Into the Library with Mark Molloy

Mark Molloy is one of the most acclaimed and sought-after directors in the advertising industry. His body of work spans almost two decades, and runs the gamut from abstract to cosy, from tear-jerking to life-affirming. There’s a driving humanism to his work, equally present in his tender tragedies and his characterful comedies - all of them are concerned, first and foremost, with people.

Mark, though, has no time for self-aggrandisement. He talks about his career only in hubble, larrikin, and enthusiastic terms - an enthusiasm, crucially, which is largely reserved for his collaborators. Thinking back to how it all began, he smirks as he recounts “I kind of fell into it.  I grew up on a farm in Australia, and the idea of being a director was not even a profession that ever really crossed my mind.”

The world of film opened up to him after studying graphic design and moving to London, and since then Mark’s never looked back.

“As soon as I walked onto a film set, I just knew I was doing the wrong thing. And I was like, ‘Okay, I need to be a director because this is what I want to do’.”

Currently represented by Exit Films in AUNZ and SMUGGLER in Europe and the US, Mark spoke to us while neck-deep in pre production on Beverly Hills Cop IV - his feature debut. The walls behind him were plastered with costume concepts, and he chuckled as he considered how stepping into a franchise once helmed by Tony Scott meant he had “big shoes to fill”. But still, he seemed relaxed, and only too happy to recount the ins and outs of a varied and fascinating career.

Nike - Mutant Foot

“I started out doing music videos, and I’d come from that very designed, very aesthetic world before I ever did ads. And so my attitude here was about creating a world. I still so vividly remember writing that treatment for that job, because I'd never really written a proper treatment before.

I talked a lot about the atmosphere. I talked about the fluid. I talked about what we were feeling at the time. I was pulling from, like, images of deep sea fish and all sorts of weird shapes. On one level, it’s a bit “what the fuck does that have to do with selling a shoe?” But it worked! It’s all created in CG - and probably looks a bit dated now, but there’s still that oddness to it which I think really hits. 

Me and my producer Will Sweetland (who now runs Sweetshop),  we flew to London on the smell of an oily rag. We had no money. We slept on someone's couch, and we caught the tube in every day, and we just spent every cent of it on getting really great post guys. And from there my career really took off.

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Australian Childhood Foundation - Superhero

This is one where I can pinpoint one of those moments in my career where I really learned something, and it was learning how to work with actors. Obviously this is such sensitive subject matter, so it really mattered that the actors drove the story with real authentic feeling. 

This was a point where I first really started to play with narrative and with manipulating people’s emotion, a lot of which comes from cinematic, aesthetic choices. For instance, how you frame people; how you light them. I don’t know that any of that was a particularly conscious choice on my end. There's definitely an instinctual thing, but it’s also trial and error. You keep playing around until the shots work in the way you know you want them to.

This was, of course, another spot we made for basically zero money. We even managed to get Johnny Cash’s Hurt for free, and it gave me the ability to say “I sort of knew what I was doing with the camera and with actors and stuff”.

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Transport Accident Commission - Pictures of You

There are no actors here. All real families who had lost sons and daughters and loved ones to drink driving. So yeah, you know, this was super raw. I basically studied up on all of the cases, so that I knew everything about what had happened to the family, and I just sat them down and I talked to them about it while I had a camera on them. 

I’d ask them to look at the camera, and I just asked questions and to think about the loss - the space that was left behind. And then I tried to capture that sense of an empty space being left in their homes and within their lives, to kind of visualise the absence. Lots of negative space; lots of desaturated colours, and it went to quite a pretty dark place with all those people. But, they all came out of it at the very end, and said what a cathartic process it had been.

There were no lights, no crew, no production - nothing. It was just me and my good mate (and, now, Oscar-winning cinematographer) Greg Frasier shooting it. All natural light, which I tend to like, honestly. I guess I'm always trying to keep it authentic, you know, I just try and make things look authentic. Make people feel real and make people invest. That's all I want. I don't want people to feel my fingerprints on it.

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Ford - The Road Less Travelled By

This ad literally just started off with the poem. They gave me the poem, and then I spent some time working with really good agencies and good people, and they just kind of let you go and interpret it whatever way works best for you.

That was honestly one of the most fun jobs. It was just a group of six or seven people cruising around in the car, with an actor, just creating a story. 

I actually did a road trip myself and found a lot of the stories. I drove around by myself and then came back with the crew and filmed it on society, travelling around New Zealand. lt was just a case of finding spots and situations and piecing it together, bit by bit. Loved it.

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Samsung - Every Day is Day One

By comparison with Ford, there was more on the page at the start of the Samsung project, but it was still really about taking that idea of surfing and looking at it through a different lens.

Traditionally, of course, it’s such a high energy sport, but we wanted to really humanise it and make it a more personal, humanist experience. Everyone’s got their first time surfing, so we wanted to look at that and ask what it meant to them specifically.

It’s another contender for the most fun I’ve ever had, honestly. We were just flying all over the world. We shot in Australia, Fiji, New York and Iceland. I had Kelly Slater with me, shooting surfers at all hours of the day. That's as good as it’s gonna get, you know?

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Apple - The Underdogs; Escape from the Office; the Surprise

Thus begins the period of my career where I just work for Apple. I did one job with Apple, and I think I must’ve done an okay job, because we then developed a really good working relationship, which carried on for two or three years.

It doesn’t really work like normal advertising; it’s all about storytelling. These are short films first and foremost, and they come to us with a little idea, something like “we want you to make a short film about four people who work in a really boring office”. And even though that doesn’t sound great, once you sit down and start working it through (crucially, working with great, talented people), you get a story out of it.

Crucially, also, this is probably where in my career, I start doing comedy. I’d done a little bit beforehand, but I was really known, starting out, as a more serious director. And, much like filmmaking in general, I really just sort of fell into it. I don’t know that I have a definite style of comedy. I’d say my philosophy with it is… I don't like doing broad comedy. For me, comedy’s always found in humanity.  I like to try and find comedy in reality, rather than pushing reality. I'm always searching for that nugget of truth, then building off that and seeing where it takes you, whether it be funny or sad or anywhere in between. I don’t have that much of a signature style with my images. For me, it’s about the process. So much of the hard work is done in pre-production, or during prep. It’s the process of trying to find the heart of the idea in whatever you’re working with, and then trusting all your collaborators to do their best to bring it to life.

And I just love actors. The two shorts we did with the underdog crew were some of the most successful things Apple’s ever put out, and it’s because of the unique position I was in with Apple and web distribution. Things normally just don’t work like that.

When it came to The Surprise (that’s the one about the grandpa and the family), the script we got initially was just about a family getting together over Christmas. But I just felt like it was missing something. So I sat down and thought for a bit, and eventually just decided - the grandma needs to be dead. That’s gonna give us the nugget of truth, the emotional core. And if you do that right, it gives it a lot of resonance. That was bloody sad actually. I was crying while shooting it!

There are times like that where you sort of have to pull little tricks. I made the whole cast get really friendly with each other, I made sure we actually cast siblings for the little girls, and the slideshow at the end was the first time anyone saw it, besides the girls, of course, who needed to know what to point out. So all those reactions were totally authentic, because they’d all bonded, they’d all spent time together. So it just hits differently.

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Tile: Lost Panda

Oh, yeah, this is a fun one that we shot in Romania. And, again, it looks like a pretty simple little thing - the idea of a lost teddy bear and its little journey. But I spent so much time perfecting it. I’m a bit of a workaholic, honestly; I spent absolutely ages designing the little bear in terms of the shape of its eyes; and the size of its eyes; and how shiny its eyes were; and the size of its pupils; and how far apart they are; and everything you can to get that right emotion when it looks up at you like that.

I spent so much time with the puppeteers too figuring out just how to move it, just how it should stand. Because it had to make everyone sad, this little guy had to give a performance.

And then the guys at Alt.VFX really made this pop. We did a lot of puppeteering on set, but they really brought the bear to life. Hopefully, you cried.

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Huggies - Welcome to the World, Baby

Huggies was a fucking nightmare. It’s a great piece, and I’m happy with it. I don’t regret or resent it. But we were shooting this in the middle of COVID, in South Africa, with so many babies. And, again, it's all a question of how you approach this job. You have to work with the resources or constraints you’re given. And I don't want to make babies act. You can’t make babies act. They’re babies. They don’t hit cues.

Everyone was like, “oh, it's gonna be like a three-day shoot in New York” or whatever. And I said, “no, it's not going to be a seven-day shoot somewhere where I can have kids on camera for a long time”. And it will have to be a long time, because I'm going to have to wait for two to three hours for babies to fall asleep, or to smile, or to do a shit. I'm going to have to sit there and wait for this to happen, because I can't make three-month-old kids act. 

So, it was just this crazy shoot where I had, like, 15 babies and four cameras, and I had to say, “okay, when that kid goes to sleep, tell me and I'm going to come back and rearrange him into a funny position”. Or, for instance, say “feed that kid, don’t let her go to the toilet, just wait, and she’ll do it - then we’ll film”. We just waited. You work with what you’ve got.