The Work That Made Me: Nathan Price
Nathan was raised on a sheep farm in New Zealand's most southern province, the birthplace of Instant Coffee and, according to Mick Jagger, the a**hole of the world. He won the school accounting prize and was a national* high-school competitive improv champ (But was later ejected from the sport for "endangering audience member with an iron"). As a Libran, he has struggled with indecisiveness but has overcome these challenges and found some success as a director, sullying cultures around the world and a few short-lived TV shows. He is a proud father of two young creative souls who keep him humble by treating him like a jerk any time he engages in boundary-setting.
Nathan is repped by Park Pictures in the US and UK, Control Films in France, Ruskin in New Zealand, and Goodoil in Australia.
The ad/music video from my childhood that stays with me…
Nathan> Grace Jones 'Slave to the Rhythm' - It's sexy, super weird, interesting, and meta; a silver Citroen CX drives out of Grace Jones' Giant robotic head. As a 10-year-old country boy, I think I had an odd proto-sexual crush on Grace Jones after seeing her in Conan the Barbarian.
The ad/music video/game/web platform that made me want to get into the industry…
Nathan> I was a movie kid coming out of Uni and wasn't interested in ads at all. I loved Tarkovsky and Wong Kar Wai. Then, I got a job as a VFX assistant at a production company and discovered the Shots reel. There was no YouTube back in the olden times. It was Gondry's Drug Store, Glazers Guinness Trilogy (Surfer, Swim Black, and Dream Club), Traktor's Evil Beaver, Fox Sports Regional, and Cunningham's Windowlicker. I was hooked.
The creative work (film/album/game/ad/album/book/poem etc) that I keep revisiting…
Nathan> This is going to sound excessively pretentious. He said, trying to sound self-aware but mainly sounding even more pretentious. But in the first poem of Lao Tzu's "Tao Te Ching,” there’s a lot of wisdom in a handful of lines.
"The way you can go - isn't the real way."
I interpret this as meaning there is no perfection in creative action. There is just a nascent groove you can feel but never quite ride, and if you think too hard, you’ll lose it. You’ve got to stay open to the undulations.
"The name you can say - isn't the real name."
Words won't get you there; it is more intuitive than that. They may get you close sometimes, but the thing slips and slides beneath.
"Heaven and earth begin in the unnamed: name's the mother of the ten thousand things."
You can get lost in words and pre-existing concepts. They can be like false gods. You have to cultivate that beginner's mind.
"So the unwanting soul - sees what's hidden, / and the ever-wanting soul - sees only what it wants."
Be careful with your desire. Don't put your stamp on things. See which way the world and the work want to pull you - that is where the truth lies, that is where the culture lies, and that is where our souls lie.
"Two things, one origin, but different in name, / whose identity is mystery. / Mystery of all mysteries! The door to the hidden."
Mystery is at the root of all things interesting. Respect the mystery, lean into it, have a plan, have a shot list, have a notion, but remain open and flexible to what is unfolding at any moment.
I believe in getting the basics right, and this poem evokes the ineffable truth of right creative action. If I can get this right, all else follows.
My first professional project…
Nathan> My first shoot featured a pre-famous Bret [McKenzie] from Flight of the Conchords at a party full of hot people. He thinks he is being pinned to a wall by a "hot girl" when he realises she admires the sensuous textured wallpaper. So, knowing pretty much nothing about production, I decided to change it up by hiring a crazy makeup artist from the fashion industry who had no idea how to get a room full of models to set on time. So, we start the day three hours down, and my equally inexperienced producer is literally screaming at me so I end up having a crisis of faith panic attack. Luckily my DP, the lovely James Cowley, covered for me, long enough for me to refind my mojo. So no one noticed. We logged a bit of overtime and lived to fight another day.
The piece of work (ad/music video/ platform…) that made me so angry that I vowed to never make anything like *that*…
Nathan> Hmm, angry, not really, I mean, it’s just advertising, right? But there’s plenty of work where I’ve thought, “What the hell were you thinking.” I think it’s easy enough within agency client culture to get caught up in your pleasing stakeholders and confirmation bias and forget to think honestly about how you might land out with the people. That’s where I think honesty appraisal is a super important part of being a director, even when it’s uncomfortable.
The piece of work (ad/music video/ platform…) that still makes me jealous…
Nathan> Donald Glover's and Hiro Murai's music video for Childish Gambino ‘This is America’: It's great art – the sense of commentary, madness, and pure PT Barnum-esque showmanship, the willingness to embrace such a large subject in an artistic way where you're not exactly sure where it's coming from, but it opens you up to all possibilities. The ambivalence of the character Donald Glover plays, he's all these things at once. We have all these wonderful, beautiful, and terrible forces within us, and it behoves us as political agents and societies to acknowledge our own darkness and light. So good.
Wrangler ‘Ride’ directed by Jonathan Glazer: So much story and evocative detail in 60 seconds, it’s a trip.
The creative project that changed my career…
Nathan> Hmm, State Insurance is one of the oldest spots on my reel, it was also the first produced by my own production company in New Zealand that I started with at the time with my girlfriend and now wife Claris Harvey. There’s something about owning your own company where you just grant yourself a little more creative and production freedom that is incredibly liberating. The script wasn’t written as an oner, we pitched that in because that budget wasn’t big enough to do what they’d written.
The work that I'm proudest of…
Nathan> You never want to say you love one of your children more than another (though perhaps there are a few you send off to the orphanage after seeing their faces). But I do have a long-standing fondness for my work for Royal London. I think it’s just the mixture of scale and stupidity, we improvised most of the comedic interludes, and I loved Gethin Alderman's performance and all the other oddball brilliant cast members. Johnny Parker and Chris Birch, the creatives, were terrifically fun to work with, and the client was also brilliant, whooping us along as we basically made stuff up.
I was involved in this and it makes me cringe…
Nathan> As a very green director, I made a super embarrassing ad for a Japanese Milk Carton Company.
The agency bought me Blur's ‘Coffee and TV’ music video by Garth Jennings as a reference, but it was basically one of those jobs where the reference was the script. I don't know exactly how it happened: agency pressure, a lack of resources for character design, or my own naive culpability, but our character design ended up hewing so close to the reference that it was basically ripping them off. We made it anyway. I'm pretty sure Sony ended up suing them, which was fair enough. No one blamed me at all, but I nevertheless felt disgusted with my role in the affair. It was my personal Lord Jim moment of moral artistic failure. I realised, no matter how green I was, that as the director and the captain of the ship, I had a moral responsibility to ensure this never happened on my watch.
The recent project I was involved in that excited me the most…
Nathan> Waka Kotahi - 'Through My Eyes': It's a New Zealand road safety campaign, where the brief was to experience the world through the eyes of one of our road policing officers. There were two scripts that the agency was testing; one was an officer having flashbacks of a crash while undertaking a speeding stop, and the other was an officer monologuing about the human suffering he experienced at the crashes he had to attend. My pitch was to combine both ideas to make it a character study in the real world rather than a monologue. The challenge was to get the audience to see and feel the man rather than the uniform. We were lucky to cast a real police officer, who was terrifically capable in front of the camera and brought real weight to the performance. We had terrific feedback from front-line police and other first responders, they felt we’d really captured something ineffable about their experiences and frustrations. It was very satisfying.
