James Rouse: An Intergalactic Talent

The commercials work of James Rouse caught everyone’s eye in 2013 – including the awards judges – with its knowing comedy style that mixes the observational and the improvised. On the eve of his first feature release, he tells David Knight how clients and agencies must learn that the key to any successful creative collaboration lies in trust

As one of the UK’s most successful commercial directors specialising in comedy, James Rouse knows the value of great scripts and he says he has worked on more than a few over the past decade. “They are all weird and wonderful in their way,” reflects the English director. “I’ve been to extraordinary places, met extraordinary people and asked them to do extraordinary things. Some of which my mother wouldn’t be very proud of!”

But it seems there is something he cherishes even more. Take Rescue, the commercial he made for Marmite last year, out of adam&eveDDB, that shifted the brand’s ongoing ‘love-it or hate-it’ marketing into new, slightly controversial territory. Shot in the style of a fly-on-the-wall TV documentary, it follows the ‘Marmite Rescue Team’ as they enter family homes in order to ‘save’ neglected jars of Marmite, just like RSPCA animal welfare officers.

Working without a script

The directorial style is observational, the camera hand held and free-flowing. It feels almost genuine – almost. It transpires that Rouse created a framework for the actors to improvise their performances in order to achieve this bone-dry comic mockumentary. That, he says, required arguably the most prized commodity of all for a commercials director.

“The creatives were very generous in their trust in not sticking to the script and running with the idea,” he says, talking over coffee in a busy brasserie on a typically rain-lashed February morning in central London. “And the client was incredibly trusting – which is very rare – to work without a script.”

He explains that instead of a conventional script, he “heavily-scripted” the characters themselves. “The actors know exactly why they are in the scene and what their emotional objective is,” he continues, “You rehearse around the scene and check the actors understand the comic premise. Once they have guidelines of where their motivations come from, then you know you’ll get fantastic stuff with every new take.”

Rescue went on to win several awards in 2013 – including a gold in Direction for Rouse at the British Arrows Craft Awards. It has stirred up a share of outraged indignation too, if the comments on YouTube are anything to go by.

“Using a worthy cause in any reference point is going to be sensitive,” he notes. “But this was about making sure that the humour was not made at the expense of the welfare charities, but at those banal TV shows about the charities.” He adds that on YouTube, the likes to dislikes ratio is running at about 10 to 1. “But it’s the 10 per cent that goes out and makes the most noise.”

The Marmite ad follows several others where Rouse has employed the ‘improv’ technique for a range of brands from Axe/Lynx to Harvey Nichols. For example, in Walk Of Shame for Harvey Nics – again out of adam&eveDDB – a succession of young women totter home after a night on the tiles, looking worse for wear in unflattering party dresses. It is another leftfield concept that nevertheless resonates with its target audience (namely, if you’re having a big night out, you better be wearing something that still looks great when you get home the next morning) and, as with Marmite, the director was given leeway by the agency and client to let the humour unfold in a subtle, wryly British way.

“They just had a fantastic idea to begin with and then they have trust,” he says. “We let that idea breathe a little bit and let each character have their own story. It sounds absurd – they are only girls walking along the street – but they know exactly where they’ve come from, why they’re there, and why they’re feeling slightly shameful.”

Walk Of Shame has become another big prize-magnet, and has now been followed by a second ad for Harvey Nichols, with arguably an even more unconventional premise. In Sorry, I Spent It On Myself we spy people unwrapping terrible presents (all available from Harvey Nics for real) from relatives on Christmas morning. “I wrote every character – why they’re there, why they bought the gift they gave, what the receiver was hoping to get,” explains Rouse. “All the dialogue comes from having invented these families.”

When character is the key

But these observational, improv-style commercials are also only part of the story. The Rouse canon also includes ads with more conventional structures for the likes of Samsung, Strongbow, McDonald’s, Discovery Channel and Volkswagen. But even when he plays it according to the script, the work is still smartly funny. With Final Push and Honours – his blockbuster-like, subtly humorous spots for Strongbow out of St Luke’s, in which crowds of ordinary British working men gather on hillsides and in cathedrals to hear stirring speeches about their greatness – the cinema version of Final Push adds some topicality by telling Britain’s bankers from their ranks to ‘sod off’.

In BoomdeYaDa, his uplifting ad for the Discovery Channel, footage is subtly subverted so that everyone, from astronaut to Egyptologist and from Bear Grylls to Stephen Hawking, joins in on a song about the many wonders of the Earth. In his wonderfully comic spots for Samsung, he added LED lights to Welsh sheep; had a grizzly bear strip off to wash his fur in a forest washing machine; and in Baby Chase, has a tot in a baby walker chasing a vacuum cleaner in the manner of Starsky & Hutch. 

And in Baby, a VW Tiguan crawls though deserted city streets at night, driven by a man with his baby asleep in a child seat in the back – until he stops at traffic lights and the baby immediately wakes and starts crying before going back to sleep when the car sets off again. There is no dialogue, but the pictures – and, of course, the baby’s crying – speak much louder than any words. It is a scenario that nearly every parent can identify with – and it was the director’s other big award-winning commercial in 2013. 

“It isn’t the documentary [style] that drives me,” Rouse asserts. “Some of my work has that observed style, but I think that stems out of my interest in characters. Baby is much more filmic in its approach – but it’s still about getting inside a character. There’s no dialogue, but it’s still about how that guy got where he is. Hopefully, you understand his pain and his story that feeds into that.”

It is fair to say that whatever style he employs, Rouse’s work throughout his 10-year career as a director has consistently contained this human warmth, this identifiability. As he says, much of his work “stems from the premise that if you put a truth that you recognise on screen, then it will be funny.” So it is somewhat surprising to learn that his whole directing career was based on a decision he made “on a whim”.

Rouse was an advertising creative himself, at Euro RSCG, in the 90s. But he had been out of advertising for a while and had just returned to London after a year-long sabbatical in Spain with his family when he met up with Ed Robinson, co-founder of The Viral Factory, a company at the forefront of creating viral campaigns to exploit the growing importance of web marketing in the early Noughties.

“Ed said he had this brief to do something with Trojan condoms and I said: ‘I’ll help you write it for free if you let me direct it’,” Rouse recalls. “It was on a bit of a whim. But bless him, he put his faith in me and said yes.”

Soon after he was in a Romanian sports stadium with genuine athletes and a crowd, shooting one of the first commercials made exclusively for the internet – due to its ribald content. Trojan Games is framed as a spoof TV broadcast of a sexually explicit version of Olympic weightlifting – pelvic power lifting. It was clever, funny and a big success, winning a gold Lion at Cannes, a gold and silver at BTAA and more. Trojan Games was one of the first examples of digital content that also became a viral hit.

Taking the director’s chair

Rouse now had the directing bug. “I can’t say I had a burning desire to be a director before that, but when I was shooting the Trojan ad, I thought ‘this is such good fun. I cannot imagine a job being better than this’.” In the wake of its success he signed to Outsider in London – which has been his production company home ever since. “Soon after that I was making commercials,” he says. “So life changed very quickly.”

His early commercial work included Bad Tennis, an commercial for The Guardian, highlighting the British public’s fleeting interest in playing tennis during Wimbledon fortnight. But that Trojan calling-card also led to more online work with a strong element of edgy humour and racy content – often devised in tandem with The Viral Factory. “There was a time when I gained a reputation for that, for sure,” he says. “While I was cutting my teeth on commercials, I was getting a lot of the quite well-known viral work – the two worked together.”

In Stefane Monzon for Remington, he created a real fashion show featuring real nearly naked models parading in outlandish merkins – aka pubic wigs. “We invited members of the fashion glitterati from Los Angeles, and they thought ‘Stefane’ was a genuine fashion designer – who, in fact, was the only actor in that piece. Preparing for the genuine show created an extraordinary atmosphere. It was such an exciting way to work.”

Building improv as a feature

It was one of his early stabs at improvised comedy, but not the first. That was Ravenstoke, Alaska, his online spot for Axe/Lynx – a fake TV news report about an Alaskan town with no women – so the men crop-spray the town with Axe body spray. Beautiful women then turn up in their droves – along with lots of horny animals.

“It was a fantastic idea and a strong comic premise,” says Rouse. “We had rural folk, very attractive women, and animals running around, all being slightly confused.” He also cast the real owner of the crop-spray plane in the spot as the town mayor, and discovered non-actors could be just as effective as professionals. “We told him the comic premise, sat him down in a chair, and he just got it. It’s a fantastic performance.”

BoomdeYaDa, his 2008 spot for Discovery Channel for 72andSunny, was an important step in his progression from being a director best known for his online content to one helming fully-fledged TV commercials. Starting with buddy-astronauts in space breaking into song about the beauty of Earth, and including stock footage of Tibetan monks lipsyncing to the song, it was a big, post-heavy job. He handled that challenge with aplomb, and seamless visual effects has become quite a feature of much of his work – his Strongbow ads, for instance, and his recent Samsung ad Baby Chase.

Rouse reflects that these ads fall into a category where even if you can’t identify with the protagonists, the work is designed to make the viewer feel good. “That’s a common desire,” he says. “It’s really important to me that its stuff that people can identify with, or recognise themselves in, or makes them feel warm and good.”   

In fact, achieving the delightful lunacy of Baby Chase last year was, he says, one of his toughest jobs: the budget was low, they couldn’t use a top-quality camera because the space they were shooting in was so small – and then there was the baby. “We had to be very careful because obviously the baby can’t be moved around. So we used puppetted legs. And getting a reaction from the baby like he’s hitting something when he’s not is, erm, challenging.”

Samsung’s Baby Chase ad was a mammoth six-day shoot. His other baby-orientated commercial last year, for the VW Tiguan, was slightly less taxing. But Rouse is loath to divulge any trade secrets about how he achieved the ad’s key ingredient of getting the baby to wake and cry then sleep again, beyond saying it was “all above board” and done for real. “I think what’s charming about it is that you feel in that commercial that the baby is real. We didn’t know for certain that we were going to get that.”

When he finds them on his wavelength, Rouse will work with talent repeatedly. One of the actors in his improv-style ad for youth counselling service Frank last year  – which features butchers passing around a joint of meat – is now in Parachute, his new ad for VW Golf, as a dimwitted skydiver who buys his parachute from a bargain bin.

Stepping up for a Downhill run

Clearly the believability of the performances in Rouse’s work is at the heart of its success so news that the director’s first feature film – a comedy-drama called Downhill – will be released in the UK this May is a cause for celebration. Shot in the Lake District and around the UK, Downhill is a story of four old schoolfriends who reunite in early middle age to attempt the trans-Pennine walk between the west and east coasts of England.

Shot in 2012, he admits that it has been a much tougher slog getting it a theatrical release in the UK than getting it made. “That was the first thing I’ve done over three minutes long. It was really hard work but very exciting. I discovered that barely half of the job is actually making the movie. You have to actively drum up interest and use every contact you have to force people to sit in a cinema. The film industry has pretty much zero interest in the advertising world, I would say.”

Downhill may or may not turn out to be a new Full Monty, but its director still has plenty to look forward to. Rouse’s intelligent approach to comedy direction – observational, improvisational or otherwise – is advertising’s gain. It’s just a matter of trust.

“It makes such a massive difference when you are trusted. I think everyone feels it – agencies feel it when they’re trusted by their clients, and that just feeds down the line. If an agency trusts a director, better work will come out of it, for sure.”