Promo Profile: Aoife McArdle

Uncompromising director Aoife McArdle finds poetry and beauty in unexpected places – from Britain’s blighted backstreets to trailer parks in Californian desert towns – and draws authentic performances from amateur actors. This magic touch has made her the choice of musicians with a message and brands that want to pack an emotional punch. Having recently added commercials to her body of promos, the director tells David Knight that she always thinks her work could be better, despite her insistence on total creative freedom

In Street Rider, Aoife (pronounced ‘Eefer’) McArdle’s new ad for Halfords, a boy cycles through suburban streets on his new bike, watched by other neighbourhood kids, and is then joined by his mates on their Christmas cycles. A sprinkling of snow establishes the ad’s seasonal flavour, as the young cyclists head towards the surrounding countryside. On one level, the cinematic sweep feels American, almost Spielberg-like, but the houses and kids tells us this is definitely the UK.

With its indie-music soundtrack and bold casting and camerawork, this is an audacious Christmas ad. Its appeal lies exactly in its sense of authenticity. That defining moment in any young life – getting a bike for Christmas – is handled with appropriate import.

“It’s about how cool it is when you get a new bike – the freedom of that,” says McArdle. We’re talking in the offices of Somesuch, her production company home in London. “Everyone can recall being on your bike, and hanging out in your neighbourhood. And when my editor showed this to his son, he said: ‘Can we go to Halfords, dad?’”

Street Rider is clearly the work of a director with a profound understanding of the persuasive powers of film and this is the most high-profile ad she’s done so far.

She’s made fashion films for Diesel and River Island and directed a Scottish road safety ad, Wheels On The Car, last year. She has also just directed a commercial for GAA and Electric Ireland – another piece imbued with a real atmosphere of authenticity. But the authority to make the Halfords ad has largely come from her music videos. Since becoming a solo director five years ago (she was previously with the collective Minivegas), she has established an uncompromising and poetic style of visual storytelling, based upon courageous casting, extraordinary locations, stunning cinematography and tight creative control.

Her best work includes her expansive portrait of economically deprived Britain for Little Comets’ Isles; her emotionally wrought videos for James Vincent McMorrow shot in a hard-bitten community in the Californian desert; and perhaps her most acclaimed work so far, the epic, existential journey of a skateboarder across the American West for Jon Hopkins’ Open Eye Signal. 

Ferry’s dark tale and a sex scandal

In the last few months McArdle returned to her native Northern Ireland to tell a story of romance blossoming on a big Belfast night out, for dance producer Wilkinson – and ran into big trouble with the local Catholic church. Her most recent promo is for none other than rock icon Bryan Ferry – who also gave her complete carte blanche. “He said he didn’t enjoy being in his videos, which made me laugh, because he’s kind of a cool guy,” she says. “But I would only make a video for people who let me do my own thing, in a way. There are bands that I absolutely love, but I’ll never work with – they would put too much of a creative stamp on what they’d want to do.”

For Ferry’s Loop De Li, McArdle has conjured a dark tale where privilege and decadence among youthful aristos leads to madness and murder. It begins with a searingly dramatic image of a young man on a wind-blasted clifftop, in the aftermath of a terrible event. Then we go back to what led him there, his psychopathic tendencies, fuelled by being unable to deal with the hedonism around him. “For me it has this balance of beauty and darkness – I think a lot of Bryan Ferry’s music has that,” she says. “When I first heard the track I wanted to create a video which reflected the sensation of swimming inside a twisted mind. It’s a European cinema version of Englishness in a weird way. It’s got a lot of influences from movies [by directors] I really love – such as Pasolini, Antonioni, Polanski…”

If the video comes as a shock to Ferry fans, it’s unlikely to achieve the levels of outrage inspired by her video for Wilkinson’s Half Light a few months ago. The Catholic Church in Northern Ireland threatened legal action against the video’s producers unless they removed one of its most important scenes, in which a young man and woman have sex in a church. A week after the video first appeared on YouTube, the scene was cut. “I’d always wanted to make a music video in Belfast,” McArdle says. “That’s where I went out when I was a teenager. It has an incredible spirit, people are hedonistic in a great way there.” She says they had permission to shoot in the church, but (unsurprisingly) not for the scene itself. “People may think I was trying to be controversial, but I was trying to show that young people in Belfast have moved on from the Troubles.”

McArdle comes from Omagh, a small town in Northern Ireland that, as she says, “is best known for bombs”, referring to the bomb blast in 1998 that killed 29 people at the tail-end of the Northern Irish Troubles. That long conflict was an ever-present backdrop to her childhood. “When I think about it I grew up through the worst part of the Troubles really,” she reflects. “I have so many vivid memories of that.”

She describes both her parents as creative people who never worked in creative industries. Her father’s feats of storytelling were a big influence on her. “He always tells stories in a very cinematic way; stories from the Troubles, fantastic ones.” She did not inherit her father’s gift for the oral tradition, so she wrote stories down instead.

After taking a degree in English literature, she headed for film school in Bournemouth, England. Here she met Luc Shurgers and Chris Wood, fellow students with whom she would form Minivegas, a directing collective that, shortly after they all graduated in the mid-Noughties, became something of an overnight sensation in the British music video world after they debuted with an animated video for Bloc Party’s Pioneers. McArdle started out as a writer, editor and compositor on the team that produced a steady stream of videos over the next couple of years. “We had fun, we learned loads, we were riding that wave of doing animation and post-heavy jobs, when you could actually make money because people didn’t understand what you were doing,” she recalls.

What happened in Minivegas...

Minivegas had moved to London, and acquired an office in super-trendy Shoreditch, where, McArdle says, “It became a bit like Nathan Barley.” Then the group of disparate talents started moving in different directions. By now a director within the team, McArdle wanted to make films not necessarily driven by VFX, and it all ended in an ugly and painful split. One of the original members kept the Minivegas name, and the money. “The reality of it is it was fucking hardcore for a while,” she says. “So I literally started over again with nothing.”

But this necessary step to independence did bring artistic reward. In 2010 she made a video for indie band Little Comets, visualising the song Isles with an ambitious, impressionistic portraitof life in the UK. McArdle highlighted the hard times wrought by economic deprivation, capturing people and their surroundings with honesty and visual poetry. “There wasn’t any money to make it, but I loved every minute,” she says. “At times you can connect with a song even if you’re not really into it. You can add something with the visuals that gives it new meaning. For me that’s what’s exciting about making music videos.”

The Isles video went on to win Best Video at the Rushes Soho Shorts festival in 2011, and although she then made some other, less gritty videos, it provided the launchpad for her intense, uncompromising cinematic style.

Existential skateboarding

McArdle’s first serious foray into drama as both writer and director came with the video for Clock Opera’s Lesson No 7. Both character-piece and fast-moving action thriller set on London’s Thamesmead Estate, it established her penchant for existential heroes – in this case a young man who takes inventive revenge on the local bad guys, but pays a heavy price.

Arguably, Lesson No. 7 resembles a Western, albeit one set on a modern London council estate. But it was a film McArdle made in the real America, a year or so later, that helped her solo directing career gain real momentum. She wrote and directed Italy, Texas for Diesel brand 55DSL – a sweet, quirky, very cool mini-comedy-drama about the eccentric ways of the animal-loving residents of a small town in the Lone Star State, featuring the town’s real residents in a well-measured blending of fact and artifice. The film was nominated for Best International Short at the Raindance Festival in 2013. 

One shot that had to be cut from the 55DSL film, when a boy on a skateboard grabbed the back of a truck for a ride (“He wasn’t wearing the clothes”), was the inspiration for McArdle’s next video, for Jon Hopkins’ eight minute electronic epic Open Eye Signal. McArdle says she came up with the idea of the existential skateboarder on a seemingly endless journey through America almost immediately. “For me that was the nicest experience of having the vision for a video.”

She created a video treatment that exactly spelled out the finished film, and once Hopkins had okayed it she spent two weeks on the road in the US picking each location and each shot. The practical challenge of delivering this simple concept was huge. “You had to plan around light – it was quite mathematical that way,” McArdle explains. “To get that beautiful feeling of going through day and night but always hitting the magic hour.” The result is a mesmerising experience: a series of beautifully composed tracking shots that earned McArdle’s DP Steve Annis Best Cinematography at the UK Music Video Awards in 2013.

“I suppose the people who like the video identify with the idea of escaping,” she reflects. “I think I do, I think it’s a bit of an obsession.” She adds that she has “this claustrophobia, agrophobia thing going on all the time”, and if the Jon Hopkins video was the antidote to claustrophobia, her next video project, for singer-songwriter James Vincent McMorrow, was all about being hemmed in.

Having seen Open Eye Signal, McMorrow contacted her directly, asking her to make videos for three songs on his album Post Tropical. So McArdle wrote three connected characters – a boy, a girl and a mother – making a film about each one over three successive days, shooting in high temperatures in central California. Once again, the quality of the casting, the direction of the talent and their relationship to their surroundings make for an intense watch.

In Cavalier a young man binges on booze, drugs and girls in a tawdry pole-dancing club, in reaction to a trauma that’s revealed at the end of the piece. Then in Red Dust the focus moves to the girl, inside her trailer, going through her own emotional torment, and who, in the central moment of the piece, genuinely shaves off her hair while her eyes well up with tears – the emotion is very real. “I try to get actors to bring their own experiences into it,” McArdle explains. “That’s sometimes a bit harrowing for them, because they will do it – especially American actors, they’re a bit more fearless about exposing themselves emotionally. And you share your own dark experiences to get them to that point too. Otherwise it’s not fair, is it?”

The tragedy of a two-part trilogy

Disappointingly the third part of the trilogy is now unlikely to be released, as McMorrow decided to change the third single to another song. “They were waiting for people’s reaction instead of being ballsy and bold,” says McArdle. “I felt sad for the crew because we’d all put so much work in.”

What with the McMorrow troubles and the furore surrounding the Wilkinson video – she describes herse

lf half-jokingly as “Public Enemy Number 1 in Northern Ireland for three days” – McArdle’s progress in commercials this year has been comparitively smooth.

For Major Moments, her ad for the GAA Minor Championships sponsored by Electric Ireland, she says, that once again, she had free rein, rewriting the agency script to create an evocatively textured, beautifully shot celebration of Eire’s national sports of Gaelic football and hurling. “It was a personal project for me,” she says. “I spent a lot of time on casting, and went to the dodgiest parts of Ireland to find the real guys. I felt passionately connected to the idea – a lovely experience.” She says there was also little compromise on her vision for Halfords. It’s all there in the final ad – even the music, created by her

flatmate’s band. “[Agency] Mother were great, and they bought into the way I work. They wanted to make something that was very pure.” She found the untypical type of h

ouses she wanted, and the surrounding countryside, in the small Derbyshire town of Chapel-en-le-Frith, and cast local ‘cheeky’ northern kids for the ad. “I’m passionate about what I want, and when you’re working with an agency, you bring them in on that passion really early, explain why it’s going to be that way, and most people get it.”

The endless quest to improve

Yet McArdle’s further immersion into advertising is probably going to be delayed for a while. Her first feature, written last year while she was laid up with a cracked ankle for a month, has now been greenlit by Irish independent film fund Catalyst. Provisionally titled Kissing Candice, the film is “sort of a romance-thriller, with lots of characters”. Set in Ireland, both Northern and Southern, it goes into production in early 2015. And before the end of the year she will have completed another music video, also to be shot in Belffast – this time for U2.

They are the next, important steps in Aoife McArdle’s intriguing directing career, which has already achieved great things, even if the director herself is never quite satisfied. “I’m not one of those directors who says ‘I’ve just made a masterpiece.’ I don’t think I’ll ever be like that. I’ll always be saying ‘How can I make it better next time?’ I think that’s what keeps you going.”