Here’s an interview with Michel Gondry.

And here’s the first question and answer:

Mr. Gondry, why are you still doing commercials?

I do as few commercials as possible, maybe one or two per year because it allows me to do the movies that I want to do. I confess I am not proud of doing commercials. If tomorrow I could make a decision that would make the commercials disappear altogether, I would make this decision even if it means I would gain much less money. But since those commercials are getting made anyways, I am taking the opportunities. It’s true, I am not proud of that and it’s a good point you are underlining. I hope my movies will be more successful and then I won’t have to do commercials anymore.

So does that matter? Are people good at things they’re embarrassed by?

Having said that, it’s been a long time since Michel Gondry made a great commercial (here’s his most recent one):

http://vimeo.com/75224608

…and I have no idea if he felt the same way when his commercial work was better:

Has he grown to hate ads? Has his disdain coincided with the vague success of his film career (ESOTSM was amazing; the rest not so much)? How will people feel when he deigns to assign his lofty genius to their shitty commercials?

And does that interview make him sound like a bit of a bell?

I don’t like The Gap or Starbucks.

This is because they presented themselves with a hippy-dippy, tree-hugging image of niceness that was violently at odds with the sweat-shop-employing, tax-dodging truth we discovered later.

Until this past weekend I didn’t know that this feeling was both widespread and the subject of many a study. The concept of ‘tainted altruism’, whereby people seem to be out for themselves while attempting to appear wholly good and kind on behalf of others, is one that gets right up our noses.  As the article says:

This won’t be news to Dan Pallotta, an American fundraiser whose story the Yale researchers tell. In the 90s, Pallotta raised $0.5bn for Aids and other causes with sponsored walks and bike rides. But when it emerged that his salary was pushing $400,000 (£240,000), the outcry led to his downfall. These days, he gives slightly bitter talks, arguing that we’re doing altruism all wrong. “You want to make $50m selling violent videogames to kids? Go for it,” he said. “But you want to make half a million dollars trying to cure kids of malaria? You’re a parasite.”

I think the public annoyance comes from the feeling that the wool has been pulled over our eyes. When Goldman Sachs is evil we get pissed off, but that negative feeling is confined to the crime, whereas a transgression by a supposedly ‘good’ organisation carries the double wrong of the bad deed and the attempt to cover it up (along with the implicit suggestion that we are stupid enough to buy the trick). We feel like we’ve been had, and by someone we trusted; our feelings were toyed with by a charlatan, and that is harder to forgive.

The ‘irrationality’ of that is fascinating, and makes me wonder to what extent we punish people or things for other reasons that are hard to justify:

When credible stars take the money and exposure of a dumb blockbuster we feel somewhat betrayed. Of course, there are good reasons why they decide to accept $5m for a superhero movie instead of the usual few hundred grand for another Coen Bros. flick, but we bought into the career of the actor, whereby we could champion them in pub chats to establish our own good taste, then they punctured the whole thing, making us look like dicks for investing ourselves in liking them in the first place.

And football players. Would you move jobs for more money and the chance to win more awards? Of course. But when your favourite player leaves to do the same there is a sense of betrayal and rejection. They played for ‘us’; we loved them for it. The fact they they were only into their team for as long as it paid them a ‘fair’ wage passed our rational minds by, leaving us hurt and pissed off. They (kind of) lied to us, so fuck them.

And maybe we have a favourite restaurant that expands all over town. Now everyone can appreciate its good food, but to many of us that’s not a benefit. Instead it means their quality is spread more thinly and the great thing we helped build has used our patronage to become worse. Can you believe it? All that money they took from us and what do we get? A worse experience. How is that fair? Up yours, expanding pizza joint.

A loved car might be discontinued, or improved in a way we don’t like.

A band might go ‘commercial’, casting aside what made us love them.

A clothing brand might court exposure from a famous twat, rending it unwearable for any of us who patronised it in the early days.

So there are many facets to the ‘relationship’ we have with a brand or product. Who knows what will offend someone to the point of rejection? Just as deep personal relationships can be ruined by a misplaced opinion, love for companies can be destroyed by the unpredicted effects of an unintended slight.

Massive paranoia is surely the way forward (unless that makes one appear desperate and needy).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XviR7esUvo&feature=youtu.be

It feels to me like a poor relation to Write The Future, chucking everything but the kitchen sink at a very slight idea.

And 4 minutes? Nothing new happens after the pitch turns into a stadium. It’s just the usual stepovers and tackles we’ve seen in every Nike ad since Good Versus Evil.

‘What do we do now?’

‘Chuck the Hulk in.’

‘What?’

‘Come on, there’s nowhere else for this to go and we need to fill 250 seconds.’

‘Oh. OK.’

I’m sure 12-year-olds will love it.

UPDATE: I think it’s worth saying that since Good vs Evil Nike (along with every sports brand on earth, along with several other brands) has been doing to death the ‘interesting variation on a football game’ plot. Pepsi had football with sumo wrestlers, Adidas had football with normal people picked by footballers, Nike had football with video game characters and on and on and on…

That’s why I liked Write the Future so much: it wasn’t just a game of football; it was a strong idea around a game of football.

This new ad is very dull and lacks any imagination whatsoever.

Movie posters with their 1-Star Amazon reviews.

The surfeur Breton (thanks, S and B):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpfB-NWSlQc

Watch a watch get made – utterly spellbinding (thanks, A):

The periodic table of storytelling (thanks, D).

Guy walks round Tokyo backwards then shows us the results in reverse (thanks, L).

Sony World Photographer Of The Year winners.

Mad Men meets Blaxploitation (thanks, D):

32 true infographics (thanks, J).

Fly a camera through a fireworks display:

Did Christopher Nolan steal the idea f0r Inception from a Scrooge McDuck comic? (Thanks, D.)

Stinky candles (thanks, J).

Infomercial struggles compilation (thanks, J):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eMCURWpNAg

Particularly (obviously) the editing.

I don’t think I’ve seen editing that brilliant before.

That is damn, damn, damn fine editing.

But I feel sorry for the poor cunt who had to do it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N52GiLGp7qA

Smart insight, completely true problem solved perfectly by product, and good direction.

That’s what you want out of an ad.

I was reading an interview with Damon Albarn the other day where he mentioned the extent to which heroin improved his creative output:

‘For me it was incredibly creative. It freed me up. If you’re talking about an odyssey, that was definitely an odyssey… I can only say (heroin) was incredibly productive for me. Hand on heart.’

Then I read an interview with Jeremy Thomas, Oscar-winning producer of The Last Emperor, Sexy Beast and The Naked Lunch. He lamented the change in the way films were made because it used to be de rigeur to provide beer at the end of a day’s shooting, whereas this was now very much frowned upon:

‘I’m not condoning drunkenness. I’m just saying that that part of the creative process is no longer there… There are many constraints on (freedom and creativity) now and my best films were made in an era of wildness.’

This left me wondering what we might now be missing that could be enhancing creativity. The possibly apocryphal stories of yesteryear agency boozing and drugging are legion, and only a myopic prick would try to argue that the work wasn’t commensurately gargantuan in quality. So did the booze and biftas bring on the brilliance, or was it somewhat coincidental?

It’s easy to see a connection between the looseness of mind that comes with inebriation and the random leaps and collisions that bring on the most original ideas. However much the sensible part of my brain would like to dismiss the relationship, the part that’s now two large glasses of delicious Summerland Chardonnay to the good/bad can only see a brick-hard logic in suggesting that one can certainly lead to the other, after all, the work of Hemingway, Huxley and Lennon does seem pretty persuasive here. But does more drinking bring on more creativity? Harder to argue, and besides, one then has to deal with the attendant problems a greater ingestion of alcohol often creates. In addition, we have those pesky tee-totallers, Carty and Campbell and their peerless creative output, proving that A doesn’t necessarily lead to B.

Of course, many other factors have repressed advertising creativity over the years, but I do recall a suggestion from the aforementioned Walter Campbell, who told me years ago that he sometimes liked to come to work at 2am because the mind worked in a completely different way at that time of night (I once tried this theory out and discovered that he was right, but then I was too knackered to continue the experiment and unlike Walt I couldn’t just fail to turn up to work during daylight hours in the service of a thought experiment). So the altering of the brain’s conventional workings, whether conventionally, illegally, or otherwise, has been consistently proven to bring on the good stuff that makes the great stuff.

But how do your own experiences bear this theory out? Does Courvoisier equal Cannes Lions? Can a bit of ketamine bring you a Kinsale Shark? Or is a messy mind entirely unrelated to the creative process?

Answers on a forthright caramel tree house.

Animals stuck in odd places but don’t seem to mind (thanks, J).

The human condition, perfectly captured in photos (thanks, J).

Romantic pictures from Russian dating sites (thanks, L).

The world as 100 people.

Cool optical illusion (thanks, D):

The futility of existence (thanks, J):

How to contemporary dance (thanks, B):

Chop tomatoes easily (thanks, B):

The best muso insults (thanks, T).

If classic footballers made albums (thanks, T).

PRANK MY DAD!!!!:

Are you a basic bitch?

35 most amazing restaurant views (thanks, T).

Nietzsche writes Upworthy headlines (thanks, T).