Justin McMillan directs the Hemsworth brothers for Archie Rose
Chris and Luke Hemsworth star in a whisky commercial parody for the Australian distillery, combining live action with AI-generated sequences.
)
A global ad campaign from independent Australian distillery Archie Rose, created with new co-owner Chris Hemsworth, takes the form of a 1:45 parody of a whisky commercial starring him and his brother Luke Hemsworth, directed by Justin McMillan.
Set against a backdrop of eight locations around Australia, True Story plays it straight while the story gets more outrageous. Hemsworth tells a stranger, played by his brother, how he takes Australian whisky to the world.
McMillan says: “What I really enjoyed was finding that delicate balance of tongue-in-cheek comedy: letting the audience believe the story is serious, then puncturing that illusion with comedic beats that make the whisky commercial parody unmistakable. It was fascinating to see the gags move from the page to the set and discover which ones landed and which needed work. That alchemy is one of the things I love about filmmaking. As a director, it's a rare pleasure to work with actors who are willing to push an idea to its limits, then bring it back into focus.”
Credits
View on-
- Production Company Citadel
- Director Justin McMillan
-
-
Unlock full credits and more with a shots membership
Credits
View on- Production Company Citadel
- Director Justin McMillan
- Executive Producer Hamish Roxburgh
- Talent Chris Hemsworth
Explore full credits, grab hi-res stills and more on shots Vault
Credits
powered by- Production Company Citadel
- Director Justin McMillan
- Executive Producer Hamish Roxburgh
- Talent Chris Hemsworth
On working with the brothers, McMillan adds: “It was a rare opportunity to build the comedy around their shared instincts and to let them play off one another and discover, in the moment, what worked. You don't often see actors of that calibre improvising together in a commercial and I felt we were making something special.”
Due to his current feature film commitments, Hemsworth was only available for two days. McMillan explains: “The original script exceeded what we could achieve in that time, so the constraint pushed me to find another approach. AI had reached a point where it could be used meaningfully to create the exposure sequence. That opened up a lot of creative possibilities: the more outrageous the scenes became, the better they served the film’s tone. For a parody of a whiskey commercial, AI felt exactly right.”
The exposure sequences of Hemsworth taking whisky to the world were created by Lipstick in Berlin using AI and cut in with the live action sequences.
Hamish Roxburgh, executive producer at Citadel, says: “We only had a small window with Chris, so Justin and I spent pre production planning it all meticulously. Chris had just wrapped a film gave us two solid days on set for the commercial, then went straight into a couple of weeks of night shoots on his next film project. Very impressive to watch.
“Setting the film in the Archie Rose bar also made perfect sense. It has an old school saloon feel with a cosmopolitan aesthetic that comes up a treat on camera. It felt like the perfect spot for a yarn like this to unfold.”
