Ringan Ledwidge: The Crown Prince of Cannes

April showers have reached a London in drought, and the rain has released a sweet scent to the air as I thread through the narrow streets of Soho to the rain-slicked cobbled mews that Rattling Stick now calls home. The small but perfectly formed production company moved here in November, at the same time opening an office in LA and launching Rattling Stuff, a creative arm that reaches those parts that advertising cannot quite reach. This includes film projects, and Artful, an ambitious theatre production drawing on the worlds of Charles Dickens and present-day London.

At the centre of all this activity, with his directorial partner Daniel Kleinman, is Ringan Ledwidge, who has won countless awards, including numerous gold Lions, a Grand Prix at Cannes last year for Puma After Hours Athlete and, in 2011, was named Best Director by Campaign. His latest work for John Lewis, The Guardian and Nike must be in the running for awards at this year’s Cannes, and with those Rattling Stuff projects on the side, this is one director with a whole banquet of creativity to feast on. “I love adverts, don’t get me wrong,” he says, talking in Rattling Stick’s basement conference room, his feet perched up on the end of an enormous table. “But I love doing other things too.”

Ledwidge’s introduction to creativity came via his mum’s way with a pencil. “She was always drawing and I just naturally took that on from her,” he remembers. Except that his drawings would become comic strips. “My best mate and I would invent characters or design football boots, or create board games we could play.” And when Mrs Ledwidge got into photography, by the time he was nine, little Ringan, too, was busy taking his own photographs. “And my dad took me to see 2001 when I was six. Which completely blew my mind. I came out of there and literally didn’t speak for about a week.” He leans back and grins, adding: “That was my initiation into what you could do.”

Travels with a camera

Before making his first spot – for the launch of The Guardian Guide in the mid-90s – Ledwidge studied graphic design at Ravensbourne in Greenwich, south London, which he describes as “very much Swiss typography and very structured and infuriating”. He got heavily into photography in his second year and, after graduating, spent the next few years working sundry menial jobs to fund trips abroad with a 35mm-camera and rolls of film.

“Then I came back and thought, I should try and do something serious.” He put together a portfolio, and cold-called the capital’s art directors, after picking their names out of Hot Shoe. “I didn’t get any paid jobs, but I was building up a portfolio, still doing manual jobs, working in kitchens and bars.” He was also working with an editor friend on cutting surreal amalgams of sound and image on Super 8, and the results were inventive enough to bag him that first, albeit unpaid, Guardian spot via Tony Davidson and Kim Papworth at Leagas Delaney. “We get on set the first day and it’s the first time any of us have seen a film camera, or a studio, or a DOP, or the fact there was a guy who just did the focus, or who just put film in the camera.” Like the wide-eyed kid watching 2001 with his dad, it opened the door to a completely new world.

From first spot to top spot

After that first job, more work followed, but Ledwidge’s casual, creativity-led route into the industry is one, he fears, that is denied today’s nascent talent. “There’s a hell of a lot of young guys trying to come through now,” he reflects. “Everyone feels they can be a photographer or a writer – whether that’s true or not, I don’t know – but I did a talk recently and it was disappointing that a lot of what the kids were asking about was the financial side of it. And that’s because they’re on a student loan now. When I went to college you didn’t have that pressure to look for work. I was there to make stuff and have a laugh. To go nuts for a while. I see a lot of work from younger directors that feels formulaic, or reliant on a lot of tricks to give it class. They’re more concerned by how finessed it looks, rather than the idea, the concept and that’s what you should be chasing; your idea, the casting, the characters and what the story is.”

Every success story needs a good break, and for Ledwidge, that came when Creative Review made him one of their Dream Team of new directors in 1999, the same year he won the CFP-E/shots Young Director gong at Cannes. This conspired to pull the focus on him as a young directorial dynamo. “It made people feel safer to approach me and use me,” he says, and use him they did – on award-winning work for Lynx (the mutual seduction in reverse of Getting Dressed), which bagged a 2004 gold Lion, as well as for adidas, Nike and Coca-Cola.

“The devil is always in the detail,” he says of his creative method. “I like to prep for jobs. I like to know I’ve gone through everything thoroughly, but the majority of my work is on the cast – are they people that you want to watch? After that, it’s the storyboard and how I’m going to move the camera and tell the story. Then it’s location, I love location scouting, it’s a huge part of it for me. But the cast is the key.”

No more so than on his Life Story spot for Barnardo’s, featuring five actors playing Michael, from the age of 25 to five, taking us back from the troubled young man turning his life around with the help of Barnardo’s to the frightened, abused little child at the heart of it all. It does everything it’s supposed to do in terms of communication yet has the solid, human impact of a powerful drama. Ledwidge’s challenge was to convincingly cast five actors playing one character, and it’s that challenge that makes the spot. “You could’ve gone the Benjamin Button route, with lots of CGI, but you would lose the heart of it – the effect would take over. I wanted it to feel loose and authentic, even though it was carefully planned out.”

Playing with Time

Other big spots – the recent John Lewis Through the Ages, featuring electrical goods through the decades, or Levi’s Dangerous Liaisons, which concertinas Levi’s history into a la ronde of seductive tableaux – echo the Barnardo’s and Lynx campaigns in their backwards time structure. Is that an auteur theme coming through here? “It’s really weird, the whole time-travel thing, because an old friend pointed it out to me, and I thought, you’re right, I do, and I don’t know why. For some reason it appeals to me, or I’ve done a couple quite well, so people send scripts that have these ideas in them… I like that thing where you’re playing with the borders of reality.”

In 2005, he directed his first feature, Gone, a well-received psychological thriller set in the Australian Outback. “I want to do another film,” he says – if cautiously. “It was an arduous process, politically, and I learnt a lot.” One of those lessons was that in today’s film industry, huge budgets mean huge conservatism. “You delve into the film world, and some of it is nowhere near as articulate or intelligent as in advertising,” he says. “It’s a lot more corporate than making commercials.”

On returning to advertising after two years, he got a call from Daniel Kleinman, which led to the formation of Rattling Stick in 2006. Much awarded, and much in demand, his most recent UK campaign reunited him with The Guardian, via his celebrated Three Little Pigs spot through BBH. The brief was to embody the paper’s mantra of ‘open journalism’. “It was quite a terrifying job to do,” he admits. “You’re dealing with incredibly bright, smart, academic people. I knew it had to work and I was terrified of being in the edit suite with [Guardian editor Alan] Rusbridger telling me it didn’t. It was a relief that he liked it.”

Keeping it real

An ambitious brief and tight budget meant it had to be wrapped in two days, with the final day stretching into a marathon 21-hour shoot. “I wanted to create an environment that was familiar but almost like a parallel universe,” he says of the final cut. “I didn’t want to use animatronics or get into heavy CGI. I like the things to be there.” The pigs’ costumes came from the Royal Ballet’s vintage production of Beatrix Potter. “We tracked down the people who made the heads and the clothes, so they had this slightly naïve feel about them, which worked very well around the armoured police.”

So what of the future? His latest campaign for Nike, I Would Run For You, premiered during American Idol in the States, taking up the whole ad break and garnering, to date, almost 1.5m YouTube hits. “I’m working on a couple of film ideas,” he reveals, “that might go sooner rather than later, and I’m trying to get this play, Artful, going. If we get it to work it’ll open in mid August.”

So, come rain or shine, you can expect plenty more good stuff rattling around in the creative crucible of that cobbled Soho mews.