Jeff Low Gets Lotto-s Of Laughs

Lotto's #PleaseNotThem series from AMV BBDO has hit our screens again, this time with TV star Noel Edmonds and Vinnie Jones.

Thanks to the campaign's earlier success, the series is back with a vengeance promising awkward laughter and stylistic execution.

Director Jeff Low talks to shots about the inspiration behind the ideas, his committment to comedy and getting Piers Morgan to lick a Piers-shaped ice lolly.

What appealed about the scripts for the Camelot series?

100 percent the idea. I think I’ve said this before but the guys at AMV get all the credit for simply having an idea that in many ways wrote itself. 

How much of a challenge did you expect communicating the comedy would be and how did you approach this?

It was tricky and scary at first.  The mock-umentary style falls apart and feels way too ‘written' if you don’t create conditions for scenes to take shape naturally in an almost undirected sort of way.  

All the stumbles and weirdness is the good stuff that you don’t get in a tightly written script. We just wrote jokes and told the cast they had to get from point A to point B however they wanted to get there and that’s what I hope makes it feel much more realistic than if I had puppeteered each moment of each scene….which I sometimes have to do.  

Tell us about working with the different celebrities and working on each of the spots in the series… Where was each ad shot and did all the logistics go according to plan? 

They were all a bit different and there were a lot of blank stare moments where I could see them doing the math about how a ‘gag’ would play with the public and the media.

Asking Piers Morgan to lick an ice-lolly shaped as his own head or telling him the joke is about his signature resembling the word ‘penis’ are both good examples of those types of moments. All the ads were shot around London and I’d say that 60 percent of the plan worked, 40 percent was improvised on set and in the moment.

Tell us a bit about each protagonist. Why was it important to make the characters as authentic as possible?

I wanted the films to feel like this was ACTUALLY HAPPENING - not LIKE it was actually happening.  No winking at the audience, no ‘get it?’ type moments.  I can’t tell anymore if that worked but we all knew that was the healthiest ecosystem for the idea to live within. 

A lot of your work is very funny. How important is humour to your directing style and how much do you enjoy shooting comedy?

I love trying to make things funny in an almost pathological way.  I’ve got a bit of a 'border collie in a basement apartment' type personality and I find it endlessly challenging and rewarding to turn words on a piece of paper into a film that might make someone laugh.