The Directors: Julian Marshall
A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Wild Gift director Julian Marshall’s thesis project was the award-winning narrative short film Obey the Giant about the early life of Shepard Fairey and the origin of his Obey Giant street art campaign. His commercial career took off from there, and he’s since directed spots for Google, Under Armour, Amazon, Nissan, Jeep, Ford, BMW, Red Bull, Citibank, Verizon, Bayer, TNT, Tidal and many others.
LBB> What elements of a script sets one apart from the other and what sort of scripts get you excited to shoot them?
Julian> I get most excited about scripts that are character/emotion driven and integrate a brand in the most natural, honest way possible. Building a brand is about building community. Successful community building stems from influencing culture and providing a viewer with an experience that enriches their life and makes them feel a personal, emotional connection to a brand and their product. It is my job, as a director, to help tell the story of “why” a brand creates the products they create. This is where emotional connection lies. My focus as a director is making the audience feel like an emotional participant in the story we are telling so that they naturally develop an intimate connection with a brand.
LBB> How do you approach creating a treatment for a spot?
Julian> Advertising treatments are a statement of service. “Here is how I intend to serve you and your consumers.” The goal is for a client and agency to walk away from reading your treatment and feel 100% confidence that they are in good hands and can sleep comfortably at night. Each project is different, but I always start from a point of, Who are we speaking to, and how are we speaking to them? Who is the target audience, and how are we making them feel? Everything else, creatively, flows from there. I also focus on being respectful of everyone’s time. Reading through three separate treatments takes a ton of time and time is precious—so I try to communicate as efficiently as possible. How can I express the most with the least? If it isn’t moving the story forward, it doesn’t belong in the treatment.
LBB> If the script is for a brand that you're not familiar with/ don’t have a big affinity with or a market you're new to, how important is it for you to do research and understand that strategic and contextual side of the ad? If it’s important to you, how do you do it?
Julian> In film and advertising research is so, so important. You have to do the research. You have to know a brand and a product inside and out. Otherwise, how can you tell its story? It has to be personal. You have to connect emotionally with the story you’re telling or no one else will.
LBB> For you, what is the most important working relationship for a director to have with another person in making an ad? And why?
Julian> As a director I think that it's important to make sure that everyone you are working with, from client to agency to crew, feels heard and feels connected with the project. Filmmaking is a community project. In an ideal world, you are working with 100 other great storytellers. When everyone is emotionally invested and taking ownership you can see it on screen. It’s like a conductor conducting an orchestra—the orchestra is only as strong as its weakest link. You have to operate as a unit. As a director it’s your job to set the tone, it’s all about leading from behind not from in front.
LBB> What type of work are you most passionate about - is there a particular genre or subject matter or style you are most drawn to?
Julian> As a filmmaker, I’m devoted to drama, genre-wise, and suspense as a storytelling mechanism. Within advertising, I focus on the subjects that are most personal to me. For my entire life I’ve had a love of athletics, automotive, technology and politics. And I focus on narrative and documentary storytelling within these subjects. I am always happy to explore a myriad of subjects because I am a naturally curious person. I love learning. I love immersing myself in new things.
LBB> What misconception about you or your work do you most often encounter and why is it wrong?
Julian> I think the industry is quick to put people in a box. “You’re a fashion guy.” “You’re a comedy girl.” “You’re a table-top guy.” In such a fast-paced, competitive industry, it's obvious why this happens. Risk management. But as a director, there’s nothing more reductive. Personally, I like to approach film from the standpoint of flexibility. It’s like Bruce Lee said—be formless, be shapeless, like water. If you only hire ‘beauty’ directors to do ‘beauty’ work, you are going to end up with the same homogenous work every time. However, if you think outside the box and hire an unusual candidate, you have the opportunity to re-imagine an entire genre and stand out from the pack. One of my favourite examples of this is when comedy actors do drama. Personally, I believe that you have to master drama first in order to then master comedy. However a lot of comedy actors get pigeon-holed in comedy. Every once in a while, someone throws a fork in this and you end up with the triumph of Steve Carell in Foxcatcher, or Will Farrell in Stranger Than Fiction.
LBB> Have you ever worked with a cost consultant and if so how have your experiences been?
Julian> Yes! Haha. The biggest problem that arises in working with cost consultants is that it begins, inherently, as an adversarial relationship instead of a collaborative relationship. The relationship begins with the assumption that you are spending too much money. And it makes sense, because that is how cost consultants justify their existence. As a director I take pride in efficiency. I take pride in coming in under budget. It looks good for everyone involved. For me, the fun of directing is figuring out how to do the best job with the money you’ve got. It’s an indie film mentality. The skillset is learning how to make people feel a world of emotion with the most economic use of money as possible. It’s about having restraint and knowing when you don’t need to light up a massive night exterior shot because the emotional core of a scene is better served in closeup on your actor. Some of the projects that I am most proud of are the ones where I’ve spent the least amount of money. That being said, there is a very clear price floor for production below which you begin to seriously compromise the ability to be confident in delivering on a project. In advertising, if you are cornered into an unrealistic budget for artificial reasons and you run into issues everything ends up suffering and everyone ends up looking bad. And more often than not, when all is said and done, you end up spending more money than you would have in the first place and could have avoided all of the headaches. So for me, bidding needs to be a much more honest process and not a game-theory chess match.
LBB> What’s the craziest problem you’ve come across in the course of a production – and how did you solve it?
Julian> One of the most frequent issues I run into in production is that timelines for production are shrinking. I’ve had plenty of big projects where an agency needs delivery of a project two to three weeks from the day it's greenlit. If you work in production, you know that it takes two weeks from green light to the first shoot day just to prep a project. Let alone shooting, editing, sound design, finish, etc. And god forbid it needs VFX! Haha. While this is a big headache, I’ve been successful with these projects and often for recurring clients because I’m organised and I have strong personal relationships with all of the people and post houses that I work with. When you develop a shorthand, it makes it a lot easier to take on short timeline projects. For example, there was a project with a major brand on a near-impossible timeline and it had a huge music requirement. They needed 50 (yes five-zero) music demos to be produced in one weekend for the project to deliver and broadcast early the following week. My first call was to my friends at Found Objects Music and they went above and beyond and delivered for us. The key word is “friends.” You can’t get that kind of crunch done without working with your friends.
LBB> How do you strike the balance between being open/collaborative with the agency and brand client while also protecting the idea?
Julian> As I said earlier, it’s all about making sure everyone feels heard and sees that their needs are being met. My job as a director in advertising is to help a client and agency achieve their goals through storytelling. If we are clear about their goals at the beginning of the project then it’s much easier to protect an idea and help them get where they want to go because we have a common language to pull from. The idea and goals always have to come first and always before ego.
LBB> What are your thoughts on opening up the production world to a more diverse pool of talent? Are you open to mentoring and apprenticeships on set?
Julian> It’s so important. It’s one of the few things that makes me optimistic about the future of our industry and its ability to grow economically. Looking beyond why it is morally important (which I have written about extensively in past interviews), it is extremely important from a business standpoint for brands. In order to grow a brand, you have to expand your audience and speak to the largest pool of people possible. And in order to speak to a broader and more diverse audience, you need diverse talent in front of and behind the camera. As I mentioned earlier, none of this works without making things personal to the people you’re working with and the people you are speaking to. Diversity is important because it makes things more personal. An example is the amount of times I’ve been on set and had a Black actor come up to me and say this was the first time in their entire career that they have worked with a Black director. It’s even more sobering when they are older. When this happens it immediately builds a bond. A bond that shows on screen. A bond that then speaks to the audience. Regarding mentorship, I wouldn’t be where I am without the people who mentored me. Giving back is so important. Exposure is the key to building a career in film. I have been mentoring students the last few years and am excited to continue doing so.
LBB> How do you feel the pandemic is going to influence the way you work into the longer term? Have you picked up new habits that you feel will stick around for a long time?
Julian> To be honest, I’m excited to go back to how production was before the pandemic, which has made the industry and process more isolating. Being around people, being around my production family is energising and one of the big reasons I love film. Our reaction to the pandemic is a testament to how innovative our industry is and how quickly we can problem solve, but I’m excited to get back in the room with people.
LBB> Your work is now presented in so many different formats - to what extent do you keep each in mind while you're working (and, equally, to what degree is it possible to do so)?
Julian> On a given project it’s important to make sure that the resources are in place to ensure that format is never an afterthought. Each format needs to be treated as its own entity or it’s easy for things to get messy. I like to make sure that we have the resources to capture our story in a manner that is native for each format. Shooting for a big screen is very different from shooting for a small screen. In today’s world both are equally valid but you have to tailor your approach.
LBB> What’s your relationship with new technology and, if at all, how do you incorporate future-facing tech into your work (e.g. virtual production, interactive storytelling, AI/data-driven visuals etc)?
Julian> I’m a nerd. There’s no way around it. I am an early adopter, and it’s something that comes naturally. I like to have full knowledge of the entire toolset that’s available to me in a given moment. That being said, there are many ways that I am traditional in how I approach filmmaking. There are many tools that are just tried and true. Just because there is new technology doesn’t mean that it’s better or that you have to use it. I like to know what’s available, and then pick and choose what is most suitable for a given task.
