Jeff Labbé

It’s no cliché to say that Jeff Labbé is a hands-on director, he once grabbed a cast member by his shirt – ripping it in the process – in order to wring a performance from him. And he’s fearless,too – the ‘actor’ was ex-boxer Nigel Benn.Tim Cumming meets the son of Mississippi Delta oil workers with a fondness for character and a painterly touch

Cajun-born Jeff Labbé’s just flown in from the Louisiana backwoods of his childhood, spending his mornings with family crabbing in the bayous with a bag of chicken heads for bait and a clutch of soft wire baskets. “We get blue crab and once in a while a soft shell. We lay about 30 traps and go around the next day and get ’em. Right now, it’s alligator hunting season,” he adds. “That’s amazing to watch.”

Though he doesn’t quite wrestle with alligators as a director, he’s survived grabbing boxer Nigel Benn by the scruff of his neck during the shoot for Carlsberg’s World Cup spot that saw English heroes such as Bobby Charlton, Trevor Brooking and boxer Benn giving advice and encouragement to England players in the tunnel before the great game. Their ears were obviously stuffed too full of money to listen, because the spot was a lot more powerful than the subsequent England effort. “They had a certain role – to motivate a team,” says Labbé of his star cast. “It’s just the team was a team of walking bodies in white jerseys.”

Not many manhandle Nigel Benn and get away with it, but Labbé’s up-close-and- personal style backs up his statement that “when you get me, you get all of me”.

He’s not beating about the bush. “Nigel was going to throw some jabs at the guys, and he did it once or twice and it was okay but it wasn’t right and I ran down the hallway and said, ‘Grab him! What are you doing? Hit him! I want you to really hit him!’ And he still wasn’t doing it right and I ran back up there and said, ‘are you fuckin’ world champion?’ and I grabbed him by his shirt and yanked him and his shirt ripped.” The crew around Labbé must have thought he was on a suicide mission. “We laughed and joked about it and then he did it. And he ended up doing a great job. So I guess when I direct I’m very hands-on.” Labbé pauses to consider. “But you’ve got to get in there and do it.”

Labbé took a roundabout route to directing. He grew up in Norco (pop: 3,579), that’s short for New Orleans Refinery Company. “I come from a big family – I have 61 first cousins,” he says in a rolling Southern drawl. “All my relatives work in the oil industry, either in distribution, refining or tankers.”

He’s come a long way from the oil refineries of the Mississippi Delta, but there are no airs and graces with Labbé. “Nothing changes that much for me,” he says. “This is the first time I’ve stayed here in this fancy place…” He gestures around him at the bar of his hotel near Wardour Street, London’s old film district. At the next low table a group of buyers examine a new line in designer underwear. “I walk down these streets and feel like the Midnight Cowboy,” he cries, breaking into laughter.

There’s a powerfully textural, painterly feel to Labbé’s work, and a sculptural heft to his characterisation. And he knows his film culture, citing the European and American New Wave as inspirations. And there’s something of the Method in the man’s immersion in his chosen subjects. You get the sense that he doesn’t sit back in his director’s chair for long, but walks all around his subject, covering every angle. “I love anything artistic, where you feel the characters in it and learn; that’s how I do my work,” he says, and sketches the origins of a lifelong creative streak. “I was raised drawing. As a young kid I was sick. I was in the hospital for a long time, so drawing was my way out of that. And I grew up in the country where you didn’t have the devices of the city so we got dirty and used our imaginations.”

Labbé moved with his family to southern California when he was in his teens, and studied fine art and illustration there – though he took longer than most to graduate, more or less hitting the road in the tradition of the Beats. “I was riding bulls, delivering hay,” he laughs, “I fucked around a lot. I finally made my way through at about 26 years old.”

His first industry work was in graphic design. “I was always a conceptual designer. I gravitated to the idea. The idea led the design.” It was a successful method. “I cracked some projects writing TV and did some spots as a writer and art director and creative and suddenly people like Weiden+Kennedy and Fallon were pitching their account to me, and I picked W+K.” Labbé spent five years as an art director there, working alongside the likes of Gondry, Jonze and Budgen, and took on a creative director post at Leo Burnett in 2003 before making his first films in 2005. Repped by Sonny in London and Industry Films in Canada, he’s built a reputation for big, character-rich work that marries art with commerce, compressing feature length characterisation and narrative into 60-second spots.

Davud Karbassioun of BBH London first worked with Labbé two years ago on the sexily feral Levi’s spots Secrets and Lies, and on the Break the Cycle campaign for Barnardo’s. “What’s brilliant about Jeff is the amount of work and texture he brings to the films. The Levi’s film was a very simple script about a conversation. He built so much into that, turned it into a big narrative and added so much texture to it.” Labbé enthuses: “I do love those back stories, you don’t see them on film but you feel them. When I read the Levi’s script, I took the words out and thought about the characters and the back story. I’ve been in that situation, I’ve lied to a girl, you know, I’ve wandered up a staircase… You gotta live, right? That script felt like something from Requiem for a Dream or Kerouac. There was stuff going on there that was really naughty, and really cool. And we developed it all together. Levi’s was a long process – and up the staircase we went. They were a very cool client.”

Barnardo’s Break the Cycle was conceived for both tv and internet, with a fundamental interactivity built into the narrative, and for Karbassioun, Labbé is “One of the very few brilliant traditional filmmaker commercial directors who really embraces digital opportunities. he can really take advantage of a more interactive experience or integrated type of idea.”

That interactivity extended to the set as well – Barnardo’s demanded as much personal commitment from the director as from the actors, brought in via street casting to play out their lives on screen. “The girl, Ellie, was breathtakingly powerful in it,” Labbé remembers of Break the Cycle.

Another, What We hear, features a teenage girl raging to camera in a therapy room before a voiceover of a vulnerable, desperately lonely girl cuts in looking for love and support. “That was even more challenging because the girl was really… She wouldn’t let me get close to her. So at Sonny one night I turned out all the lights and just sat down with her and asked her some heavy questions, and slowly we turned the lights up, and she started to trust me.”

It’s this hands-on, head-first, intuitive confidence that powers Labbé’s work as much as crafting it all in prep and edit. “She opened up about her life, and that’s what taught me the most about directing – characters. How much trust you can gain with them and how deep you’re willing to go and how deep they’re willing to let you go into them.”

For the last few years his work has been predominantly in the UK, and it looks set to stay that way, with an upcoming project for Chivas Regal due to add to his director’s reel in the coming months.

It was another British project that took him back to deepest, darkest Louisiana for a delightful slice of southern magical realism and reverie, the Walter spot with DDB for Volkswagen, one of his own favourites. “That’s very much a reflection of my youth,” he says of Walter, the almost mystical old man who teaches young tearaways to drive – after marching them down to the barber shop.

“That was a really cool idea I worked with at DDB. There was some homespun quality and honesty and sincerity about it. We had a blast. I took them out to a little town called Elijay which is really the deep, deep woods. Everyone in town knew it was going on. We went into the deep hills, got rifled out of a few places, people were saying ‘This is our mountain and you gotta get off’. So we had some experiences. The land, the people – I know like the back of my hand. But at the core of that film is this character. When I read the script it very much reminded me of my papa [his grandfather] who was running moonshine through the hills when I grew up. he did some bad things but he had a sense of charm about him.” Labbé laughs, the boy from Louisiana caught up momentarily in the soft-wire basket of his own backstory. “And my poppa was that way, too – he’d look at my hair and say ‘I can’t see your ears’ and he’d take me right to the barber shop.”