Seb Edwards: Only Just Begun

It’s not so much the answers that Seb Edwards gives to the questions he’s asked that tell you – though those answers certainly help – it’s the pauses between the questions. If it’s possible to gain any true insight into someone over an hour-long conversation then the 35-year-old Edwards is not a man who speaks unless he knows what he is going to say.

Most people understandably pepper their conversation with ‘ums’ and ‘ers’, working out what they’re saying as they talk, but Edwards carefully considers each question before relaying his answer. He is thoughtful and erudite and passionate about his job, but also quite quiet. Not in a ‘can I push the tape recorder a bit closer?’ way, but in a controlled, calm manner that makes you listen all the more intently.

Unlikely child star It is this characteristic that could be blamed for Edwards’ eventual career behind a camera, one that has seen him direct work including HTC’s Detour Warsaw, Emirates’ Anthem and Hovis’ Farmer’s Lad.

Before all that though, at the age of eight, the young Edwards was plucked from obscurity to feature as the lead in John Boorman’s 1987, semi-autobiographical film, Hope and Glory. As a child Boorman was quiet and a bit shy and as it was a film based, in part, on his own life, he wanted someone who reflected that. Numerous stage school auditions met with no success, so Boorman began street casting in schools, picking out kids from classrooms and, well, you can probably guess where this is going.

“I’d never acted before and I was chosen to be in this big movie,” he explains, as if still confused at the prospect. “I didn’t want to do it to be honest, but the more I didn’t want to do it, the more [Boorman] wanted me because, I suppose, that’s the sort of boy he was after.”

Eventually Edwards agreed to be in the film and describes it as an “amazing, extraordinary experience”, but not one that he wants to repeat. He didn’t really take to acting and Hope and Glory is his first and last time in front of the camera. What Edwards did love was being on set, around the crew and the cameras, “being a part of the filmmaking family”.

Years later, influenced by that film, Edwards found himself studying Fine Art at university with a view to becoming a production designer. “A friend of my parents was a really good production designer,” he says, “and I thought that sounded pretty cool, so I started building film sets in my studio at university, as a way of creating a portfolio of art direction work.”

In order to satisfy the needs of the course, Edwards was required to make performance pieces and video art inside his sets to justify having made them. “I soon realised that the building of the sets was a nightmare and actually the making of the things inside them, the films, was much more fun. That’s how I arrived at directing.”

Edwards describes this as his ‘lightbulb moment’, saying that before then he didn’t really have any clarity or conviction on what he wanted to do. After leaving university, now with a freshly minted student showreel, Edwards started, like many before him, as a runner. He knew that getting his foot in the door, making connections and learning from different people would be key.

His first break came on something you don’t see very often now, or in fact, ever; a wallpaper commercial. “There was a script that no one wanted to do,” he begins, “and it was a really low-budget one for wallpaper. It was a disgusting wallpaper, too; textured with bright colours, some sort of 70s monstrosity.

Anyway, it was a really weird script and no one wanted to touch it and out of sheer naivety I decided to rewrite it. I handed it back to the creatives and they were understandably insulted, but the creative director thought it was much better, so they agreed to let me do it. I didn’t really know what I was doing, I just shot a load of stuff and cut together a film, but it ended up surpassing the expectations of what they were after.”

Edwards spent a few years learning the trade in dual roles, often as a runner, but sometimes as a director, something he considers to have been a healthy experience, moving from one level of responsibility and input to another and learning all the time. There were however, occasions when holding those two separate identities almost caused problems.

“I remember being a runner on a commercial for Zurich Insurance and I was working on the brand spot, the main ad of the campaign, which was being shot by Gerard de Thame,” Edwards says.

“Then about a month later I got a script for a spot in the same campaign, which I pitched on and won. So I went to meet the client at a pre-pro meeting and, of course, all of the agency and clients are the same people I had been on set with a month before while I was a runner. Luckily they didn’t recognise me. I put on a hat and disguised myself, but they were like, ‘I’m sure we’ve met before…’.”

Does he think it would have been a problem if they had have recognised him, even though they’d obviously thought he was the best man for the job? “I have no doubt I would have been fired,” he says succinctly.

Subtle transitions and music videos Edwards considers the question of when he believes he went from being a runner/director to simply a director and after a pause says, “when the gaps between jobs got smaller. When I didn’t spend a month, sometimes two months, waiting for something to happen.”

Edwards was 25 when he shot the wallpaper commercial and 28 when the gaps became short enough for him. But something that he regrets about his time coming through the ranks is his lack of experience on music videos. He explains that he spent a long time, if not worrying, then certainly puzzling over his directing style, mainly because he wasn’t sure he had one. The website of Academy Films, the company to which Edwards is signed, describes his style as “visually striking and emotionally engaging” and looking at his work from the last few years it’s hard to argue against that.

But Edwards believed he could have cemented his own directorial voice a lot quicker had he had the chance to work on more music videos. “I think it’s quite hard in commercials to create a voice that’s recognisable and singular,” he says. “I think it’s much easier if you start in music videos, which I didn’t do and which I regret, I think that’s where you form an identity.” At the same time, Edwards acknowledges the fortune he had in being able to make commercials and, also, that the music video scene at that time – the early to mid-00s – was not steeped in creativity, or in cash. Now though, promos seem to be having a resurgence. While budgets are still small, interest in them as an artistic form is high and promos have taken on a new importance in the age of YouTube and its like.

From little acorns Edwards too has taken a renewed interest, directing his first promo earlier this year for James Blake’s A Case of You. The video, starring actress Rebecca Hall, is the epitome of ‘visually striking and emotionally engaging,’ as it uses lighting techniques and clever set design to show Hall seamlessly moving through different scenes in the same flat in an intense and beautiful film. The project came about because Edwards knows Blake and his manager and was asked if he’d like to direct one of the videos.

They also gave him carte blanche to do what he wanted and after choosing the track and talking to Blake, that’s exactly what he did. “It turned out to be a mixture of film and theatre,” he says. “I used to go to the theatre a lot when I was a kid because my dad loved it and I was always fascinated at how they did scene changes using lighting, and how sometimes an actor would stay on stage while the scene changed around them.” With his first promo under his belt Edwards is already primed to direct another one, this time for another friend who’s breaking through, John Hopkins; “he’s a musical genius and I’m excited about it”.

Before taking on the world of music videos, Edwards says that the first project he worked on where he felt he’d really done what he set out to do and created something that was truly his vision was for the Central Office of Information (COI), for the army, in 2009. Those two films, Debris and Waiting To Happen can, once again, be described as visually striking and emotionally engaging. “That was really the first time I made something that I was really proud of,” Edwards says, “something that felt relevant to where I wanted to go [as a director]. And they got golds in Cannes, so it was really the first stuff I’d made that got noticed.”

Since then Edwards seems to have found his stride and his work has become increasingly high profile and his services increasingly in demand. Spots for the Road Safety Authority through Irish International Dublin, the Olympicthemed Nike spot, Find Your Greatness, codirected with Lance Acord, through Wieden + Kennedy Portland and Dare London’s Farmer’s Lad for Hovis have all met with critical approval, most importantly from Edwards himself, and each one is a carefully crafted story with characters you can connect with.

Asked whether his work or, in fact, any work in the commercial arena, can be considered art, he takes another breath and pauses, looking down before answering. “This whole idea about art and commerce,” he sighs, “with people saying painting is the purest art form. You go back and look at a lot of the Renaissance painters and those were commissions. Those were artists trying to earn a living painting some wealthy landowner sat on his horse with his children around him. I think it’s always been art versus commerce. The whole idea that when you apply money to art it dilutes the purity of it I think is wrong, because some of the greatest pieces of art have been paid for [and] the idea that commercials are a sort of soulless pursuit and just a money-making exercise, is wrong. Certainly the best directors, the directors I admire and respect, create work that is culturally relevant and pioneering.”

Edwards didn’t always feel so passionate about the commercials industry though and cites a meeting he had with a production manager early in his career, when he was still a runner, which showed him the power and creative potential of the combination of art and commerce. “

At the time I remember thinking, ‘God, I really don’t want to be a runner in commercials’, I just couldn’t see a future in it artistically. But the production manager on the job showed me two reels. One was Jonathan Glazer’s and the other Frédéric Planchon’s – this was years ago, before I came to Academy – and I realised after watching them that you could make interesting work that paved the way to something beyond [commercials].”

Regrets on working his way up What is beyond commercials for Edwards remains to be seen, but if he’s got any say it will involve feature fi lms at some point (he has recently signed to Independent Talent for feature fi lm representation). He has already directed a short fi lm, called Friday, which is entered into various short fi lm festivals throughout the year, and it is, says Edwards, as though he is rediscovering himself as a director.

During the course of the interview he alludes to wishing that he could turn back the clock on his career, not because he is old, of course, but because he feels as though it is only now that he is working out the sort of director he wants to be. “I wish I could go back fi ve, 10 years and start again,” he says, “because I feel like I’ve wasted a lot of time. I think I’ve got a really clear idea of where I want to go now, but I think there was a long time when I was just wandering around in the wilderness, kind of lacking in direction. That’s exactly how I feel. I think everything up to this point was just like a dress rehearsal for something else. Everything was a practice lap up to the beginning of the race, which is the beginning of my career.”

He pauses again, for the last time, staring at something in the distance and says, almost as if to himself, “this really does feel like the beginning of my career”.