Jake Nava: Nava Say Nava

His promo for Beyoncé’s Single Ladies was viewed 80 million times, he helped bring British street music into the mainstream and he knows how to shift hair products, too. Is there anything Jake Nava can’t do? David Knight meets a phenomenal success

Jake Nava works with the A-list, in Hollywood, hip-hop, pop and fashion. And we’re talking the very A stars of the A-list here – Beyoncé, Britney, Kanye, Kylie, Shakira, Alicia Keys, Kate Moss, Cindy Crawford, Jessica Alba, Halle Berry, Leona Lewis, Jay-Z.

His music videos include two bona fide classics: Beyoncé’s Crazy In Love, and Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It) – the latter was voted 2009 video of the year at the MTV VMAs and at the BET Awards, it was also ranked third by readers of Rolling Stone magazine in a recent video of the decade feature. He has made some of the most unashamedly sexy (and occasionally notorious) videos of the past decade, and his commercials for top cosmetics and perfume brands such as Revlon and L’Oréal are among the most successful ever in their markets.

But Nava is not one to rest on his laurels. So here he is, in a café in London’s East End, talking about fighting for more creative freedom in some of the more unyielding arenas of commercial filmmaking, and confronting the controversy surrounding Monster, his new Kanye West video.

Scary monsters and super Single Ladies

Monster has been whipping up a storm since it was leaked to the internet late last year revealing Kanye and friends (including Jay-Z) surrounded by fashion models. No surprises there, only these girls happen to be dead – hanging from chains, lolling in beds and under sofas – while a zombie army attempts to tear Kanye to pieces.

“It’s about the demonisation of Kanye – his fall from grace when he jumped up on stage and started going on about Single Ladies,” Nava explains. “He experienced a lot of criticism and ended up writing a song about feeling like a monster. We fulfilled the prophesy together, and he is monstrous in the Monster video.”

It feels appropriate that the director of Single Ladies should place an ironic perspective onto the hysterical reaction to Kanye West’s antics at the MTV VMAs – when he told ingénue Taylor Swift she should hand over her award to Beyoncé for Single Ladies. In fact Nava seems almost less interested in the video’s contentious imagery (“Kanye wanted to amp up the horror factor”) than its styling: the UK rude boy look for Kanye, and the classic mod suit worn by Jay-Z. These things – European style in a very American medium, the rap video – are what matter, he argues, when you are reaching a mass audience. “I don’t like conventional American rap videos very much. Any time a genre becomes repetitive it loses its interest to me. But I get a kick out of eroding those traditional boundaries between genres.”

Remaining a la mod

Jake Nava is the guy from London who made it big in the toughest bastions of US commercial filmmaking. But he keeps close to his roots. (The mod suit is important to him: he had his first when he was just 11 years old, inspired by a babysitter who had a part in the film Quadrophenia). He is still dividing his time and work between the UK and US – in fact, spending more time in the UK than he has for some time. Recent British jobs include directing Cheryl Cole for L’Oréal, ads for Max Factor and a compelling spot for Lucozade.

And there has always been another side to his game beyond the Beyoncé videos and Revlon ads. There is his superbly entertaining tale of Essex ‘dodgy geezers’ for Audio Bullys, Way Too Long; his powerful, D&AD-nominated anti-gun crime film Stop the Guns, made for the London Met Police’s Operation Trident; and also his recent Alicia Keys video for Unmistakeable that throws a spotlight on continuing racial divisions in the US. These demonstrate a rather underappreciated gift for visual storytelling. “I’ve always split my time and focus between sometime-narrative, European type of work and the more mainstream videos I’ve done for the American divas,” he says. “It was cool to do the Lucozade thing because it utilised both halves of the skillset.”

Bringing the street in from the cold

The Wild Ones spot launched a new youth-lifestyle campaign for Lucozade – creative-directed by ECD Nils Leonard at Grey Advertising – featuring British rap star Tinie Tempah, world champion boxer Katie Taylor, and Blink 182 drummer Travis Barker in an intense, atmospheric three-way jam session. “Nils had a very dynamic vision, and wanted it to have the spirit of a really good video that everyone starts sending around the web,” Nava explains. “The challenge was to make a film that really did make you feel an adrenalin rush building in parallel with the three of them, the idea of the alchemy of the three individuals’ separate skillsets, when put together inspiring them all to greater heights of energy. I wanted to make it like a real thing that genuinely you might go to – a kind of one-off happening. So I was actually channeling the theatre events that my dad put on when I was a kid.”

Jake’s father José arrived in London from Mexico to become a driving force behind pioneering avant garde theatre group The People Show – where he worked with, among others, future director Mike Figgis. His older brothers also tried their hands at directing music videos. Jake was still at film school – and also running a club night – when he directed his first commissioned video, for Misty Oldland, a British R&B singer, in the early 90s.

While his contemporaries were making videos for the 90s Britpop and dance booms, Nava was taking on the challenge of bringing British urban music and street culture into the mainstream, when it was considered the poor relation of US hip-hop and R&B. A significant early crossover success was his video for Mark Morisson’s Return Of The Mack – a huge international hit – which he describes as “the first video I made that I was pleased with.”

Ironically, his younger brother Emil Nava is also a video director now working with a new generation of urban artists who are also proper pop stars, as indigenous British urban music has successfully reached the mainstream. “I’m very pleased that’s happened,” says Jake. “I was always trying to break down those kind of conventional ideas of what is considered appropriate imagery for different cultural demographics.”

At the same time, he yearned to move on to a bigger stage, and his breakthrough into the hugely competitive world of American hip-hop videos could have hardly been more spectacular. He directed Crazy In Love for Beyoncé in 2003, adding a European sensibility and a suitable edge of intensity and danger – perhaps best expressed by the exploding limo with the singer apparently still inside – to what became a huge global hit.

Because they’re all worth it

“After Crazy In Love I more or less spent a year living in a hotel in LA, working all the time,” he recalls. Over the next couple of years there were videos for Britney Spears, Kylie Minogue, Lindsay Lohan, Usher, Dido, Enrique Iglesias, Mariah Carey, Pink, the Rolling Stones – and several more for Beyoncé.

The videos have duly led to commercials, including work for HSBC, Del Monte and Puma. But it’s in cosmetics and perfume that his work has had the true Midas touch – Jake Nava and beautiful famous women has been a winning combination for Revlon, L’Oréal, Rimmel and Max Factor. “The Jessica Alba spot I did was the most popular Revlon ad ever. Cheryl Cole for L’Oréal got the biggest sales spike of any launch for L’Oréal.” His latest perfume ad, for Rochas, comes as something of a surprise in that there is no celebrity involved.

Sweet Charity (put a ring on it)

He also directed the ad last year for Beyoncé-endorsed fragrance Heat, precipitating one of the most successful perfume launches ever. That was another landmark in his special relationship with the singer, which includes the Armani ad for Diamonds perfume, and numerous music videos. The most recent of these – Single Ladies and If I Were A Boy – were shot back-to-back in 2008. “She wanted to make two videos; one dance-based, the other one narrative-based, shoot them at the same time and retain a relatively minimalist anchor.” And there is definitely some erosion of traditional barriers going on in Single Ladies, as Nava combines R&B with the influence of legendary Broadway choreographer Bob Fosse – there are elements of the musical film Sweet Charity in there.

But the whole thing about Single Ladies was that it took on a life if its own. “The quality of the choreography was so unusually high that I was able to keep the shots for as long as I wanted.” Nava recalls. “I just conceived evolving camera moves that served to show the movement from the best possible angle at every moment.”

The director who ‘misdirects’

The song was broken down, then covered in different photographic styles, then put together again. “The beauty of it was that it was both planned and freestyle – there’s a balance of being really clear about what you want to get across in a film and leaving the scope for the artist to take you somewhere that you didn’t expect to go.”

He is also happy with its companion narrative video. In If I Were A Boy Beyoncé plays a New York patrol cop in a relationship triangle with her male patrol partner and her boyfriend. But there is ultimately a role-switching twist in the tale – what he calls the ‘misdirect’. It’s also there in other videos, like Leona Lewis’s Happy and James Blunt’s Carry You Home, and Nava’s skill in these emotional stories is making them repeatedly enjoyable, when the surprise element is over. “The misdirect has become a kind of a theme,” he confirms.

An unmistakeable labour of love

Another fine example of his narrative work is Alicia Keys’ Unmistakeable, made last year. Essentially it’s a love story across racial divide in small-town America – but Nava gives this slick commercial piece for one of America’s biggest stars a sharp edge by having this story repeat through the decades from the 50s to the present day and confronting the continuing existence of racism on both sides of the divide. The video has now been commended by the NAACP, the oldest civil rights organization in the US.

“It’s definitely about the fact that in some parts of America it’s still socially unacceptable to have relationships with people from across the tracks – it was the case in the 50s, and still the case now. Yes there was stuff on the net from black and white bigots objecting to it, and that made me proud that it had such tangible effect. Now the cultural impact is so quantifiable, it makes the concept and meaning of every film you make more pertinent and important.”

The Alicia Keys video became a “labour of love”, made possible by now having Cherry Films – the production company, ostensibly for all his UK and European work, that he set up with his longtime producer Ben Cooper. “We set up Cherry for creative autonomy, to be able to make decisions about which films needed more investment of time and even money. In general we’ve been lucky in that we’ve had a flow of creative stuff happening.”

It has led to Nava and Cooper being more involved in the creative process on several commercial projects, including working on scripts for Cindy Crawford’s line in shoes and a new Max Factor campaign, bringing treatment-writing skills from music videos into a different sphere. And he is bullish about chipping away at the conservative edifice of the global beauty industry. “They do believe they know their business, but what young people perceive as entertaining is evolving. It’s not enough any more to make an ad with a girl that looks pretty in it.”

The cherry on the cake

In the States, having been with Anonymous Content for some years, he has recently moved to Believe Media. In fact, with Nava now spending more time in the UK, the activities of Cherry and Believe are likely to become more integrated. “In England we retain our identity as Cherry but the Believe reps will be working with us,” he explains. “It’s a partnership that I feel really good about.”

He’s also now been discovered by the British film industry, having signed a development deal with Working Title on a sci-fi thriller. It’s not the first time he has been picked up by the movie industry. “Part of the evolution in America was that I did get greenlit on a massive Hollywood movie and I did learn that when they say ‘greenlit’ it doesn’t mean that it won’t become un-greenlit. But I think those experiences just make you more determined to express yourself – and capable of putting a team around you who are conducive to not just getting a film made but one you really feel great about. And actually that’s not so different in music videos and ads.”