Henry-Alex Rubin

The French-American maverick filmmaker Henry-Alex Rubin is on a mission – to tell the truth on screen, even if that means forcing brands to withdraw their most popular products.Tim Cumming pulls a few strings with the master manipulator behind some of the most talked-about spots in advertising

Henry-Alex Rubin moves like a man on the run – and with a mission. Here he is on a Thursday night in London, four years into a furiously busy advertising career, working through Smuggler with Saatchi up on Charlotte Street, hurrying from hotel to café to agency while fielding calls and plotting the latest T-Mobile spot, having just flown in from LA for a few days of scouting and meetings, and what he’s looking for is the truth. In advertising? That’s some mission. “I’m interested in the idea of how able or unable we are to really film the truth,” he explains. “Advertising is about creating a completely different perception from what is the truth, and what is interesting for me is to find truths that I can put on film, so that what people watch feels authentic, and feels more like the truth than they’re used to.”

Rubin was born to an American art historian father and Parisian mother, and was brought up in both America and France – he usefully holds citizenship in both countries. “My father was studying art history in Paris in 1968. He was running around taking over the art history building with his buddies, thinking they were revolutionaries. And I guess they were, in a sense. They didn’t have weapons, but they stopped Paris, the students and the unions. They stopped everything.” Everything except love, that is. “My parents knew each other for about ten days before they decided to get married,” he reveals. “And they’re still together.”

A specialist in 19th-century French painting, James Henry Rubin regularly took his son to art galleries on both sides of the Atlantic – the Rubin household was obviously a cultured one – and young Henry-Alex was drawn to the cutting-edge video art he saw with his father while growing up – “conceptual cinema, and artists like Bill Viola and Bruce Nauman. At college I did a lot of documentary film, because, to me, real stories are more surprising than fictional narrative.”

His documentary career includes the Academy Award-nominated Murderball (2005), an intimate, if bone-crunching portrait of the hard-knock life of quadriplegic rugby players in the USA and Canada; Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme (2000), featuring Mos Def and Tupac Shakur; and a 1997 portrait of maverick American filmmaker Henry Jaglom, whose improvised, unscripted features have been a consistent source of inspiration. “He really likes to watch people flail and panic on film, and sometimes to rise to the challenge,” he says of Jaglom’s method. “A lot of people really hate him, find him solipsistic and boring and pointless… But he was after something you can’t get if you script a movie. It’s watching people under pressure on film. Sometimes a truth emerges from that style.”

His entrée into advertising came with the New York premiere of Murderball, where he first met the co-founder of Smuggler, the production company he’s been with for four years now, Patrick Milling Smith. “Making ads was the last thing on my mind,” he recalls. “It seemed like the absolute way to sell out and hang up your hat.” Subsequent events would soon change his mind.

“After the screening, Patrick came up and put his arm around me, and said, ‘do you fancy a crack at some spots’.” Rubin’s initial reaction? “At that time, I didn’t even know what spots were.”

Since then, Rubin’s deftly stage-managed encounters between truth and image have propelled him to the front ranks of commercials directors, his hilarious and revealing use of real people in almost-real situations pulling off marketing coups for the likes of Burger King, Walmart, Sony Ericsson, Microsoft, Domino’s Pizza and Renault – the latter shot this summer in Gisburn, Lancashire, a Megane-free town where a French ‘specialist in joie de vivre’ tries to sell Renaults to the Brits. “My actor couldn’t understand a goddamn word any of these villagers were saying,” remembers Rubin, “so he had an earpiece through which I fed him lines to say – and I‘d watch the monitor to make sure he didn’t get punched.”

Rubin calls it “Borat with a heart” – though the Daily Mail went for a more considered ‘Residents’ fury as French mock English village in new car advert’.

And after four years of making ‘spots’ with Smuggler, how does he view the industry, from the inside? “Some of the smartest and most creative people by far I’ve ever met are in advertising – I would not have expected that,” he confesses. “They think unconventionally. Most of us follow rules we think exist. But most of the time they don’t. And that’s when you notice something fresh or exciting – when you see someone else, not yourself, break the rules that you imagined existed.”

You could expect Rubin to throw away the rule book for T-Mobile’s follow–up to its much-feted Liverpool Street station Dance and Trafalgar Square Sing-along spots, this time set at Heathrow’s Terminal Five, and perhaps Rubin’s biggest job to date. “When the T-Mobile Dance piece came out, we were all really impressed,” he says. “I thought it was incredibly fresh and new. It borrowed a lot of things that exist in the culture – fl ash mobs, improvisation, performance art – and all under the rubric, ‘life’s for sharing’. That’s an incredibly wide-open container for an idea.”

For Rubin, the idea is king. “That’s really what advertising is – who has the freshest or most exciting idea. And how do you translate that and circle back somehow to the products. It’s as legitimate to me as any movie by Sam Brakhage, or any cool experimental short fi lm I saw in college.”

His work stands out for its guerrilla mix of You’ve Been Framed-style hidden-camera set-ups, Borat-inspired situationism, and a wandering, hand-held eye. Burger King Whopper Freakout, discretely filmed at a real fast-food emporium, captures the reactions of customers as they’re told that the Whopper has been discontinued. It looks raw, almost ad hoc, and feels immediate, but the ingredients have been carefully prepared. “I don’t tell my DP where the action is,” he laughs, “and it drives him crazy. I don’t want him to know. I want him to pull his own focus and find it for himself. That’s messed up a few shots, but it’s also gotten them very naturally.” And that is the nub of a hugely successful technique – Whopper Freakout bagged him an Integrated and two gold Film Lions, and racked up millions of hits online. “I’ve found this fun side of the pool to splash around in,” he says, “which is to do things for real – or at least to make them look real.”

Persuading a client to trick their own customers in real time is one thing, but Rubin went one stage further with his spot for Domino’s, which had real people from the company – from the president on down to the cooks to the restaurant staff and harassed-looking focus group leaders – admitting that their old pizza recipe tasted like cardboard smeared with ketchup – the kind of unacknowledged truth you simply don’t expect from brand marketing. “It was dangerous for them, because even though that may be the truth, you don’t want to say that to your shareholders. You don’t want to denigrate your own product. So it was very courageous for them to let it air – and by all accounts it’s done wonders. They’re now ahead of the pack, their stock shot up, they had everyone from Jon Stewart to Jay Leno talking about the fact that they had the balls to come out and say this stuff, and that’s very interesting to me – truth in advertising.” That mission bell rings again.

As well as possessing a documentary maker’s acute eye for the foibles that make big brands human, there’s plenty of laugh-out-loud humour in his work, and no more so than in Sony Ericsson Product Testing Unit, where six groups – toddlers, seniors, surfers, models, glam rockers and Jersey Shore guidos – test competing smartphones. “We told them they were auditioning for commercials I’d written that didn’t really exist. I picked the ones that weren’t good actors at all, the ones that seemed the most… guileless… and hauled them back in and asked them if they wanted to be part of a testing group. And at the end of that I came out and told them, congratulations, you’ve booked the commercial. And they had just been in it.”

Fearful of action from competitors, however, Sony’s lawyers insisted on a disclaimer at the beginning proclaiming the ads ‘a dramatic re-enactment with actors’ – which was not the case. “I pride myself in doing things for real, and that one hurt my feelings more than anything I’ve ever done.” on the testing ground that is YouTube (“the most cynical peanut gallery on the face of the earth” says Rubin) his Sony ads have drawn much heated debate. “You guys Do realise this is all an act” roared one recent poster of the ‘models’ spot. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s a brilliant campaign, but unfortunately these are ACToRS.” It’s the poster who’s wrong, but it’s exactly what Rubin wants to hear. That grey area where people don’t know whether to believe something is real or not has become Rubin’s favourite stamping ground – and it is where he can measure his work’s success.

“People say that reality in TV and ads is just a phase, but I don’t think so. It’s here and it’s here to stay.” He points to the success of directors such as Paul Greengrass, reinvigorating the Bourne franchise with less gloss, handheld camerawork and more naturalistic acting.

“Authenticity and reality is where ads are going,” he says. “Companies and politicians are starting to realise that if they are honest, people respond to that.” And his own quest for truth in the marketplace is one that emphasises the human over the ideal, and the magic of the real experience over the received idea. “And if you can Trojan horse your own ideas, interests and thematic concerns into the work you do,” he adds, with a touch of his parent’s 1968 revolutionary spirit seeping in, “then you’re really having fun.”