Director Profile: Jeff Low

The story of Jeff Low’s journey to becoming the award-winning director of spots like Skittles’ Cat and Tena Men’s Keep Control, reads like the sort of surreal farce this funny-loving guy would write as a treatment. His unusual-to-say-the-least journey from covers band musician to IT tech to PA to director, via a combination of unbelievable luck, balls and sheer graft, may explain this writer-director’s taste for the ridiculous – and ridiculously funny – but also his incredible work ethic, attention to detail and intense focus. But, as he tells Iain Blair, coming from nowhere and coming late to the business doesn’t worry him – “I just do the best work I can and work my tits off”

Over the past eight years, Canadian director Jeff Low has established himself as one of the top creatives in the business, largely thanks to a simple, but highly effective, philosophy: work as hard as humanly possible (and then work a little harder still), and never forget that comedy is king.

“I’ve realised that the thing I love doing the most is making things funny,” he states. “It’s the most fun you can have on set, and I never feel like I’ve wasted my time if I’ve succeeded in making something funny. Not ‘ad’ funny, but actually funny, and it’s just so difficult to do, as there’s so many competing agendas with clients – ‘We have to do this’, ‘We can’t do this’, and ‘You must never do this’. It’s hard to get things past the goal line that are genuinely funny, and anything that people find funny is what I’m most proud of.”

A look at some of his extremely witty Greatest Hits helps underscore his point: there’s the recent Tena Men Keep Control campaign for AMV BBDO; The Guardian, Use In Moderation for BBH London in 2014; Mattel/Scrabble Blank and Q for Pereira & O’Dell SF in 2012; General Mills Fruit Snacks Cocoon for Saatchi & Saatchi NY; and the famous Skittles Cat for BBDO Toronto, both in 2011.

“And I just did World Animal Protection Before They Book [for BBH, which won Best Integrated at the recent British Arrows awards in London], so I don’t just like to tell jokes,” he adds. “Essentially all I really care about is, is it the best idea? And it’s the latest thing I’ve done that I’m proudest of, that and Tena Men. Everything else seems like a million years ago to me.” 

Making it up as you go along

Low sees the writing process as a key component. “The times when it works out best for me are when I get to write as well as direct,” he states. “I like the process of writing a lot, and I like to add as much as possible to a script on paper, before you go to camera.” Running with this thought, Low also admits that he’s “actually still unclear about what a director is, in a way. There are some who just take a script and execute it, and there are guys who are really good at that. I can do that, but I’m much more useful if I can also help write.”

The Tena Men spot is a good illustration of this approach. “I wrote a lot of those scenes with the team,” he notes, “and so those are ideal conditions for me, when I can combine it with ideas and conjure ideas with the creative team. And then on set I’ll execute them, as a normal director would. It also allows me to write my own scripts, sometimes. So if there’s a script that isn’t perfect, but it’s a situation where everyone is pretty flexible, then I’ll tend to take that script if I can do stuff to it.” Low also “loves the satisfaction” of taking a blank page, writing something, and then later watching that idea “become a reality that works. There’s something very cool about that.”

Despite his success, and self-awareness, Low comes over as genuinely modest and unassuming. “The truth is, I have a hard time even watching my own reel,” he insists. “I’m not my own cheerleader. I think I may be an honorary Brit in that way.” He’s happier talking about the work of others. The recent Honda The Other Side spot shot by Daniel Wolfe “blew my pants off – and if it doesn’t win the best ad of the year, I’ll be pretty shocked. I was very impressed.” And while Low feels that there are “just too many” awards shows, he recognises that the financial benefits of winning shouldn’t be ignored. “Just because I’m Canadian doesn’t mean I’m a socialist,” he notes drily. “A healthy amount of competition is good. I just wish I’d been smart enough to start an awards show, as I feel that may be the best job in the whole industry. You accept money so you can hand out trophies? What could be greater?”

But ask him about his favourite spots of his own and he quickly takes a considered step away from the subject. “I suppose there’s two ways of looking at it,” he allows. “There’s the ‘careerist’ way – stuff that sort of helps me in my career, and then there’s the stuff that I like, the comedy stuff.”

The accidental commercials director

Successful comedy, of course, depends on timing, and it turns out that the Toronto native, who eventually found his way into directing through an unlikely and non-traditional route, always had a great sense of timing – and time. Starting off as a musician in his 20s, Low played bass guitar and keyboards, “in bar bands and David Bowie tribute acts, for drunk college kids mostly,” he reports. “It was tons of fun and a great way to spend a decade. I loved it.”

But gradually he felt the gravitational pull “to grow up and do something other than just drink beer for a living, which is basically what you do as a musician in those kinds of bands,” he explains. So Low got a day job repairing computers in the back of a shop. “I was in my 30s, struggling to grow up and be responsible,” he adds. “It wasn’t what I wanted to do, but then I didn’t know what I wanted to do, and it was a job.”

When one day he got called out to the sales floor as a temporary replacement for a salesman who’d had to leave, Low’s gift for timing arrived in a career-changing moment. “This guy came in who wanted to buy a computer, and I told him I couldn’t sell it to him as I wasn’t a sales person, but a repair guy in the back,” he recalls. “So he said, ‘Do you like your job?’ And I said, ‘Of course not – I hate it!’ So he said, ‘If you sell it to me at a discount, you can come and work for me tomorrow’. It turned out he was a production manager and needed an assistant, and thought I’d make a good one. I had to ask him what a PA even was. But it sounded far more interesting than what I was doing, so I thought, why not?”

Low was promptly fired from the computer store for his unauthorised stint as a ‘salesman’ and started his new career the next day. “I didn’t mean to do any of this,” he laughs. “There was no big plan. It all happened by accident, and when I got on set, I found that everyone was really cool, and they all had the same problem I had – no one really knew what the hell they were doing with their lives.”

After learning the ropes and gradually working his way up through production, a burned-out and frustrated Low decided to leave the film industry – but not before he gave it one last shot. “I’ve always felt creative and had that need to express myself, so I thought, ‘I’ll pick a job that I want, and I’ll really try to get it,’” he says. “And if I don’t get it, no big deal. I’ll leave and go back to my old life as a musician.”

Aiming for the stars, Low picked ‘director’. “I wanted to do what they do, and by then I’d been doing treatments for them and sort of understood the job,” he adds. “I’d learned how to speak to agencies through treatment writing, and knew what they wanted to hear – good fresh ideas.”

With this minimal training, Low “somehow convinced” an acquaintance with a local production company to build his reel. “I’d write fake commercials, and he’d help me shoot them on the backs of jobs he already had,” recalls Low. “And he helped me get some scripts, which put me in a position to do what I already knew how to do – writing and crafting treatments. And ever since then, my strength’s been writing and crafting ideas on paper, and being very specific about them. And then, just with experience, I’ve learned to see what’s going to work and what’s totally not going to work.”

Although Low paints a fairly breezy picture of his move into directing, he admits that if he’d known just how hard it would be, “I probably wouldn’t have pursued it. Every single happiness in your life has to be forfeited, for at least a year, and if you go into this thinking, ‘I’ll make a ton of money’, you’re an idiot. You need to let go of everything and forget about money, which is hard to do. And it was a real grind, a game of inches, and it’s so competitive.”

His big break finally came with his acclaimed interactive Skittles spot which garnered 1.5 million views online within 24 hours of its debut (the overall campaign won two gold Lions at Cannes). “For a guy like me to even have a brand like Skittles really got me noticed,” he says. “And it was all blind luck. I worked my ass off to get it, but I didn’t write it.”

But it was the spot that got Low signed to Biscuit, and got him leverage. “I had a cool little reel before, but this was a major deal, and it solidified me as ‘a funny guy’ whether I liked it or not,” he notes. “And in America, at least, I find you can only do one thing. You’re ‘that guy’. You can’t do four things, because it’s such a specialised market. But that’s not the case in the UK or Canada or Australia, at least in my experience.”

Since then, Low has actively “tried to leave money out of the equation” and focus on work “that I feel good about. Forget about awards and so on – just do the best job I can, and work my tits off. That’s the secret.”

That and intense preparation. “I do a lot of research and forensically go through every aspect of a job,” he explains. “I’m almost scientific about my approach, on paper. But that only gets you so far. You still need the je ne sais quoi.”

While he still has a home and family in Toronto, Low rarely works in Canada anymore, and divides his time between London and LA, “almost 50-50. And I’ll almost always get ‘funny’ scripts in both markets, but the UK will give me opportunities to do other stuff,” he reports. “Culturally, it’s just more open to a director doing varied material, and I don’t know why.”

Come over here and sit next to me

Asked about his directing style, Low describes his approach as “trying to be a conduit for the script’s author. Sometimes they may want me to totally take over, but more often when you’re working with a top creative team, they have a very strong position on how it should be,” he states. “So it’s not really my vision, and I want to amplify their vision. And you can work two different ways: either I sit down beside you and we go over things, or I sit across from you. And I’d rather sit beside you. That’s the best way I can describe my approach. Maybe it’s collaborative to a fault sometimes, but I love the debate and the back-and-forth.”

As for the future, Low says he has no plans to move into movies. “I feel like I’m perfectly trained to make a terrible movie,” he claims. “I like the short format, so I can definitely see myself doing sketch comedy, and I love writing so much that – whatever I end up doing – as long as it involves writing, I’ll be happy.”