Guy Shelmerdine: Fun Guy

He’d like to be nibbling caviar on a yacht in Cannes with pretty women, he’d also like advertising’s budgets to stop shrinking. But despite life not being fair, as befits the co-founder of former directing team Happy, Guy Shelmerdine is a cheerful man. Tim Cumming finds him nursing a hangover and managing a half-smile

“You hear these stories about the 80s,” says Guy Shelmerdine in the kind of English accent that must work wonders on the West Coast.  “If it was then, I think we’d be having our interview on a yacht in Cannes. It would be nice, spread over three days, helicoptered out there. Let’s pretend we’re doing that in our article. ‘Feeling a little seasick talking to Guy on the Riviera, with lavish caviar and girls everywhere…’” So here we are, courtesy of Smuggler, lounging on a boat in the bay at Cannes, sunning ourselves on deck with silver plates of lobster tail the colour of fake tan, tall glasses of pink champagne fizzing on a zinc bar top…

But this isn’t the affluent 80s. It’s 2011, unfeasibly early on a Friday morning in the long, quiet bar of the Soho Hotel, and director Guy Shelmerdine, who divides his time pretty evenly between LA and London, is just back from a four-day wedding bender on the west coast of Ireland, where Smuggler’s Brian Carmody just got married. “The whole of Smuggler was out in Ireland, in Adare,” he explains, and shows me iPhone snaps of their complete roster of directors – all elegantly suited and booted. “You fly to Shannon and it’s about an hour from there. LA came to Ireland. It was a pretty epic wedding. In a stately home. In one day I did golf, archery and clay pigeon shooting.”

An expertly barista’d bowl of cappuccino is set in front of him, and you can almost sense him rising through the grey shale of a mighty hangover
as he begins to address the business of the day. There’s shots to talk to, and afterwards, a producer from Smuggler will guide him back to the office to look over a couple of scripts for a job that begins shooting in less than two weeks. As he points out, unlike the legendary spending sprees of 80s advertising, “time and budgets are tighter. It can be good for creativity, but you see ideas that are executed not so well – it would be better if they’d had a little more time and money.”

Graphic design vs. film school

Shelmerdine is a prolific director who started working in advertising in LA while still studying at Central St Martins in London. He’d done his foundation course at Kingston in southwest London, where a tutor advised him that, if he wanted to get into making films – which he did, right from the beginning – he should study graphic design rather than go to film school.

He already had form – his family background saw him on set in a world of invention, perfection and confection as the son of producer Mark Shelmerdine, who, between 1972 and 1990, owned the iconic London Films (founded by Alexander Korda in the 30s, and responsible for the likes of The Thief of Baghdad and Things to Come). “He made incredible dramas like I Claudius, Poldark and Thérèse Raquin, for British TV. I was always on film sets, and it was always my interest to become a director.”

While still a graphic design student at St Martins, he started working for an ad agency in LA called Ground Zero, first on print, as an art director, and shortly afterwards on his first television work. “When I graduated – and I don’t think you could get away with this at any other college than St Martins – my degree show featured ads that I’d already made in LA.”

From Ground Zero in LA, he connected with the Cliff Freeman agency in New York, which specialised in comedy, an area that Shelmerdine has gone on to explore in much of his subsequent work. What he remembers as a ‘difficult’ three-month animation project for Fox Sports led to his first spec job, just after 9/11, with production designer Tom Wales. That was an anti-smoking spot called Lungs, in which the eponymous organs are coughed up from the poor addict’s chest like a nightmare image from Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch. The spot is comedic, but uncomfortable – this is a 30-second spot on addiction, self-harm and death. A later ad for Benylin Mucus and the eye-watering Dog Breath spot for Wrigley’s used similar scenes of gross bodily expulsion.

It was in 2001 that he became one of the founding partners (alongside Richard Farmer) of directing duo Happy, on the back of a simple but demanding philosophy that he still adheres to. “The original aim was to create happiness as a collective, and to make other people happy, and I still take that on. Everyone has a job to do, everyone’s job is on the line, everyone has things they want to achieve, and I help to facilitate that as well as getting what I want from it.”

Inspiration from the top guys

Along the way, he worked with some of the industry’s top directors, and soaked up influences from the likes of Jake Scott, Mike Mills and Traktor. “They all influenced and inspired me. One was called The Knowledge for ESPN. Dante Ariola directed it, and it was a lovely campaign that won a D&AD award. That had a big impact on my own work. There was a darkness to the comedy which I like, and the work was well crafted and cinematic.”

His own favourite from Happy is a spot for Bacardi (Fly), where two flies sit together, and the older one says, ‘I was born 24 hours ago, I’ve wasted my life, don’t be like me’. And he dies. And the younger fly decides he’ll live an amazing life, and jumps up and flies around and does a lot of crazy things in one night. Then, in the middle of having good times in the bedroom with two pillow-fighting cuties, he suddenly dies. “It was pretty funny,” says Shelmerdine, deadpan. “There’s a comedic element to my work that I like to think I can execute well.” Has he always had that bent? “Yes, being British and having a good sense of humour. There’s a funny element to me. But there’s a serious side too, a touch of darkness. The fly that died….”

He signed up with Smuggler just as it was establishing itself back in 2003. “I had representation in London, and I was looking to get US representation, and three different friends in the same week advised me to talk to Smuggler. It was like a perfect marriage – they were starting out and so was I.” What snared them is a beautifully simple but brilliantly effective spec ad for a publisher, following a working man obliviously walking through mayhem while stuck firmly in his book. “They did pay me a little money to do that,” he remembers, “A seed budget – enough money to buy the book with…” Since then, the budgets, and the sets, have upscaled, There was the ambitious Pinball production for Mini Cooper, in which a vast pinball set was erected in a disused ice rink in Prague. “We tried to get as much in camera as possible. There is something really nice and organic about that method. There was only a slight digital element to it. But even now, I’d try and do it the same way.”

Bridging the Atlantic

His directing work, he says, is a 75/25 split between America and Britain, and the main difference between the two markets is that in America, the director usually leaves the project after the shoot. “Whereas I try to stay involved and have influence all the way through… With any project, it has to become your obsession for the period of time you’re with it. Like the Weetabix ad, I’ll obsess over everything about it until it’s finished.”

Aah, Weetabix. How many did you have today? The brand has always had a strong, and much loved presence, and Shelmerdine’s latest spot for them, Big Day, features the challenges each family member – including the baby – must face through the course of their day. The end result works wonders with a brilliant script and a brilliant cast. “What’s great about the idea is that it’s drawn out of a really great strategy. Like, ‘how many Weetabix?’, it’s something you’re born with. It’s a part of the culture.”

Though he started out as a graphic designer and art director, he has a great empathy with actors. “I like working with them. It’s way more part of my focus these days. In the past I made the mistake of giving more attention to the production design and not putting as much love in the talent and performance, which I have now learned is the most important thing. Creating the perfect harmonious balance between performance and design is critical to my method of working now.”

In these days of multiplatform spots, and ever-evolving media technology on which to project them, Shelmerdine’s focus stays on the quality. “I like things to be more crafted. Lit and framed properly. The quality should stay the same, even for a viral.” As for technology’s impact behind the camera, “it’s making things happen quicker and quicker. The timelines, the schedule for commercials tend to be shrinking.” Deadpan, he adds: “People think decisions can be made quicker.” He seems not to agree with this. 

And if the world of 2011 is tussling with economic uncertainties, Shelmerdine’s view of the industry, and his own ambitions within and beyond it, remains pragmatic, but upbeat. “I’d love to work on longer format work, whether it’s TV or film, but at the same time I love making commercials. People still need them, even in a recession. People still buy cars. If I make a movie, and it’s not next year, that doesn’t bother me.” He half-smiles, half-winces, and this being Shelmerdine, you half expect his Adare-born hangover to physically leap out of him and sink a hair-of-the-dog Guinness right there on the bar top. “I can wait,” he adds. “It has to be the right thing. I’m patient.”