Ali Ali: Animal Instincts

Director Ali Ali tells Ryan Watson being pigeonholed as a comedy man just isn’t funny anymore and he’s done with elephants and bears.

According to Egyptian director, Ali Ali, Middle Eastern creativity has come on leaps and bounds in the past six or seven years: “I can safely say that the Middle East is ahead of a lot of places. Advertising over here has changed tremendously from 2005 up until today. I think it’s come a very long way and that’s probably been led by Egypt in terms of television work.”

You could certainly do worse for an insider’s opinion on the situation, considering Ali’s experience and status in the region. Since the launch of the Dubai Lynx Festival (the Middle East’s answer to Cannes Lions, in 2007), he’s picked up awards including a 2010 Film gold and Best Director in Film Craft for online viral smash Never Say No to Panda, as well as Best Cinematography this year for two-minute Vodafone film, Let Nothing Stop You! In fact, not only is Ali the most awarded director in the festival’s short history, he’s also the most shortlisted. “I’m really grateful for the Lynx because it helped establish me in the region,” he states. The director’s career in advertising, however, began way before his success in the Middle East and he actually began agency-side.

From oil painting to Orangina

Raised in Cairo the director went through the American schooling system and, for some time, was heading toward a career as a computer scientist. “Why I did that I have no idea,” he muses, “it was just something I fell into when I was 16. My old man’s a computer scientist so it made sense and I liked physics a lot and was good at maths in high school.”

Ali also had a talent for oil painting, and having won a merit scholarship to San Francisco Art Institute, decided to pursue his creative interest instead of following in his father’s academic footsteps. Once on the West Coast, though, it wasn’t quite what he’d expected and he only lasted six months on the course. “When I got to San Francisco, I realised nobody was painting anymore, everyone was doing video art and installations,” recalls the director. “I was probably the only one on the programme who was painting. It was outdated but I wasn’t crazy about all the conceptual stuff that was happening.”

He decided to leave the world of painting behind and got into Miami Ad School, where he spent a year and a half and graduated early after gaining an internship with D’Arcy Bucharest. While in Romania, Ali was offered a position as an art director at Leagas Delaney Hamburg where he worked on accounts for Skoda, adidas, Orangina and some local German brands and the move would mark the beginning of a creative spell that most don’t manage to experience in a lifetime in the industry. “I got a chance to work with Herman Waterkamp, my creative director and one of the best German art directors,” says Ali, looking back with fond memories at a time in his life that gave him an education in aesthetics, “Germans have a way with art direction that I really respect and appreciate and I learned a lot. It still helps me today with my framing.”

Learning the ropes

Ali was just feeling as if he had finally arrived at the right place, when, at the end of 2004, tragedy struck – his father had a stroke and he had to return to Cairo. It was then that he’d get his first taste of the Egyptian creative scene, firstly at Leo Burnett, and while it was a big change from his European experiences it was good training. “Things were much faster,” he says, “at Leagas Delaney they’d shoot maybe two or three TV commercials per year and at Leo Burnett we were doing two or three a month so you got to be on set a lot and around the camera; that’s the best way to learn. I spent two years there and got a lot of exposure on set. I think in my two years in Germany I was only on set once and that’s a problem when you want to be a director.”

But despite spending more time on set, Ali wasn’t keen on making the switch over to directing until he’d gained maximum experience from working at an agency. And after spells as regional creative director at McCann Erickson and then as ECD at DDB Berlin, he decided to launch his own agency, Elephant, with former JWT colleague Maged Nassar. “I realised very quickly that the guy was a genius and it’s always good to work with someone who’s better than you,” Ali suggests. “I had the experience and Maged had the crazy ideas. He would always come up with the weirdest shit and I would try to think of how we’d shoot that. I was more execution and he was conception. He had no idea how to execute the shit he’d come up with and vice versa.”

Elephant was born out of the duo’s belief that too many people were involved in the creative process, so they left their jobs and cut them out: “We’d walk into meetings with 30 or 40 people just to sell the same idea but it doesn’t take that many people to do good ads,” explains Ali. “We never pitched for new business at Elephant, most of the work we did was from people calling, knocking on the door or emailing. We don’t really like pitches and we don’t like to show options. We always go to our clients with one idea and one idea only; if that’s the best idea, why show them another?”

Go small, make an Elephant

In two and a half years, the agency went on to become one of the most successful in the region, winning big at Dubai Lynx and taking Cannes Lions back to Egypt. There was a lot of interest from investors and networks wanting to buy the company, but the partners couldn’t see why they’d want to go against their values. “Everyone was interested in taking Elephant and making it into a 30- or 40-person agency, they offered us a lot for it but obviously that would’ve taken us back to what we ran away from in the beginning,” states Ali. “We had a good few years and won the Lynx Grand Prix three times in a row. Our strength was TV but all the other agencies were talking digital.”

With longstanding directing aspirations, Ali decided to call it a day at the agency, and it closed in early 2012. “People often ask me, ‘so you’ve stopped being creative?’” says the director, “I think that’s a funny question. They forget that directing is fundamentally a creative job. It’s not about lenses, lighting, casting or acting, it’s really all about thinking,” he explains.

Being well established in the region, Ali now represents himself in the Middle East: “I see the point of an agent or publicist in the UK, for example, and I’d probably partner up with them because I don’t know anyone there but when you’re getting the jobs anyway, there’s no point in complicating things.” He’s just signed to Dopplegänger Film for international representation excluding Italy, where he is with Big Mama and makes it known that he’d love to direct more campaigns in Europe.

No more animals and costumes

He may be well-known in the Middle East for his directorial flair, but Ali reveals that, because his Never Say No to Panda viral has become one of the most-watched online videos, he often seems to attract boards involving costumes and animal ideas. “I hate to be labelled as the guy that did the panda; that kind of bothers me. I’m labelled as a comedy director and 70 per cent of the work I get is comedy but I want to break out of that. I shot a two-minute film for Vodafone in Cairo that involved zero comedy and it was entirely storytelling. It was great for me to flex that muscle,” he explains.

Not only has the Dubai Lynx exposed and rewarded Ali’s directorial ability, to the world and the rest of the Middle East, but the director explains that it has played a pivotal role in the region’s creative revolution by putting work from Cairo, for example, up against content from Morocco or Dubai. The fact that the festival employs an international jury makes for a genuine judging process and each year people come away impressed by what they’ve seen.

Though Ali feels that Egypt is falling behind others, such as Lebanon and Dubai, in its print, PR and integrated campaigns, the country is still pushing creative boundaries in TV.

“When I came back it was all jingles. Everything was hard sell and a lot like what you see on television in Italy and Spain,” he explains, “but now ads have become very competitive, very conceptual with a lot of storytelling. I think it’s come a very long way. It seems good looking back compared to where it was. I can’t really say where it’s going but I do know where it came from.”