thirtytwo

In recent months Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern have worked with several rock ‘n’ roll legends, directed their first commercial – featuring one of those legends – and been nominated for a Grammy. Which is not bad for a couple of guys who just a few years ago were visiting government call centres and “filming people doing training”. This is the story behind a directing double act known as thirtytwo: two young men who found themselves in a career and creative dead-end, but vowed to do something about it. In the past three years thirtytwo’s progress has been impressive. They found success with a series of music videos for the likes of Franz Ferdinand, Elbow, The Fall, The Wombats, Chase & Status and others, and have been influential in the medium’s creative renaissance. They deconstructed the narrative video in their 2009 promo for Franz Ferdinand’s Ulysses, and then reconstructed it again for Chase & Status’s Let You Go. Where they have ventured, others have followed. And that’s not all. In 2009 they directed the highly acclaimed feature-length documentary No Distance Left To Run, chronicling the history of Blur. At the beginning of this year it was nominated for a Grammy, for Best Longform Video. And for good measure, towards the end of last year they made their commercial-directing debut. Slow The Pace for Kronenbourg 1664 features Lemmy Kilminster – legendary frontman of Motörhead – playing a stripped-down version of the classic Ace Of Spades in a French bar. That evidently required sensitive handling of their star turn, who they describe as “reassuringly difficult”.

In training

thirtytwo are versatile, smart and innovative. But their career has not been all rock ‘n’ roll. They have paid their dues, in the prosaic environment of corporate filmmaking. It seems that much of the drive, the appetite and the groundwork for their current success comes from that experience. But first things first: why ‘thirtytwo’? “We’d done our first music video and it needed a director’s name attached to it,” explains Southern. “A friend of ours knew this really pretentious art student who enrolled on his college course under the name ‘32’ – no one knew his real name.” “And he never revealed it,” adds Lovelace. “That tickled us.” Lovelace and Southern met at Liverpool’s John Moores University in the late 90s and bonded over a shared enthusiasm for film, and an antipathy for their course and fellow students. When they graduated, they applied for a business grant to start a production company in Liverpool, and surprised themselves by getting it.

Learning Curve

“For the first six months we had no work and spent our time filming people out of the office window,” Southern recalls. “But then, bizarrely, we started to get quite decent clients – like IBM and PriceWaterhouseCoopers.” It was the start of a learning curve in terms of shooting and production budgets. It was also when “we learnt we weren’t business people” says Southern. Certainly employing their friends in full time jobs was not financially smart. “We had this big salary bill, and had to take on the most uninspiring work to pay it,” Southern continues. “It intensely focused us on what we really did want to do.” Lovelace is even more blunt. “The appeal of earning some cash when you come out of university quickly fades when you’re doing the same boring shit.” This led them to try other things, such as managing a band (“very unsuccessfully”) and, more productively, making no-budget music videos, several for the soon-to-be-signed indie-pop outfit The Wombats. They started by making animated pieces in Southern’s kitchen, but it was ambitious, kitchen-sink efforts like the video for The Wombats’ future hit Moving To New York – where, among other things, singer Matthew Murphy is tormented by a giant guinea pig – that would prove crucial to their career change.

Shooting from the hip

When Lovelace moved to London in 2007 (with Southern soon to follow), they looked for proper music video representation and were fairly quickly signed by Believe Media on the back of the Wombats videos. Then Believe closed their music video department, so Lovelace and Southern moved on to Pulse. It was a fruitful move: thirtytwo were well equipped to embrace the multidisciplinary ethos at Pulse, which incorporates music videos, commercials, online content, live concert shoots and TV production. Their early videos there demonstrated their versatility: animation work for Wild Beasts’ The Devil’s Crayon, VFX-enhanced choreography for Elbow’s The Bones Of You, slapstick comedy for the Young Knives’ Up All Night. They also satisfied the industry’s increasing demands for web content – including Web Transmission, a broodingly atmospheric live set by the Arctic Monkeys. Then came their video for Franz Ferdinand’s Ulysses and their next major creative breakthrough: Lovelace and Southern portrayed the previously sharpsuited, urbane band as gibbering, acid-casualties, marooned in a semi-comic, surreal LA nightmare. They were also able to experiment with film, making the video in 16mm and even Super 8mm. “We wanted to hark back to the American new wave and shoot it very loose – not make it up as we went along but allow for the film to come to life as we made it,” Southern explains. “It was the first time that the thing we imagined beforehand ended up on screen.” Ulysses came together at the last minute so it helped that thirtytwo knew the band well – they had made a ‘making of’ film for the new album – and it was that kind of project that stood them in good stead when they pitched to make a documentary about Blur, as the band prepared for a summer of reunion shows in 2009.

All a-blur

Describing themselves as “of Britpop age” – Lovelace is now 32 and Southern “32 plus one” – they felt that they knew the best approach to take with Blur. “It was 20 years since they started, so we thought rather than just do something about the comeback tour, we should make the film about them, about the band,” notes Lovelace. However their first meeting, when Blur were in the early stages of rehearsals, was a near-disaster. “The impression we got was they didn’t know we were coming or why we were there, so we had to cold pitch our idea,” Southern recalls. “But that meeting was quite weird because they started reminiscing, and you could see the temperature change during the meeting. We were like ‘that’s never going to happen but at least we got to sit in a room with Blur’, but then two weeks before their main rehearsals started we got the go-ahead.”

Making the distance

What followed was intense. They shot for five or six weeks during the rehearsal and tour, completed interviews after the tour and then completed the edit themselves before Christmas 2009 – six months work condensed into half that time span by virtue of working 18-hour days. “We’d worked on how the film should work structurally beforehand,” Southern explains. “If we hadn’t done that we would’ve gone in completely blind and not known what we were shooting.” They also agree this was where the Liverpool years came in useful. “When we were shooting Blur, 80 per cent of what’s on the screen was me and Southern in a room with the band,” says Lovelace. “If we hadn’t had that experience of the technical side of things, it would’ve been us plus a cameraman and a soundman. That feeling of being intimate in the space with the band wouldn’t be there.” In No Distance the directors manage to combine revealing interview material with fantastic archive footage – some of it very rare indeed, including the earliest Blur concert filmed, on VHS – interwoven into the story of their reunion shows. No wonder that critical acclaim for No Distance has been near-universal – and awards and nominations have followed. But the success of No Distance did have a temporary downside. “An artist who we won’t name asked us to stay on hold for another documentary project and then never got back to us,” reveals Southern. “We wasted three months waiting. So we came back into music videos feeling pretty much off-radar.”

Chase & Status

But their return to videos last summer with the DJ-producer duo Chase & Status’ Let You Go turned out to be one of the best of the year, notably reviving storytelling and characterisation in a way not seen in videos for ages: it features Patrick Chase, manipulative host of a Jerry Springer-style morning TV show, who combines his sanctimonious and smug TV persona with a secret life more debauched than anyone on the programme. Similarities between the TV show in the video and The Jeremy Kyle Show – Britain’s version of Jerry Springer – are impossible to ignore. Lovelace and Southern do not deny them. “I hate that man so much,” mutters Southern of Kyle, adding that they did not believe anyone would take a plunge on a treatment that was a cocktail of Kyle’s show and Werner Herzog’s remake of Bad Lieutenant. In fact, they were given a free hand by Chase & Status – and a decent budget – but its the scene-chewing performance of stage actor Glenn Carter as Chase which makes the video. “We did this big casting, and Glenn was the first guy we saw,” recalls Lovelace. “You think ‘fuck, he can’t be the right one because he’s the first guy’. And then eight hours later he’s still the one.” “We actually wrote him a two-page biography of his character,” adds Southern. “We tried to do it properly and gave him a history. We workshopped a scenario with the actors and we could probably cut a real show – that was the plan at one stage. It was very improvised around scenarios, so what you see on-screen is kind of in the moment.” And as the extras who made up the audience “weren’t really aware of what they were coming to watch, some of the audience reaction is semi-real”. Its notable that Let You Go has been at the forefront of a fresh wave of mainstream videos featuring gritty narratives – but the next stage for thirtytwo has been to graduate to commercials. They say that the script for Kronenbourg’s Slow The Pace – by Matt Doman and Ian Heartfield at BBH London – “came a bit out of nowhere”. Their experience working with musicians was to come in useful with Lemmy, who evidently had reservations about the ad’s central concept. Their first task was supervising his re-recording of Ace Of Spades, and the rocker made it clear that he was not prepared to slow it down too much. “Every time we said ‘slower’... well, put it this way, you could see where his threshold was,” says Southern. “But I think he was right. It’s groovedriven rather than melodically-driven, so there’s only so slow you can make it.”

Rockabilly royalty

Since then, Lovelace and Southern have worked with more rock legends – one even older than the sixty-something Lemmy. Their video for Thunder On The Mountain by Wanda Jackson, who enjoyed rockabilly hits in the 50s, together with Jack White of The White Stripes fame, who produced her new album, takes them back to straightforward performance. Shot in a Nashville recording studio, it is all the more riveting for its simplicity. And they have also shot a second commercial – for BBC Radio 4’s recent cinema season, featuring recreations of iconic scenes from famous movies. And the exciting projects keep on coming, ranging from new commercials to new long-form proposals. “One’s a hybrid – a music documentary that’s a comedy fiction film as well, with the musicians playing themselves.” Southern reveals. “The shooting schedule is rapidly approaching so its another Blur-type situation.” With that, Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern are off to their next meeting. Within days, they will be in Los Angeles for the Grammys. It’s all a very long way from filming in call centres.