After Making an Estimated 1,000 Ads, This Director Likes to… KISS
In his 40 years of directing, Alejandro Toledo estimates he’s made around 1,000 ads. There are almost 400 on his Vimeo page alone. It’s hard to know where to start to appraise a career of that scale, so I let the Spanish filmmaker tell me his story as he sees it.
“I started directing short movies for cinema. I won some little awards when I was 19 or 20 and then I started working with the local TV stations. A young generation of directors could get our start there because nobody wanted to do all those commercials. They give us a range of introductions in the market, working with very low budgets.” As you can see from his reel, Alejandro, who is now represented by Diamond Rocket, would eventually get his hands on some of the biggest production budgets going. But to begin with, it was about making the most of what was available.
One of his biggest early projects was for a bank and was his first commercial to pick up an award. Suddenly Alejandro’s career exploded. He started directing bigger and bigger ads with proper budgets, which was welcome to someone not used to a full crew. “At the beginning I was doing everything myself,” he says. “Even bringing the lights. We were a crew of three or four, usually.”
Alejandro’s career snowballed from there and over a period of years he founded several companies in Spain, Propaganda being his biggest venture. "We had some very flourishing years of non-stop work," he says.
Actually, he was flourishing a little too much. Shooting, by his estimate, 55 commercials a year. “It was exhausting,” he says. So he sold his shares in the business and looked beyond the shores of Spain. “I moved freely, jumping into the international market.”
By this time it was the mid ‘90s. Alejandro was working with Group Films in Spain and all over the world with different companies – No Guns in the US, Tempomedia in Germany and Quad in France. He learned the nuance of each market’s production and advertising styles. “Every country has its own specific way to work,” he says. “All the general rules are the same; what changes is the mentality. In France, the mentality of the people is very different from shooting for example in Germany or Turkey or Russia. The way to behave or the creative relationship with the clients is different. The approach to the business is different also.”
There was one particular market where the challenges were pronounced for Alejandro. “Germany was very specific. In terms of creativity, the submission of agencies to clients was really strong. It was tough.” And working on a lot of Unilever projects at the time through Lintas, the clients had some weight to throw around. As a result, he saw some creatives get worn down by their best ideas being rejected repeatedly.
“The French were different. The creativity was sometimes a bit better because the relationships with clients were different. Until the cost controllers entered the market. And then it changed the power relations between agencies and clients. The cost controllers got a lot of power. They were in our meetings and even looking at our treatments and taking the decision on who was going to do what.”
Alejandro’s career has flourished in no small part due to proving himself a safe pair of hands with an expensive automotive script. It was a big BMW commercial which allowed him to prove himself in this space. ‘Faster than the Wind’ it was called. “It opened the gates of car work,” he says. “Before I was doing Spanish brands. After that I did a lot of commercials for Kia, Toyota, big ones. We did a huge campaign for Toyota Brazil and Toyota Argentina which was called 'Rescue'. It was an aeroplane that had lost its runway. Everyone from the village made a runway with their car headlights for this little plane to land.”
That’s the sweet spot for him in a lot of ways, because it involved real storytelling. “I like the car ads when you have stories to tell,” he says.”Not just showing off of the car itself like a catalogue. It always depends on the creativity, the ideas, when the car itself becomes a protagonist of the story. I think each car has a soul. And the important thing is to discover these souls and put them in the picture. Then the car becomes something else because there is a difference. When you find a story with a car it's more than a car, more like a companion in your life.”
He’s always looking for emotion in scripts. “I like simple stories where you can submit to an emotion,” he says. “I think this is what I like most. When the camera is really a witness of this emotion. These are hard movies to do. You have to fabricate everything. So I try to be simple, choose the right casting, fight for it and then place the cameras. This is the system I employ.”
But focusing on the human element doesn’t need to be at the expense of aesthetics. “I like commercials which look nice. And this is not the opposite to creating real emotions and taking care of the images that you deliver. It's not just one image after another. We don't do documentaries here.”
Alejandro may be an advocate for deep storytelling, but he’s not trying to perfectly encapsulate the human condition in his commercials either. “I think this is a philosophy of work. For me, a director in advertising has to understand what the product they're delivering is. I'm a professional. I'm not an artist, but rather a craftsman.
“And for me, advertising is something very serious. If I have to do a soup commercial, I will understand what the soup means and how to do it perfectly. I will investigate other soup commercials. What's the difference between a cleaning product or a car? They both pay me. But it's important to understand how I do it best is in the idea that delivers what the client needs. At the end the client is the one who pays and they have a purpose, there’s a meaning behind it which I have to respect. I believe in this because it gives sense to my work.”
Of the hundreds of ads Alejandro’s made, the most challenging was for an olive oil brand. The idea was to show lettuce falling in slow motion with the bottle of oil in the foreground, all in one shot, with no post production. Working with a Photo-Sonics camera that weighed 30 kgs, shooting in speed. “We had to have all this salad hanging by wires, piece by piece,” he says. “Then in one second everything was happening. I remember this like a nightmare, because we were trying to find technical, creative solutions.” It worked after four days of shooting, when it was supposed to be one day’s work. “I'm very proud to have managed such a stupid stunt,” says the director.
And having shot so many things in so many different ways, he’s usually got some relevant scenario to apply when everything needs a rethink. “Experience gives you solutions and the possibility of reacting. When you were young, you had one idea but you didn't have two. Then if something happens on the shoot, the skills you’ve attained give you the capacity to improvise or find another angle.”
With so many shoots (including the ridiculous ones) under his belt, Alejandro talks about the decisions he’s able to make instinctually now. “I don't get so nervous. Because a lot of the time I can anticipate what’s going to happen, just from experience. For example, I can tell you from the minute I arrive at a shoot, whether it’s going to be a nightmare or not, by the way the cars are parked!”
That depth of experience also helps Alejandro to marshal the number of people needed to make the most ambitious films. “Crews are like horses,” he says. “A crew is judging. Like when you first jump on a horse, the horse knows exactly if you’re a rider or an amateur. A crew is exactly the same.”
As a safe pair of hands, Alejandro has been called to work on some of the biggest productions going. He directed the action unit for the feature 'Loving Pablo' starring Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz. “They called me for doing this kind of big stuff where you have to have the skills because you have maybe 500 members of crew. You enter this world where your decisions count very much.”
More recently, his trailer for fantasy online game, Lineage, starring Kit Harrington was one such shoot, with around 400 extras in Poland, combining this with a virtual shoot in Unreal featuring digital extras. “It was a bit complicated to make the replica in London and to preserve how the film was,” he says.
“After all my experience, I have learned something: KISS – keep it simple, stupid. This knowledge is difficult to have. To keep it simple is to find a way to get to the essence. This is the way I enter into my projects now. Deliver simple emotions. This is what I like most in my work. There are not so many projects like this around, but within this landscape is where I feel super confident.”
