Kim Gehrig: The Discomfort Zone

A former gymnastics champ, Kim Gehrig is fond of feeling uncomfortable and assuming awkward positions. While still flexing her arty muscles as a creative at Mother, she pushed herself into directing. As she admits to Danny Edwards, her first attempt was a disaster but she got back on the [pommel] horse and her perseverance has seen her develop a winning style that’s bagged her trophies for great promos and work for IKEA, Nokia and Amnesty.

Kim Gehrig likens directing to hitchhiking; ideas, concepts, treatments, storyboards, discussions, plans and directions are all well and good, but to make any of it happen you’re basically waiting for someone to stop their car, roll down their window and pick you and your idea up. It’s a good analogy and one that works particularly well for Gehrig – seeing as she describes herself as “a bit of a nomad”.

Escape from Sport Town

The former creative at Mother London turned Somesuch & Co director grew up in the suburbs of Sydney in what she describes as “the most uncreative background”. Most directors, she thinks, have come from some sort of artistic family or upbringing – parents who were into music, art, design or cinema – but, says Gehrig: “I come from, you know, Sport Town”. Where Gehrig was raised, if you weren’t a swimmer, a footballer or an iron man triathlete, frankly, you weren’t trying hard enough.

Gehrig wanted more than that. True, sport was part of her life (she reveals in passing, much later in the interview, that she was an Australian junior gymnastic champion) but she was always drawn to more creative and artistic adventures and was keen to spread her wings both in outlook and geography. “I went to high school outside the area I lived in,” she says, “and I had a wonderful art teacher who told me that I should really do something creative with my life. My mum wanted me to be a physiotherapist.”

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with being a physiotherapist and Gehrig is keen to point out that her parents didn’t actively discourage her artistic endeavours, they simply had no frame of reference for them and were keen for her to be able to survive, financially, in the real world. After going to art school in Sydney to study visual communications, at 20 years of age she flew to London to study at Central St Martins “like every other director in the land”. Despite the placement being for three months, Gehrig says that deep down she knew she wouldn’t be returning to Australia any time soon. “I had a huge leaving party,” she says, of the time just before her placement began. “Who has a huge party when they’re going away for 12 weeks? I knew I would be away for a long time and that [party] sort of marked the point.”

Gehrig loved London and has only returned to Australia for two or three weeks since her arrival in 1997. She was studying design at Central St Martins but also “fiddled with directing”, though she didn’t start directing properly until she was 30 years old. Now, at 36, Gehrig has a raft of polished, creative and award-winning promos and commercials behind her for brands such as Asics, Coca-Cola and IKEA, and artists like Wiley, Mark Ronson and Primal Scream. Her way into the directing chair was, like many before her, through working at an agency. A friend suggested that she should take her book to Mother and see what they said. “I called the agency for about three months,” she laughs, “and, finally, I got in to see [then creative director] Ben Mooge, who interviewed me with Caroline Pay. They gave me a job and Caroline ended up being my creative partner for five years.”

This was in 2000 and, says Gehrig, her time at Mother was immensely important in her creative education and development. Having no previous experience of advertising, did she find the transition difficult? “I just pretended I wasn’t in advertising,” she says. “Within Mother at that time it was the furthest agency from advertising you could find. It’s probably a bit more businesslike now, but back then we were sat in a caravan in Clerkenwell. It was brilliant and inspiring.”

There was a certain energy at Mother that spurred her on, an energy she now thinks exists and pushes her at Somesuch. “At Mother you were always, like, ‘what’s this person doing? What’s that person doing?’ And it’s the same here now; ‘what’s Romain [Gavras] doing?’ Or, ‘what’s Nick [Gordon] doing?’ You want to push yourself and do something cool to keep up.”

Gehrig spent eight years at Mother but there wasn’t a clean break in the sense that one day she was a creative, the next she was a director; the transition was much more blurred. The initial hankering to be in the director’s chair came from being on set, seeing other people work and thinking, as many of us have done about many other things, ‘I could do better than that’.

“It was just a time when I was on set,” she explains, “and I saw what the director was doing and I just thought that I knew how I would tackle this project, and it wasn’t how he was doing it.”

Comfort in the uncomfortable

In retrospect, Gehrig says she probably didn’t really know how to do it any better but wanted to put herself in the position of being able to try. Placing herself in new and challenging situations and “making myself feel uncomfortable” is something she likes to do, something that she thrives on, and was something she did to get her foot on the first rung of the directorial ladder. Continuing to work as a creative at Mother but also attempting to break onto the directing scene was no easy task: “I was working what seemed like 24 hours per day, seven days per week,” she says. “I would work at Mother and then take days off to direct music videos.”

Her first proper directing gig didn’t go well – “it was a disaster” – and though it wasn’t really anything Gehrig did wrong (it rained consistently on what was meant to be a beautiful summer’s day shoot for a Calvin Harris promo) it put her off directing for six months. “I went back to Mother and was… my little heart was broken,” she remembers.

What that experience taught Gehrig was that she still had a lot of the craft of directing to learn, so she got in touch with Sally Campbell at Academy Films [now co-owner of Somesuch], whose directors’ work she much admired, to ask for some help and guidance. Campbell was more than happy to help and set Gehrig up with a promo for Gomez. “I decided I wanted to go down the music video route,” says Gehrig, “because I already knew so much about advertising but I needed to learn a lot more about directing. [Promos] were a freer environment, more under the radar and without any advertising people really knowing that I was doing it. I could just experiment because I didn’t want to be one of those good ad creatives who went straight into directing and failed. I thought I’d do it the slow way.”

Time to give up the day job

Gehrig worked like that for a couple of years and, she says, learnt a huge amount. But the dual role of creative and director couldn’t last forever, and it was when she started to get ad scripts in through Academy that she decided to make the leap to full-time directing. “I couldn’t be working in one agency and then taking meetings to go and shoot for another, so I had to choose.”

Mother, she says, was supportive and encouraging of her choice and it was Mother that actually gave Gehrig her first commercial project to work on, for Amnesty International. You Are Powerful is a 90-second film that cleverly puts civilians into existing news footage, showing them freeing prisoners and protecting beaten men. The spot, which Gehrig also co-wrote through Mother, picked up first prize in the European Broadcast category at the cfp-e/shots Young Director Award in Cannes 2009 as well as a silver Lion the same year, and put her on the path to directorial success.

By this point signed to Academy Films full time, 2009 was a good year for Gehrig and not long after the Amnesty success came further awards recognition, this time for a Wiley music video, Cash In My Pocket, which picked up a UK Music Video Award that year. Gehrig was initially unsure about taking the project on after a previous Wiley video had hit the buffers and the artist had pulled out at the last minute: “I pulled out all the stops and called in a ton of favours to get a lot of kit and people on set,” she explains, “and he turned up and, I think, just felt that the production was too big, too corporate.” This time though, and without the star being in the video, everything went smoothly and the film was a huge success. Set in a corporate bank’s office and utilising a single smooth tracking shot, the camera follows a whole host of staff who lip-synch to Wiley’s lyrics as they move around the office. It’s funny, clever and brilliantly executed and was another huge step on Gehrig’s directing route.

When Gehrig is asked if she feels she has a particular directorial style – or has attempted to cultivate one – she smiles and says that it’s something she thought about even before she had shot a frame of footage as a director, that she would strategise over what sort of director she wanted to be. “But then just after that first, ill-fated shoot where it rained all day and everything went wrong, I happened to be at a lunch with some of the Academy people and Jonathan Glazer was there,” she says. “I was talking to him about what sort of a director I wanted to be and he’s a man of few words, but what he said has stuck with me. He said ‘you can’t strategise about being a director, you just have to make work and the work will talk back to you and tell you who you are’. I’ve held those words quite closely and always tried to let my work speak for itself.”

The music is definitely something that you notice in Gehrig’s work. As far as the promos are concerned, that is obvious, but much of her commercial output has a very strong sense of music. IKEA In the Kitchen at Parties, Nokia Poodle Loop and the recent Asics Better Your Best all have music and sound integral to them, but Gehrig isn’t surprised by this. “I love music, and I used to be quite good at it but also,” she says, “people who didn’t know I was a creative thought I was a music video director, so my route back into advertising has been through music. It’s not necessarily in my DNA or where I’d want to go in the future, but it’s been my route back in.”

Another music project she took on was Coke’s Olympic campaign, Beat 2012. A campaign which included a documentary covering a host of young athletes looking to compete at the 2012 London Olympics, it was an hour-long programme that included following musician Mark Ronson as he created a special track from the sounds of different athletes’ sports. “The documentary is my favourite part of that project,” says Gehrig. “It was a tough project, a random one and I again put myself in a slightly uncomfortable position in that I’d never made a documentary and I was like, ‘shit, this is weird’. But I liked the idea and if I like the idea I’ll do anything for it. I also felt it was the next stage of my filmmaking.”

Bite off too much and keep chewing

Gehrig’s penchant for taking on difficult projects, for putting herself in tough positions, is something that has helped her succeed and that brings the questioning round to a potentially awkward area – namely, gender. You can never be sure that, by asking the question about there being a dearth of women in the directing community, you’re somehow indulging in sexist cliché. Some people might think so, but unfortunately it’s a valid enquiry because it’s true – there is a distinct lack of female advertising directors.

On this point, Gehrig is thoughtful for a minute before agreeing that it is tough for a woman but, as she exemplifies, not impossible. “I’m very proud to be a female director,” she states. “[But] I’ve always deliberately wanted to make not very ‘female’ work. I’ve gravitated to more male things so as not to be seen as simply a female director. I think sometimes people love that you’re a woman and can bring femininity and a different perspective. I think rather than it being a problem with clients, sometimes the hardest thing is [dealing with] the crew. When I was starting out and knew a bit less about directing I think I got a lot less respect. A young male director probably would get more help along the way than a female director [and] I’ve had to pick my team quite specifically. But it is hard. Directing is hard. And I think a lot of women are, like, ‘why would I do that?’.” It has been hard for Gehrig too but she likes to quote her old art teacher who told her; “bite off more than you can chew, then chew like crazy”.

While the ads are interesting, features can wait

In January 2011, Gehrig signed with Somesuch & Co, the company co-founded by the aforementioned Sally Campbell and Tim Nash – a former promo commissioner she had worked with on videos, including Wiley’s Cash In My Pocket. As for whether she plans to bite off a features script in the near future, Gehrig is reluctant to commit to anything just yet. “I’m in no hurry,” she says. “I love making ads and I actually feel like I’ve got more to do in advertising. I feel like I haven’t quite made the work I want to make yet. It’s also boring to hear advertising directors saying that they want to make features because that’s a craft in itself – one that I respect – but I still want to make great ads and I don’t simply want to use advertising as a stepping stone to movies.

“And I think there’s a golden age happening now, it’s massively exciting and I don’t want to hark back to when we had big budgets and spent half of it on champagne. I want to embrace what’s going on now because I think, now, great work happens in between the cracks. Throw me an ad, throw me a documentary, throw me a fashion film, I don’t really give a shit where it comes from, if it’s interesting, then I’m interested.”