I love Death Race, it's one of my favorite films. I thought, "You know what? All that two years worth of work is now gong to be wasted because I'm highly unlikely to direct another car movie straight away," and I felt at that point there was no one who was kind of better at shooting cars, so I thought rather than let it go to waste I would explore the idea of doing commercials, and that's what I did.
It's a very different experience shooting in 3-D because the camera rigs are so large. Everything we've become accustomed to in the last ten years as filmmakers, which is cameras getting smaller and smaller and you can just throw them on your shoulder and stick them in a car and do whatever you want, you can't do any of that now. You're forced to put things on dollies and track and cranes.
The first job I did was Volkswagen, we shot it in Long Beach, and it was like they won multiple awards with it and they were super excited about it and that kind of launched me into the world of commercials. Still most of what I do is car-related stuff.
I think people were a little nervous to work with me to start with, because the movies I've done they thought that I wouldn't be able to control myself at all. I'd have to blow up the cars or something like that, and I think also people are scared of working sometimes with feature directors, because they feel like you're not going to listen to their opinions.
I'm a very collaborative person, so that's not the way I work any way. Once VW got over the idea that I was going to blow their cars up, then we shot the thing really fast and it came out really good. Like I said, it won a bunch of awards and that really was the start of working in commercials.
It's all based around the idea that basically VW cars are space age. They're the worst cars to use in action movie, because all the things you want to traditionally do in an action movie they won't allow you to do, because they make you drive safely if you want to or not.
So each of the commercials- basically it's an action movie cliché. "Bus" is very much inspired by Speed obviously, where you have a high-jacked out of control bus, and you have heroes who are trying to jump from a moving vehicle to the bus and they just can't do it because the moving vehicle can't get close enough, because all these VW cars have this distancing technology, which is really fantastic.
When that technology becomes widespread and it's on every car on the freeways, it's going to save so many lives. Especially in America, so many people get killed in these multi-car pileups on the freeways.
I started doing commercials in 2008 right after we released Death Race, and the reason was that I spent two years prepping Death Race and building all these custom rigs to shoot cars in the most dynamic and exciting way.
When you're writing it's a very solitary job. It's you and your word processor and a cup of tea. It's nice- that again, is another nice thing about being able to do commercials is, you can get out of the house and chase high speed cars around for a few days and then by the time you go back, you're kind of re-infused to write.
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