powered by- Production Bacon
- Director Martin Werner
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