Director Profile: Olly Williams

Making spaceships and blowing things up were the two things that first appealed to director Olly Williams about the film industry, as well as being in charge. Growing up in Twickenham, West London, his favourite toy was his lego table – an 8’x4’ sheet of wood on legs with a hole in the middle where he could stand and have complete control over the lego world.

“That table was without a doubt the single most influential moment of my career. Any kid thinking of going to film school should look into getting a lego table first,” he says.

After studying film and theatre design at Wimbledon School of Art, Williams worked in the design team at the Royal Opera House and as a design assistant for Matthew Bourne, choreographer/director of Swan Lake and Edward Scissorhands.

“I was doing things like making models, spending weeks making a tiny chair out of cocktail sticks, which was fun but as an industry it was way too slow for me! I wanted to design for film – I really wanted to make spaceships and blow things up. So, I was trying to get into the film industry whilst working in theatre as well as in bars in the evening and all that crap.”

Teaching a young dog new tricks
Williams’ big break in film came when he noticed a shoot was taking place in the car park across the road from his flat. He strolled over and introduced himself to the art director, Clare Clarkson, who gave him a helping hand by informing Harry Nash that he was a great storyboard artist.

“So they phoned up and asked me to come and do some storyboards. I’d never done storyboarding before in my life!” explains Williams. “I went away and spent a week working day and night doing them but went back to Harry Nash and said they’d only taken me two days to complete (because I wanted to look like I knew what I was doing!) I then started storyboarding and art directing for Jake Nava and that was how I got into music videos and commercials.”

Although he was loving life as a production designer, Williams soon found the world of directing was becoming very attractive. In 2008, he joined up with his friend Phil Sansom to form a directing duo called Diamond Dogs.

“I should probably say that I always wanted to direct commercials, but originally all I wanted to do was design for films. Then my friend Phil was pitching on some music videos and asked me whether I wanted to help. I thought, why not? Then we won a couple and I thought, this is really fun!” says Williams.

“Phil and I worked together for 10 years as Diamond Dogs, shooting music videos and commercials, which was great fun. But I wanted to keep the building things and blowing stuff up going at the same time, because I love it! And designing keeps your head a bit more sane sometimes, as you have to deal with logistics.”

The last 12 or so years has seen Williams building two careers – one as a sought after freelance production designer for screen in the world of commercials and another as a successful director.

In 2008, Diamond Dogs wrote and directed short film The Black Hole, taking the Grand Jury prize at the Virgin Media Short Film Awards and winning countless other awards at festivals including Montreal, Festival Courts dans I’Herbe, Rushes, Cannes Short Film Corner, OneDotZero, Melies France and Canadian Film Centre. The duo also made numerous hit music videos, including Robbie Williams’ You Know Me and Maximo Park’s Apply Some Pressure.

However, Williams eventually decided to go solo and is currently represented by Another Film Company, where he has created some standout work including the recent B&Q Unleash campaign.

“It was hard to go solo. Working in a duo is a brilliant thing but working on your own does mean you can just follow your instinct, which was the only thing we ever clashed about. We are still great friends and the decision to work apart was partly taken as our friendship always came first,” he says.

The friendship between Williams and Sansom is still thriving and the duo can often be seen around London performing together in cover band The Philthy Collins Band alongside Dougal Wilson and James Wicks.

“The band is fairly silly, but it has this awesome reputation that way surpasses our actual collective skills –  mostly, I think, because the audience is usually completely hammered and made up of our mates , many of whom work in advertising and are therefore quite good at exaggerating,” says Williams. “The idea is to play covers of tracks that should never ever be covered, so loud and with so many effects that nobody can hear quite how much we suck.”

Now a successful director in his own right, Williams’ commercials effortlessly combine comedy with sensational art direction, this can clearly be seen in his B&Q campaign as well as the award-winning Doritos Juke Box campaign and Smartphone work for O2.

The double life of Olly Williams
Williams still works as a production designer, whenever he can find the time, and finds that his two careers work hand in hand and help make him better at both skills.

“I’d like to think that my background in design has helped me become a better director, just as directing has informed how I think about design in a much clearer way. When I design a set I really like to think about the shots and the lenses and how it’s lit. I’d like to think that that mutually informative learning also benefits the directors I’ve designed for as much as it has benefited me as a director,” he says.

“A lot of people ask me when I’m going to quit designing – but it doesn’t really work like that for me. At the end of the day it’s about building a picture, it doesn’t matter how you achieve it. I love building a world and really showing it off on a big wide shot, but I also I love working with a character and shooting on a long lens when you’re only marginally aware of the space the character is in – which as a designer is always frustrating to see happen to a set you’ve built. Of course it’s always bloody satisfying to me when you pop back out to the wide and it just looks the nuts.”

Williams says it’s difficult to pick a favourite between directing and designing. “I think I’m happiest when I’m directing something that I’m designing at the same time, or at least have had a heavy hand in designing,” he says. “I really love it when I’m creating a world and you can do that by designing something really ostentatious and visually impressive, but you can also create that with just a simple character in front of a camera – I love doing both.”

An example of how Williams combines both skills is his recent short film, The Fly, in which he decided to blow up his own car. The film has been nominated for best film at Bend Film Festival in Oregon and tells the story of a getaway driver at a robbery struggling to keep his composure.

Of the film, Williams says: “It’s a character piece and I was lucky to work with a great actor, Jack Doolan, who threw himself into the role with so much violence, power and spirit. It’s his real blood on screen, which was… nice?

“I needed a cool getaway car to blow up and my own car turned out to be the right one to choose, so we blew it to pieces! I then spent a painstaking few months putting it back together again. The week after the shoot, my brother walked into an art gallery around the corner and some artist had hung and signed the bonnet, riddled with all the scorched shotgun holes that we’d made for the film. He was trying to sell it for £10k and was peddling some bullshit line about how his work was ‘informed by film aesthetics’. I had to commend him on having the balls to be honest.”

Williams says his favourite film genre is drama. He adds that shooting drama, commercials and music promos are all very different but he gets a similar buzz from all of them and they’re all about telling a story with pictures and finding something in them that will resonate.

He particularly enjoyed working on the B&Q commercials and has recently finished shooting the brand’s Christmas campaign, which promises to be full of fun and humour.

“This campaign is a totally different type of filmmaking for me because it’s about locking a camera off and creating a quick narrative out of a series of plates happening very quickly. Stressful, fiddly, but really fun,” he says.

“It’s been a really fun campaign. The client said right from the off that they wanted to make it bonkers and fun and if we had an idea like that then to just go with it. It’s been really refreshing. It’s like an anti-advert, but in a really good way.”

Of the industry today, Williams adds: “Budgets have gone down but people try a lot harder to make something great out of very little. People put their heart and soul into their work. Talent prevails and good stuff gets made. As long as you don’t take yourself too seriously, you’ll be fine – that’s a rule for life really, not just the industry.”

Although design was the area that Williams first wanted to specialise in, he admits that even before the design dream reared its head, there was an earlier ambition – to be something pretentious.

“I went off to art school thinking ‘I’m going to be a sculptor, an artist or something else amazing (and probably quite pretentious), paint my nails and dye my hair’,” he says.

However, it seems almost inevitable that film was going to take the leading role in his life, rather than sculpture, as he admits that he spent most of his childhood watching Indiana Jones movies.

“When I was a kid I spent my entire time watching Indiana Jones and that totally made me want to make films. I imagine I’d earn more kudos by saying that Tarkofsky was my driving influence (and I do love his films) but I know what struck the loudest chord with me,” he says.

“Steven Soderbergh actually just graded Temple of Doom as black and white and put a new score on it without the dialogue, to highlight what I already knew – that it’s a totally badass piece of film making!”

Looking to the future, Williams' ultimate ambition is to direct and design for feature films as well as commercials. He looks to the likes of David Fincher and Spike Jonze who came from the commercials scene and are proving that it’s possible to get there.

However, he realises that that’s a common dream among commercials filmmakers, telling shots: “I want to eventually be working on features. But then, who doesn’t?”