The Way I See It: Vaughan Arnell

Vaughan Arnell is a commercials and music video director, whose award-winning work includes spots for Levi’s, Nescafé, Stella Artois and Lucozade. Formerly teamed with fellow director Anthea Benton, as Vaughan & Anthea, he’s now a solo act. Arnell talked to Diana Goodman about being lucky, the joy of big dogs and how a Spice Girls track helped him locate his missing mojo.

I’m aged 51 and have two homes – one in the middle of London in Oxford Circus, an apartment in the old Glenn Miller recording studio, and the other in Surrey, a 15th-century farm cottage.

I’m married to Carol, who was a stylist I worked with for about nine years. We got together on a shoot in 1999. Sadly, Carol and I don’t have any children. We did 12 courses of IVF that didn’t work.

We live by ourselves with our two dogs, both rescue Ridgebacks: Tilly and Alfie. Alfie’s only six months old and he’s already the size of a pit pony, but all the vets say, “Oh, he’s going to be a big dog.” He’s got the kind of look on his face as if he’s been smoking spliffs all day. His big eyes sort of roll in his head like Satchmo.

I’m really extremely lucky, that’s how I would describe myself, and every day I wake up loving this job, whether it’s music videos or commercials. I feel just really, really lucky to be here.

I grew up in the country out in Surrey, which is in the suburbs. My dad was a bookbinder and my mother worked in Marks & Spencer in the bathroom department all her life.

I had a really happy childhood. Obviously, I was growing up in the 70s, so I looked like a member of a glam rock band, with the really long hair and platform shoes and tank tops. I think the best way of describing me is like one of the cast out of that film In the Name of the Father – something very, very 70s.

My mum and dad got on really well and there are great pictures in my mum’s photo albums of my parents having parties at home. It was quite a small house – a two-up, two-down cottage built for railway workers. My dad died of a heart attack when I was about 20, which
 was very sad.

My dad worked in Germany and my first memory is of going on holiday in an old 60s white VW Beetle belonging to his friend, and seeing lederhosen and big beer kellers and travelling through Salzburg and places where The Sound of Music was shot. I’ve got no brothers or sisters so it was just my mum and dad and me cramped in the back of this little VW, which was really good.

I basically had a pretty normal education. I went to the village school and secondary school, and then did a foundation course at art college [Epsom School of Art and Design]. No university. I can’t read or write very well, but I can just about speak.

I used to get the piss taken out of me at school because my name is Arnell and they used to call me Vaughan Arsesmell. I got beaten up a few times – I got a bit of a kicking – but I was not really bullied.

When I was in my youth I was a bit of a 10cc fan, so when Godley and Creme did that Cry video they were my heroes. They went on to make commercials and I thought they were amazing. One of the first times we ever did an edit for a music video we were in the suite next to them. They were in there for months because they had so much money. We were in there for 20 minutes because we had no money for our promo.

At art college I hated studying graphics – it was really boring – and I found a 16mm camera in the photographic dept and just literally fell in love with it. I found some buskers in Covent Garden who were robotic dancers and I made a couple of videos with them. Then I got a job working with Rocking Russian’s Al McDowell, who was a sleeve designer for Siouxsie and the Banshees. He used to be the art director for Tim Pope, and I basically hooked up with Tim and got a job as a runner and went from there.

I met Anthea Benton through work. She was a milliner who came to see me with her stuff and we started talking about ideas. We ended up having a partnership and living together for 10 years. We grew up together as directors – cut our teeth together – and then it just came to an end and we decided to go our own separate ways.

We’d won a D&AD Pencil for best director on Red Shoes [Stella Artois] and we were winning awards left, right and centre for Levi’s Creek and things. So it was a real shock when we split. There was one person from an agency who said to me, “You’re no different from a runner now that you’re by yourself.” Everyone thought Anthea was the clever one and I was the funny, stupid one. When you’ve been really popular, English people love to kick you on the way down.

One of my best friends, Ashley Newton, who runs Sony in America now, gave me the second Spice Girls track, Say You’ll Be There, and said: “Just play it.” It was really scary because I was quite battered at the time emotionally, but through doing that video I got my mojo back.

Basically, it was a one-day shoot in the desert near LA. The stylist overslept. and she had all the clothes in her car so we had to shoot the whole thing in an afternoon. When you shoot in the desert, the winds come and they just howl and it starts blowing to hell. But I loved every minute of it. Someone who knows David Beckham told me that when he saw Posh in that video he decided he wanted to marry her. So I can die a happy man, knowing I made David Beckham happy.

Working with One Direction [Arnell has shot three of their music videos] is not that different at all. They’re a great band, and to crack England one minute and then America the next is unheard of these days. The thing about music videos is that they are there forever. Ads get buried, but you can watch a band grow up through their videos. Hopefully, they’ll still be there in five years’ time.

At home, I listen to everything under the sun. When I was in my youth I used to listen to a lot of rockabilly and I remember going to see one of the first Stray Cats gigs ever, and The Cramps, and obviously working with Dead or Alive back in the day. The older I get the more I start listening to so many different things – even mariachi bands. Everything and anything that makes me smile.

I think the difference between making music videos and shooting ads is that with a music video they come to you because they’ve seen what you’ve done – with Robbie Williams or the Spice Girls, or George Michael – and they pretty much say, “Please will you just make me something amazing?” and you get carte blanche. In advertising, there are so many people involved and everybody’s got an opinion. You know how it is, the client is scared and the agency is scared that they’re going to lose the client. There’s often a lot of fear.

I’ve got no fucking idea what makes my work distinctive. The only thing I think about is to try and make it timeless – something that’s going to work for a long time. There was a guy called Roger Woodburn who did things like the Dambusters [Carling Black Label]. He was one of my heroes when I first started making commercials. I always thought that he brought magic to the screen and that’s what I try to do – although it’s pretty hard with some of the scripts.

How well do I think the advertising industry is doing in adapting to the technological revolution? Basically, at the end of the day it’s all down to the idea, and as long as you’ve got a strong idea it will work on a poster, it will work in the cinema, it will work on the internet, it will work projected onto the side of a bus, it will work on an iPhone. A strong idea is what’s really important and I think at the moment there are a lot of people who just look at things on YouTube and rip them off.

The ads that I’m most proud of are things like the Stella Artois spot Red Shoes, Levi’s Creek, Lucozade Mods, Nescafé Hairy Old Cortina. You can make trendy shit, but for me, it’s when you kind of get it right and it appeals across the board. When you know inside that you’ve crafted it the best way that you can and it stands out and makes a difference.

It’s really interesting when you talk to an agency, how the team can describe their idea and how much belief they’ve got in it – that’s when you find out whether it’s a good, strong idea. The best ideas, I think, just roll off the plate.

As a consumer, I think a lot of advertising is fucking shit. There are some really good things on mobile phones that if you press these buttons this happens, and you think, that’s what I want to know, but they dress it up with so much lifestyle crap. Or they’ve done a three-minute short film just to sell something and a lot of it is up its arse.

I think everything is going to go back to film shortly. The digital thing is really good, but you don’t get the quality and the performances aren’t as strong anymore because the actors know you can keep going. A lot of the energy has disappeared because we’ve lost the magic of the film going through the gate. I know I need five and a half hours of rushes over a three to four-day shoot for a music video, but on the first One Direction video we had 58 hours of rushes and you’ve got to put all of that into the edit. A lot of things get missed.

I’ve only been to Cannes once, to pick up a few Lions, and I just couldn’t believe that there was that much to drink at the dinner parties and in the bars. Normally we can’t make Cannes because we’ve got a job on, or we can’t make parties at Christmas because we’re too busy. I’m not being snobby, but I think it’s just great when you’re flat out all the time. I can really panic when I’m not.

With a music video, if I don’t like the track and the artist is a wanker I just can’t do it. There has to be something that sparkles for me. And it’s the same with a product, really. There’s got to be something about it. But the most important thing is being inspired by the creative team and the way they describe their brief, and by the creative director. I think it is really important for the creative director to just pop his head in and say hi. It may be all that he says, but it means he cares.

I don’t really feel there is a stigma attached to working in advertising, unless you’re doing something really dodgy, which I haven’t ever done. Normally, when I’m out, I never like to say what I do, but people ask and they push and they’re really interested by it. I tell everyone I did the music for Where Eagles Dare with Clint Eastwood [he didn’t] – they treat you a lot differently then.

Have drinks or drugs ever been a problem for me? Well, I could say everything in moderation, but that’s being a bit smart. Recently, not through drink and drugs, I lost two really close friends and it just made me focus on how short life is. One died in a motorbike accident in South Africa – a really close friend of mine, who was a grip – and my best man committed suicide, because of various demons. I think drink causes so many problems with people; I just had a phone call today – a gaffer I work with has had a stroke and he’s really young. So I think you really want to look after yourself: the more you can do to stop yourself doing damage to your body, the more it helps.

I really don’t really care what other people think of me. I’m sure there are loads of people out there who don’t like me or my work, but I do what I do and I like to make films or videos that entertain people. And when you do something that people like, it’s really nice.

I judge a person on their shoes; that’s how I can tell what they’re like. My mum always said, “Spend money on your shoes or your bed, because most of your life you’re on your feet or on your back.” But you get people with the finest watches, a really expensive Rolex or something, who wear the cheapest shoes.

I’ve never voted, because I think all politicians are wankers. They’ve all got backers – big companies who put them into power – and they’re all manipulated by other people. The most interesting thing would be to have a political Big Brother where each party leader is brought in and they have things to do each week to get themselves out of there. You’d finally see what they were really like.

I think being British is everything and I love it. I’m so glad I can get in a cab coming back from the airport and talk about the poxy weather and say words like ‘bollocks’.

The people I am closest to are probably my wife or my mum, who’s called Jean. She’s one of the funniest people you’d ever meet, although she can cut people down to size in seconds. We had her 80th birthday party at our house in the country, with a big marquee and tepees in the fields so her friends could stay the night. It was like a big summer party for three days and it felt so good to be able to give her a little bit back.

My greatest weakness is probably talking too much and being too nice to people.

What makes me really angry is people who waste my fucking time – have me waiting on phone calls or dealing with call centres. I hate that more than anything else – that and when people take the piss.

The last time I cried was quite recently. We got a puppy called Bob and we were at a friend’s house having dinner one night in the garden and we couldn’t find him anywhere. We looked all night and then we went back right to where we were sitting, and Bob had got tangled up in wires in their swimming pool and drowned. Pulling back the pool cover and seeing this little five-month-old puppy just suspended deep down in the water was horrible.

My view of marriage is that it’s for life. I think you have to work at it really hard and I’ve learnt that recently. Basically, we’ve got the house here in the country and sometimes when she’s at home and I’m away in Miami staying in nice hotels, I have to keep myself grounded and remember that there’s someone at home walking the dogs in the mud.

I think that what children need most is just love and encouragement, and I feel so lucky I came from the parents I did. It’s all about love – that’s what everybody needs

If I could change the world, I would stop racism and stop wars, and stop people hating each other.

Am I afraid of dying? My dad died young, at 63, and I probably will do as well because I think it runs in the family. So I’ve always got that one hanging over my head. I just think, don’t waste any time and live life to full without taking the piss or hurting anybody else.

If I could relive my life, I would not change a fucking thing, because I love it and I feel extremely lucky.

What gives me real pleasure is music. And I love meeting people. Doing this job, one minute you can be meeting some guy in the RAF who’s a top fighter pilot, or mega famous popstars, and the next minute you can be meeting some pensioner who lives on a housing estate in Cardiff or Swansea.

In the end, what really matters is just trying not to hurt people and trying to bring happiness and entertainment and make people smile.

Commercials representation

stink.tv

Music videos

rokkit.tv (production)

marisagarnerassociates.com (representation)

Key work

• Levi’s Creek

• Stella Artois Red Shoes

• George Michael Outside

• Spice Girls Say You’ll Be There

• Robbie Williams Angels

• Robbie Williams Rock DJ