Director Profile: Gary Freedman

The success of The Glue Society is not just down to the bonding together of eight creative types from disparate disciplines – art, design, filmmaking and writing – it’s also due to the fact that the collective’s work, for top clients from Virgin to Axe, boasts the award-winning ingredient of ‘viewer adhesiveness’. Co-founder Gary Freedman explains all to Tim Cumming

Glue sticks things together, however far apart their origin. The sticky amalgam of rendered-down animal parts, like the creative imagination, has been connecting found objects in inventive new ways since, well, the dawn of time (or at least 200,000 years!)

In more recent times (since the late 1990s, to be exact) The Glue Society, working out of offices in Sydney and New York, has been imaginatively putting disparate elements together – sculpture, advertising, film, live events, drama series – that have gone round the world, from the coast of Denmark for Sculpture By The Sea, to the Australian outback for The Missing Piece art project, plus exhibitions in New York, Chicago and at Art Basel, Miami. On top of that, campaigns for the likes of Canal+, HSBC, Doritos, Halfords, Aldi and more have placed it at the top of the directorial tree. And a key ingredient of the glue holding it together is co-founder of The Glue Society, Gary Freedman.

Having the idea and making it… even chicken fighting

Based in New York since 2005 (“Mainly just to try living there,” he comments. “One of those ‘You have to live in New York once in your life’-type things,”) Freedman set up The Glue Society in 1998 with Jonathan Kneebone, three years after both of them had stepped off a plane in Sydney, in search of thrills, spills and art direction. Freedman, who hails from the British seaside town of Southend, was fresh from college, travelling the world with a rucksack, pushing it under the bed to take a freelance job as an art director in Sydney working on an Australian music TV channel. Next he moved to Y&R, where he hooked up with Jonathan Kneebone, who’d arrived there from Howell Henry Chaldecott Lury in London. “I worked as an art director – for a short time really, in the big scheme of things,” says Freedman. “But spending that period of time as a creative in an agency was invaluable. Ultimately, with directing a commercial, the most critical thing is ‘the idea’ itself – and there’s no better way of learning how to appreciate that than working in an agency for a while. It doesn’t matter how good the rest of the film is, if the idea isn’t there, or just not very good in the first place, you’re buggered.”

He and Kneebone first worked together on a book they wrote and art directed called Knowledge Keeps Like Fish. “It was produced to inspire people to do more interesting advertising in newspapers,” says Freedman. “We worked with some amazing creative people outside the advertising world on that project. And I think it ended up inspiring us to leave and do our own thing.” And that initial bonding led straight to The Glue Society.

They soon became a magnificent seven (now eight) of artists, writers, designers and directors, bringing art and sculpture, long-form and live events into their roster of hugely successful commercial work – work that has brought them a Cannes Titanium Lion and Direct Grand Prix, a multitude of gold Lions and D&AD awards, made them two-time winners of Australia’s Creative magazine’s Hotshop of the Year, and put them at the number-two director in the world slot in The Gunn Report.

“We never really had a strict model for it beyond it being a place where we could pursue any creative thing we wanted to do,” says Freedman. “We have originated advertising ideas as well as directed them. But we’ve never been an agency of any sort – we’ve never had any accounts or long-term clients. But also, aside from advertising projects we’ve made short films, music videos, long-form entertainment and exhibited as sort of ‘capital A’ artists – which sounds a bit high falutin’, but it’s really not any different from anything else we’ve done. It’s just about having ideas and making them. It wasn’t that clear from the beginning, but that’s where The Glue Society has ended up – as a group of people who both conceive and make.”

In the very different media landscape of the 1990s, their idea of creative work was all about breaking down barriers and the paradigms of the 20th-century TV/radio/print landscape. “Yes, we were interested in doing things beyond traditional media,” agrees Freedman, “but 1998 is a long time ago now. It’s a totally different world from that perspective. There are no barriers now. In many ways we’re more suited to the way things are now than we were back then.”

The Glue Society’s first work was for Australian music TV channel, Channel V, riffing on the concept of a cult leader. It got them a New Directors’ Showcase in Cannes in 2000, followed by a run of work for Virgin, which was awarded at Cannes and elsewhere in the early 2000s. Then came Chicken Fight for Burger King with Crispin Porter in 2004. “It was a half-hour show – the Chicken Sandwich world championship – where two men in giant chicken suits beat the crap out of each other in a steel cage.” Sounds reasonable enough – who doesn’t like tenderised chicken? “We were very into experimenting with long-form advertising then, and soon after that we did another project for Axe through BBH called The Gamekillers, a one-hour show for MTV.”

Looking back and learning what you’re good at

Instead of high-end visuals, what inspires Freedman is story and character – they are the glue that holds all the work together, binding tighter than any fancy keyboard work in post. “Whether it’s more drama or more comedy, I am equally excited to work on it if it’s driven by an interesting character and a story that you can add dimension too. I think it takes a long time to really discover what kind of a director you are and what you’re good at,” he adds. “You don’t really see it until you look back on a bunch of work and realise that you tend to lean one way. And for me, it’s people. I like to do things with cinematic scale and narrative – but ultimately it’s always ‘people ideas’ that I’m drawn to. Casting is the biggest factor in most of the work that I do.”

Of the campaigns he has worked on, March Of The Emperors for Canal+ is among his favourites. “That was a genius idea – which needed to play like cinema, as it exists in someone’s head. It won a lot of awards and kind of set me on a good path. Since then I’ve done quite a few more Canal+ ads.” He adds, self-deprecatingly, “Actually, the really great ones like The Bear and The Closet were directed by someone else much smarter than me.”

Then there’s his Doritos Dip Desperado spot with AMV, in which a chip-flicking champion takes the spotlight. “I love that kind of thing where there’s a great idea but it can expand into a big narrative,” says Freedman. “We were quite free to develop a story that really built on the initial concept. And even as we were shooting, things were still able to evolve.” They were in Mexico, he remembers, scouting locations and creating new scenes on the spot to add to the story. “It’s that kind of flexibility – to develop the story simultaneous to the production – where things become really magical.” He adds: “I like a stripped-down approach where you’re not weighed down by the circus of a huge cumbersome production. It allows you to react more easily and create something new which gets you to a more authentic place.”

Looking for the human glue to stick the story together

An ability to react fast as the story, the character and the shoot unfolded, was crucial to the success of Lift for HSBC through Grey London – a whole life story told in those moments between floors. “We had a character whose story takes place entirely in a lift over 40 or so years,” Freedman says. “It’s about his business, but really it’s the story of his life with all the ups and downs and the relationships within it. As you work through it you discover more and more about the character and you start to layer the film with detail as all these touch-points start to connect.”

That connecting tissue is what makes a good piece of work great, and it is what makes people stick rather than twist, to stay and watch rather than click elsewhere. That viewer adhesiveness is probably the biggest job in contemporary creative communications.

“I’m always looking for things in a character that are real even if they are a little off-beat,” says Freedman. “Things that make them a real person. Often I think these things are what make the commercial really memorable. The idea is the foundation but it’s the human qualities that make it connect with people.”

The Glue Society was born just as the internet age was kicking off and, for Freedman, it was well-placed and perfectly formed to adapt to the incoming digital flow. “We don’t profess to know anything really about digital and social media,” he admits, “but I think that our kind of ‘loose’ skill set is well suited to creative ideas that are new and hard to pigeonhole. We’ve always been reluctant to be pinned down as one thing and, in a funny way, it’s worked well for us because advertising has evolved in that way too.”

In terms of the changes he’s seen since launching The Glue Society back in 1998, Freedman pinpoints not the revolutions in technology so much as the more interactive approach of the brands. “I’ve noticed how much more involved clients are in the making of their advertising,” he says. “Not just the idea but the details on how something is produced. That feels quite new – to be so aware of specifics. The way the industry has moved in the last few years, clients seem to want to be much closer to the source of the creative. And that now extends beyond the agency to include the director. I don’t know whether that’s a good or bad thing,” he laughs. “I guess it depends on the client.”

The benefits of not making a shitty film

For now, he’s just wrapped up a shoot for adam&eveDDB. “It’s an idea that’s right up my street,” he says, “funny, human, and with a biggish story to it.” As for future projects, long, short and free form, he opens up about plans to helm a feature film. “I’ve been working towards directing it in the last couple of years, so I find I’m drawn to commercials which are kind of sympathetic to the film I’d like to do,” he says. “But who knows where that is ever at?” In the middle of last year, he was all set to start shooting at the beginning of 2015 before abruptly finding himself and his project back at square one.

“They’re tricky things to get off the ground,” he laughs, “and I’d rather make a good commercial than a shitty film. In fact, I’d rather make a shitty commercial than a shitty film – it’s easier to bounce back from.”