Tom Kuntz

A purveyor of arresting images, from dancing eyebrows to dogs with strap-ons, Kuntz has moved from ad director to cult hero.

Tom Kuntz’s eyes dart around the deli, his mouth full of panini, his brain formulating an answer. Our conversation’s covered several topics so far — some stuff about his ‘Brady Bunch’ upbringing, how he started as a director, his split from creative partner Mike Maguire – but this is the one I’ve been waiting to ask: where does Tom the man end and Kuntz the brand begin? Talking about himself and his work, Kuntz shows a degree of self-awareness that’s inspiring and intriguing in equal parts. In the pauses he takes before committing thoughts to words, glancing down at the table, tailing off mid sentence on the edge of revealing something he thinks he shouldn’t, Kuntz conveys the image of a guy who’s intensely aware of the personal scrutiny he attracts as a director and a desire to balance truth against selfpreservation and privacy.

“I guess a part of me feels like a brand,” he eventually responds, as Bowie’s voice intones ‘and there’s nothing I can do...’ over the speakers in the background. “I think any good working director is. You’re not going to get me to say what the elements of that brand are though. I know there are certain things people say about me or my work. But to me that’s scary because it’s the beginning of getting pigeonholed.” At the same time as dodging shorthand descriptions like bullets, Kuntz is conscious of the contradictory need to sustain continuity through his work; the problematic line between revisiting and repeating. “I’ve always tried to take on projects that aren’t me, but that can be dangerous too because I don’t want to water down what people know about me. Looking at my reel, I don’t feel like I’m repeating myself. There’s something that’s repeating. What that is though…” he fades to silence.

In part, he’ll go on to explain, the urge to avoid being labelled is also an attempt to resist his work becoming devalued in the hands of those who pick it apart, categorise and digest it. If there’s one thing that’s obvious about Kuntz it’s his drive to try and push past the limits of advertising as a medium and the way it’s perceived from without to begin to make something, dare he say it, closer to art. “I do view my body of work as... I want to be proud of it. I do take it seriously,” says the man who’s been referred to as advertising’s Clown Prince. “Some directors look at what they do as being like a hired hand and maybe that’s actually more in touch with what the job is. But there’s a certain idealism I have that’s worked for me so far.”

Dealing with idealism’s offshoot, doubt, is something Kuntz admits he battles with regularly, one of the unavoidable dichotomies of working in a format that invites public judgement on such a massive scale. “There’s a definite love/hate thing going on between me and advertising,” he admits, glancing over at the dictaphone suspiciously. “As proud as I can get of the stuff I do, it’s still just making commercials. It kills me that it’s not real art. I think in England commercials carry more cultural weight and advertising can be a medium through which people produce art. It’s not like that in America. That is the biggest bummer to me — operating in a medium that’s not respected.” We start discussing the root of the problem and whether it’s intrinsic to the American ad industry or if the attitudes and expectations of audiences are responsible for curtailing creativity. “To a degree I feel like the whole business is still happy to see a beautiful, well executed spot,” Kuntz muses.

“They’ll make a big, shiny ad and be all proud of it when the rest of the world just writes it off as advertising. Whenever I do an ad I’m always really scared that it’s just gonna end up as something that looks and smells like advertising because there’s so much of that at the moment. To me that’s the hardest hurdle to jump - making something that doesn’t get lodged in the mound of slick advertising and has no connection with normal people.” As an example of the sort of project he’s talking about, Kuntz lists the work he did this year for Coca-Cola. “For me the Crave spot was a great opportunity because it didn’t feel like my obvious style. There was very little fanfare when Crave came out and it didn’t garner a great deal of attention so that’s a case in point where I think the work deserved a better reception than it got. Maybe it suffered from slick-commercial syndrome, but to me that was a really interesting job.”

When things go well though there are few directors at Kuntz’s level who can attract the same sort of fandom. His work for Skittles has earned a cult following among its target audience of high-schoolers and cool kids, reformulating the rules of mainstream comedy commercials to the extent that his absurdist palette has now become the status quo. While Kuntz undoubtedly takes the imitation as flattering, it’s left him needing to rethink his next steps. “The Skittles work kind of started a niche that then sparked a bunch of copycat stuff,” he says. “That sort of bizarre and surreal comedic style has gone from feeling fresh to become the norm. It feels like there’s an obligation to make something completely new at this point.”

The future, perhaps, lies somewhere in the body of his personal projects and sideline hobbies, which have justifiably attracted a cloaked army of devoted idolaters. For Kuntz junkies, and there are a surprising number of them out there, his commercial work is just the tip of the iceberg. While headline grabbing spots like Cadbury’s Eyebrows and Axe Chocolate Man offer neophytes an entry portal in to the twisted corridors of Kuntz Manor, it’s the off-the-radar experiments that have allowed Kuntz to control the tide of his creativity.

The crown jewels of Kuntz’s online half-life are a pair of filmed Christmas cards that have earned him a reputation way beyond the borders of a television audience. 2007’s festive greeting, Warm And Fuzzy Feeling, featured a delightfully deviant dog-with-gigantic-cock (“we used a massive strap-on“), while the 2006 short, Santasm, showed a battered and bruised man-boy in braces and Y-fronts breastfeeding from an oversized grinning trucker-bear in a gingham waistcoat. “It‘s a metaphor for the relationship between me and my assistant, Matt Dilmore,” explains Kuntz, as though that makes everything OK.

Beyond his film work Kuntz has nourished his passion for music, creating record sleeves for Brooklyn-based artist Dr. Dunks, promos for Electric Six, Bumblebeez and Avalanches and a two-hour mix tape of tunes for Q-Department’s Director Series event in New York. “Part way through the evening Michel Gondry rocked up after a few drinks and started playing drums to the entire mix,” Kuntz recalls over coffee. “And if that wasn’t weird enough, George Bush’s daughter turned up randomly with some friends and was hanging out there, flanked by bodyguards. Surreal.” Amid the whirlwind of industry attention and a busy work schedule, I’m curious to know if Kuntz engages in the fandom around his work. “No,” he says straight up, without stopping to consider his response. “I mean, I’ve Googled myself to see what pops up but really…” and here he leans in, whispering, “I’m too insecure. I don’t want to hear people being mean about the work. I could say I’m not sensitive to criticism but I am. I try not to let it bother me but it definitely sinks in.”

Few directors manage to speak about their fear of failure with the same brutal honesty as Kuntz, who freely confesses he’s his own worst critic. “I have a thing where I don’t see the successes,” he reveals without breaking eye contact. “I dwell on jobs that didn’t come out how I’d planned. But you have to be like that. It’s about chasing the thing you can never obtain, which I guess is kind of obvious.”

In part, Kuntz suggests, the spectre of failure is the necessary and unavoidable flip side to success. “It’s like, if you’ve done three interesting things in a row people want you to fail all of a sudden,“ he muses, stopping to dissect the thought process. “Maybe not. I dunno. People love it when you fail. I think it’s human nature. People can definitely be more brutal in their assessments because of who’s behind a piece of work; looking at something in the context of someone’s work rather than as a thing in itself. It‘s like people are secretly happy when a person‘s humanity is shown through their shortcomings. Seeing that someone is human after all.“

Here Kuntz pauses and glances away, the various clattering cutlery noises and garbled background chatter fighting against Thom Yorke’s strained voice coming to rest on the line ‘I am back to save the universe’. Whether he knows it or not, Kuntz is smiling at the kid clutching on to his mother’s leg at the food counter as he begins to speak. “To me that’s the hardest part of being in the industry,” something clicks and he’s back in the room. “I fear that I’ll lose... I fear that my career will go away. I know how quickly directors come and go in advertising; how easy it is to move from being really hot to really cold, really quickly. I want to keep on doing this. That’s the scary part. The threat of being in a position where you’re not seeing the good boards, not seeing work that gets you excited. That’s probably what keeps me trying.”

And here the battery on the dictaphone dies.