Ad Icon: Frédéric Planchon

Literally growing up in the theatre has given director Frédéric Planchon a love of collaboration, and the ability to put human emotion before high concept and cold technique. Tim Cumming explores the light and shadow in the French auteur’s career, following his search for beauty in imperfection and the unexpected

“Theatre was my childhood – even my first girlfriend. My first kiss was backstage with an actress who was two or three years older than me. I was 16… She was 18…”

This is Frédéric Planchon talking (somewhat wistfully), the man behind the heart-tugging recent Vodafone spot featuring a couple locking lips from first love to old age.

While he was tasting first kisses, his father, Roger Planchon, was head of France’s Théâtre National Populaire, his mother was an actress in the company, and young Frédéric grew up in a world where “theatre was a passion and total dedication. It was really their life,” he says.

“I never had any babysitter as a kid. I was always backstage playing, during the rehearsals, during the play. It was quite wonderful and magical for a kid, so it has built a lot of things in me. It’s where I come from.”

A dramatic beginning

The Planchons’ theatre was that of Brecht, Molière and Shakespeare, mixed with more avant-garde names such as Robert Wilson, and the teenage Frédéric wasted no time in soaking it all up. From the age of 17 to 22 he worked as an actor and assistant director to his father and fellow Théâtre National Populaire director Patrice Chéreau (who later went on to make La Reine Margot), cutting his teeth as an AD on a total of 15 films, while moonlighting on the side at France’s national film school (“without authorization – nobody ever noticed that I wasn’t allowed to be there”).

“But to be honest, I don’t think I was very talented as an actor,” he admits. “It’s a great thing to do, because you understand what it is like. When you work with actors, you understand a bit more how they feel and how to direct them – but I stopped because I didn’t think it was my thing. I much prefer being in the shadows,” he adds, smiling, “than being in the light.”

It’s in the shadows, after all, that you’re more likely to steal a kiss. Which brings us back to that tender Vodafone spot, which bagged two Lions at last year’s Cannes Festival.

“There’s nothing more intimate than a kiss between two people, or more emotional,” says Planchon. “It had to be almost one shot, to have this seamless travel through the different periods of a life, which was not easy to do, to be totally intimate, real and emotional and not technical at all, not a cold exercise. We cast different actors, who sometimes looked like each other, though it wasn’t about getting a pure lookalike; it was more about what’s going on in their eyes, and in their body gestures.”

Where Kiss stands out is not just in the seamless casting and segueing from youth to age, but the fact that the sensual heart of the film comes towards the end, with maturity, not youth.

“Exactly,” agrees Planchon. “It’s unexpected and it’s something that you don’t usually see. It’s a very striking image, to have people who are old in something that is very sensual and sexual, and I think it was shocking in a good way, not provocative, just an image to wake up people in front of their TV and see something really tender and really real.”

Based in Paris, and signed to Academy in London, in the US with Anonymous Content, and in France with Iconoclast, Planchon has won an armful of Cannes Lions, D&AD Pencils, British Arrows, and delivered spots for brands including British Airways, Mercedes, Google, Orange, Miller, VW, Vauxhall and American Airlines.

His first award was a Prix de l’Image in 1990 for a short film, L’Echange. He went on to make music videos and more shorts before a production company approached him to direct his first spot in 1996, for Volkswagen.

“I started to look at commercials, which I hadn’t done before. And I must say I was quite amazed, because I thought some of the very good stuff was really good. I didn’t expect it, because when you looked at commercials on French TV, they were 70 per cent crap.” That same year he was voted France’s commercial director of the year, and took to the industry as if it was his first love.

“There’s something really exciting about this world,” he says. “Every two months, you get to focus on a totally different subject. Directing is about craft and experience, and it’s great to be able to live your life doing something you really love and enjoy.”

Being signed to Academy, Planchon is a regular passenger on the Eurostar from Paris to London, and loves working in the city.

“My first work in London was a Sony job for DDB. It was a strong emotional film and I really enjoyed doing it. The second one was for Breathe.com, totally unexpected and poetic. That’s why I really like the London market – it gives me the opportunity to do something unexpected.” He cites his Orange Belonging spot from 2007 as an example: “people in a park just appearing behind each other in a very theatrical way, at the same time with real emotion – I enjoyed doing it because I hadn’t seen something like that before.”

As well as capturing emotions, he’s adept at delivering high-end visuals – whether it be for Guinness (Dark Life) or Orange (Planet) – but insists he’s less driven by visuals than by the concept behind them, and stresses the importance of a great script.  “Without it, even if you’re a good director, you can’t make it good – you can improve it, but it will never be a good ad.”

So what is his definition of a killer script?

“A strong concept or a strong emotion, or a tone that I haven’t seen before, that’s a bit more unexpected or poetic or different. For example, Vodafone Time Theft [tilting the old work-life imbalance sharply towards life with the tag line, ‘Make the most of now’] – I think it was a beautiful concept, and at the same time it was a great advertising idea, a very filmic idea to which you could bring emotion and acting. That’s the terrain I really like, rather than the purely visual. I like a strong concept, and I always like a human element. I like having people in front of a camera. The human emotion on a face is stronger than a great composition or a fantastic wide shot. I like faces.”

The charm of imperfection

There are faces aplenty in Orange Planet, where strong and simple visual concepts drive the story, with people on every continent slapping and sloshing blue paint around – enough to make ‘the blue planet’ disappear from the view of astronauts on the international space station. What you might expect to be heavily CGI’d turns out to be mostly caught in camera.

“A lot of it was done for real, by moving and duplicating the crowds. Of course, we used CG for the super-wide shots, but what was good was to get these people doing a game” – the importance of concept over visuals, again – “and that it was a real emotion coming from this child-like behaviour, having fun together.”

It was shot all over the world – Mexico, China, Europe, Africa – and without a professional actor in sight. “I wanted to capture a genuine reaction from real people splashing paint around – a genuine reaction from someone who isn’t an actor can be very powerful.”

Planchon’s concept-before-visuals mantra extends to how he sees his role as a director, eschewing auteur-like fixed visions for a malleable approach to his material.

“It’s always important to find that your style is going to help the idea rather than trying to bring your style to an idea,” he says. “You don’t want to overwhelm it. I always try to do something different each time, and I think as a director you have to. There are some things that belong to you, that you can recognise when you look at it from the outside. But for myself, from the inside, I always try to do something different. More to find the appropriate style for an idea, rather than doing the other way around.”

Since he started with that first VW spot in 1996, the industry has been rocked by massive changes in the mechanics of filmmaking, distribution and viewer platforms, and for Planchon the most exciting changes have come to the kit he prefers to stand behind rather than in front of.

“I really like digital cameras,” he enthuses. “I like the lightness of them, I like to be able to work with no light at night, with smaller crews. Anything that makes a shoot less heavy and more organic, I appreciate. There’s an expression in French nouvelle vague – Godard and Truffaut used to talk about the camera pencil, something quite light, that doesn’t intrude – and what I hate in a shoot is heaviness. So digital cameras give you a lot of freedom. They get better and better, and I love mixing the new with the old. Shooting with a hi-tech digital camera but using old lenses, especially anamorphic lenses, and zero series from the 1970s – they give a sort of imperfection and a filmic quality. The default of these new cameras is that sometimes everything is a bit too sharp, too crisp. I like a bit of softness, that things are not totally perfect and cold.”

That mix of old and new – the hard digital edge fused with an analogue softness and warmth – neatly sums up Planchon’s creative ethos. He’s about human contact over visual fireworks. It’s as if those formative early years of stage scenery and greasepaint, of travelling players, and stolen kisses in the wings – all the intensely human and heavily lived-in chambers of the creative process – are still illuminated in what Planchon the director sees in his brief, in the brand, in the camera screen, in the script before him, and in his cast, whether they be ‘real’ people or actors, or a way of framing a shot to serve the story, and increase the viewer’s sense of involvement.

“With everything I do, imperfection and difference is part of what I like,” he adds. “I don’t like scenes that are totally perfect. It lacks charm.”

Taking the cues

If imperfection is the grit in the oyster that creates the pearl, then the shell is Planchon’s emphasis on the collective ethos of the theatre continuing in his work. “I like working with all sorts of people,” he says. “They’re all really important, but also, when I work with actors, it is team work. They improve what you’re doing. If you want to do something by yourself, you’re a writer or a painter. But if you want to work with moving images you have to learn how to work together. You really benefit from other people’s work. I’m giving direction but taking cues from other people’s talents.”