Sam Brown

What have DJ Jo Wiley exploding a large teapot, equine antics from Chris Moyles and a cheeky couple streaking in the snow got in common? Not much, save that they’re all images created by Sam Brown, an ordinary man with an extraordinary body of work. Here he explains to Belinda Archer the virtues of not being unique

Sam Brown is a regular sort of bloke. He's got a regular, blokey sort of name, lives in London, has a beard and does normal, uncomplicated things outside of work - no unusual potholing hobbies or anything particularly left-field. But that's where the regular stuff stops. Because Sam Brown the Director, maker of several seriously beautiful commercials and a fat clutch of award-winning, chart-topping pop promos, is anything but regular. His work to date demonstrates a decidedly irregular, startlingly varied talent that belies the man you meet.

There's the gorgeously sun-drenched, cinematic bicycle-riding of Corinne Bailey Rae's Put Your Records On, then there's the intense slow-motion of a fighting couple in Doves' The Man Who Told Everything. Cut to the effectsy exploding paint of Get Cape's War Of The Worlds, the simple, charming narrative of a couple of streakers in a Lotto spot and the cunning intercutting of juxtaposed images in Virgin Media's Fantastic Journey. Crank it up a bit more for the whole new world of completely mad stuff in a yet-to-be-screened two-minuter for Radio 1 (DJ Chris Moyles on a rearing stallion anyone?), and, phew, you get the idea.

Charlie Crompton, executive producer at Rogue Films, home to the Brown directing machine, agrees: "I have simply never seen anyone who has such a varied body of work. None of it looks like it has been done by the same person. This is someone who can pull off beautiful photography and composition as effortlessly as fiendishly intricate in-camera effects." Brown certainly seems equally confident at getting great performances out of his actors as finding the beautiful in the mundane or nailing technically challenging effects work. It's a versatility that is certainly needed to sustain a long-term career as a filmmaker.

The 35-year-old, who has been directing "off and on" for around 10 years (but only full-time for the past eight), seems to be understandably proud of his reel and its lack of detectable theme or look. "I'd struggle to sum up my work or aesthetic," he says, with a modest shrug, "but if I do have one I hope I'm gradually shedding it. The more experience I've gained the more I've tried to shake off habits, to be led by the idea rather than fall back on techniques that I know are going to work."

Quite. So where did it all begin for this particularly unassuming director (who is not, despite his CV on the Rogue website, a committed vegetarian who, nonetheless, eats only reindeer meat while on shoots and stocks his entire wardrobe with items from Swedish extreme weather outfitter Fjållråven - all flights of Crompton's fancy, according to Brown)?
"I'm from Henley," he says, referring to the smart Thames-side town beyond London. "You're posh then?" "Nah, just from a posh place."

Brown reckons he got the bug to make films simply by watching music videos in his youth.
"I knew immediately that this was what I wanted to do. It seemed to me like a lot of fun, plain and simple," he recalls.

He studied photography at what was then the London College of Printing but says he knew quickly that stills weren't going to be the right thing for him, finding it all a bit "limited creatively". "I'm also not a techie," he adds, "not into hardware or equipment, so I found that film suited me better, it's an arena in which I'm basically not allowed to touch anything."
His early experiences were disheartening, however. Brown was working as an office manager at production house Flynn, having made a handful of videos he wasn't happy with, and was teetering on the verge of giving up when the managing director Mary Calderwood offered him £4,000 to make something completely on his own terms. "She was amazing, always reassuring me that I was cut out to be a director," he says. And she had always responded to a particular idea he'd had about a man and a woman fighting in a hotel room, but filmed very slowly, almost as if dancing.

Cue his first proper film - the promo for Doves - and a whole load of very useful publicity that followed in its wake. "It seems quite over the top to me now, but it really stuck out at the time and people reacted to it very strongly, very emotionally. I finally had something on my reel that people were paying attention to," he says.

Promos swiftly followed for James Blunt, James Morrison, The Verve, Foo Fighters, and Corinne Bailey Rae. He picked up several awards along the way, including two MTV awards for James Blunt's Beautiful, and he aided the chart-topping success of Morrison and Bailey Rae (helping both achieve number one albums in the UK charts). Most recently, he trousered a nomination for Best Director at the 2008 MTV awards for The Pretender, his powerful riot-cop-drama promo for the legendary Foo Fighters.

Despite all this music video success, Brown soon decided he wanted to expand into commercials, and since Flynn weren't making ads at the time, he started to tout himself around. He signed to Rogue, at the end of 2006.

"Finding the right production company is something of a minefield, and there were a whole load of big companies I didn't even look at," he recalls.

"I didn't want to get buried at the bottom of a huge roster of big name directors and wait for things to trickle down. Flynn taught me the value of generating my own interest and building gradually, and also that there's a huge difference between being 'represented' and really developed."

Rogue, he says, was turning out very strong work but had a name for mainly comedy and character stuff, which wasn't really him. Both parties saw this as a positive, however, because he could contribute something else. There was a hole there he could fill. "They've been a brilliant choice, for me they're the model of what a good production company should be," he says.

Indeed, within weeks of signing, Brown was shooting spots for Wieden + Kennedy, BBH and a BBC Five Live campaign for DFGW. In fact, the promo king, it would seem, has now gone all advertising. Yet the transition was far from easy. "Promos were a great training ground for me, but I actually found that when I started making commercials I had to unlearn a lot of things, to almost start again," he says. "You realise very quickly that what people really take away from great commercials are story and character, and the aesthetics that you so valued in promos hold much less interest and weight. It takes time to get used to it, and to prioritise different things."

Warming to his theme, he adds that with music videos you have the freedom to execute your own ideas with very little interference from anyone, and they're very experimental: you can take big chances with things. "At the same time there's very little money or resources to realise them, and the whole working environment is pretty unhinged," he says. "Commercials can be made very precisely, and I've found that I really enjoy the collaborative aspect of commercials, the way that your ideas develop and refine with other creative people involved. It's also fun to begin with someone else's thoughts. Scripts are constantly surprising, all these ideas you could never have come up with yourself."

Brown the commercials director is certainly becoming a heavy hitter. In January 2008 he fought off stiff competition to make the latest Tropicana film, a beautifully shot ambitious job that took him to Hong Kong, Sydney and Chicago. And his most recent ad, for Virgin Media, is an extraordinary multimedia journey demonstrating the different worlds of entertainment available via your mobile. Crompton comments: "Two years after signing to us, he's coming into his own, from Tropicana to Virgin Media to Radio 1 - all completely different. The only common thread (apart from the odd random explosion) is the care and attention lavished over each shot, which picks him out as a craftsman who is now really coming into his stride." "I'm not sure what, if anything, sets me apart from other directors," says Brown.

"I don't see distinctiveness as being an asset in directing commercials, particularly, because it suggests a certain style or way of working that is ultimately limiting. Being consistently good and making things that really stand out is far more important than being unique," he says. And his goals now really lie in commercials - making "bigger and better" ones. "I like how diverse the experiences are and I like the economy of the storytelling and the pressure of the 60 seconds or whatever: there's no flab, every shot has to work really hard. I've got little interest in longer formats at the moment, unless the inspiration hits me. I'm quite happy to wait for it."

Perhaps his timing to move away from promos is shrewd. The industry has obviously taken a battering over the past few years, and for most directors who care about what they're doing it's "a loss-making exercise now - you either live like a church mouse or supplement it with another creative outlet". "When I came into the video world there was a handful of big US and UK directors developing a brilliant body of work. It was exciting to see what they'd come up with next. The videos were really crafted; each one felt like an event. The promo industry can't support that kind of director any more." He adds, ruefully, that if you were to make a list of the seminal videos of the last decade, the majority of them couldn't be made in the current climate.
"Videos like Chris Cunningham's All Is Full of Love, these astonishing pieces of art just aren't happening now. Everything seems a lot more disposable." He also feels the gap between the worlds of promo and advertising is widening and it's going to become a lot harder for directors to get to the point where they can jump across. Like he did. "However, there are also plusses," Brown says. "The lower budget range means it's much easier now for people to get into making promos, and get commissioned professionally.

I also really believe that an industry as raw and creative as promos should constantly be in flux… new talent and ideas should always be eating up the old. I'm sure the video industry will take whatever limitations there are and ultimately mutate into something much more exciting and interesting."

So is Brown totally turning his back on his roots? Will we see any more stunning music videos from him? Thankfully, yes - but perhaps not for a while. "I've been lucky in that my commercials work has been pretty constant for the last couple of years, and it's really my main focus. I still love making promos, and will continue to do so, but now it's got to be right - a band or artist that I like and a decent budget is a pretty rare alignment." Plus, he says, music videos are very hit and miss. "It's almost impossible to judge what people are going to go for. I've done a handful of videos that I know have literally made an artist, but then again I've done countless more that I thought were better, and went largely ignored by everybody."

You certainly couldn't ignore Brown's latest piece of advertising - an eccentric extravaganza for Fallon client BBC Radio 1. It's got DJs Jo Wiley exploding a giant teapot, Edith Bowman as a sledgehammering parrot killer and Fearne Cotton as a jelly-exploding geisha. Plus Moyles on that white charger. "The guys at Fallon gave me an amazing amount of creative freedom. They just said do something attention-grabbing and over the top, and we ran riot on the ideas. It's all very epic and daft," he says. So far only tantalizing 20-second cuts have been played, but we await the airing of the finished epic with anticipation. It'll be a well deserved, if a little crazy, showcase for one of the most exciting directors around.