Brief Encounters
Christopher Nolan is one of my favourite directors. I’m as fascinated by him as I am by his films.
I love the way he explores concepts of time & memory in films like Inception, Interstellar & Memento (note his conviction that Memento is a perfectly linear film, it’s just that their are multiple timelines & one of them runs backwards).
I love his Dark Knight Trilogy in particular.
He made each film in the trilogy a different genre: a typical origin story (Batman Begins); a noir crime thriller (The Dark Knight); an historical & political epic (The Dark Knight Rises).
It was a way to make the audience as interested in Bruce Wayne as we are in Batman.
He said that:
Bruce Wayne doesn’t have any super powers other than extraordinary wealth. But really, he’s just someone who does a lot of push-ups. In that sense, he’s very relatable and human. I think that’s why I gravitated towards it
What fascinates me the most about Christopher Nolan’s approach to filmmaking was something I heard him talk about on Desert Island Discs.
For each of his films he writes a half-page summary telling the story of the film. At the end of each day of filming, he watches what’s been filmed & asks a question.
Does what he’s filmed tell the story he wrote in that summary?
This got me thinking about the role of the creative brief as a guide against which work should be evaluated.
Which got me thinking about the creative brief in different industries.
Which got me looking for some examples.
Which led me here.
Breaking Bad: Vince Gilligan
Breaking Bad tells the story of an American high school chemistry teacher, Walter White, who becomes a crystal meth manufacturer. The show’s creator, Vince Gilligan, said he wanted to:
Take Mr Chips & turn him into Scarface
I think this is great for three reasons:
- It conjures striking & recognisable images in your head. You can visualise Mr Chips & Scarface. Their mannerisms, speech, behaviours, motivations, beliefs, desires. You know exactly who Walter White is & what he’ll become. And all in only eight words.
- It unites two ideas that don’t belong together. Mr Chips & Scarface are polar opposites — they shouldn’t exist in the same universe, let alone the same sentence. That tension creates excitement & possibility.
- It explains where we are now and where we want to end up, but gives the writers the space to do the rest — show how Walter White became Mr Chips &, more importantly, how he’ll become Scarface.
London Calling: Joe Strummer
The ice age is coming, the sun is zooming in
Engines stop running, the wheat is growin’ thin
A nuclear era, but I have no fear
’Cause London is drowning and I, I live by the river
Joe Strummer’s brief for London Calling was:
Make it sound like fog rolling in over the Thames
This brief’s a bit of a brain-teaser. How can you make a song sound like something that has no sound? You can see fog, you can even walk through it, but you can’t hear it.
It forces you to interpret & imagine. But while it gives you the freedom to explore, it’s specific about where you are. You don’t know what fog sounds like, but you know the fog is in London.
And for some reason I think that detail’s important. Would the fog sound different if it was draped over the Golden Gate Bridge in San Fransisco? I think it would.
Alien: Ridley Scott (thanks to Alan Khanukaev for this one)
Alien was only Ridley Scott’s second film. The brief was a masterpiece in precision:
Jaws in space
I think this works for almost completely opposite reasons that the Breaking Bad & London Calling briefs work.
It’s so tight it leaves no room for interpretation. It’s a brief I think Dave Trott would like, containing as it does a single, simple-minded proposition.
As a map to where you’re going, it’s brutally directive. At any point during filming, you could assess what you’d done to see you’re going in the right direction. It offers a great yes/no test.
Years later Ridley Scott expanded on his approach to directing Alien, when he said he:
Wanted to scare the shit out of people
The tautness of the brief & objective come through in the film. The critic David Thomson describes Alien as basically a haunted house film — except that the creepy house is a spaceship.
If you’re interested, the copywriter Barbara Gips came up with famed tagline.
Gaggan: Gaggan Anand
I’d never heard of Gaggan Anand until I watched Chef’s Table on Netflix. During his episode, he talks about his twin loves of music & food.
Listening to Pink Floyd provided the inspiration for his restaurant in Bangkok (which will close next year). If they could write a song that lasted 25 minutes, he wondered why he couldn’t put together a 25-course tasting menu.
And so the brief for his restaurant Gaggan became:
Put the sound of progressive rock on a plate
I like this for its combination of elements that don’t typically belong together, something it shares with the briefs for Breaking Bad & London Calling: music & food; sound & taste; aural & textural; tangible & intangible.
It’s a brief that opens your mind. It forces you to ask unusual questions & look for atypical connections. How can you eat music? What does prog rock taste like, look like, smell like? If music had a physical form, what would it be?
It doesn’t ask why — it challenges you to ask why not.
I’m well aware I may have got all this wrong. I know I may be completely off in my interpretation.
But that’s fine.
Because the briefing & creative processes are ultimately about interpretation. They can’t help but be subjective, which is as it should be. Ideas are only generated through a prism of our own experiences, beliefs & perceptions.
Different people will interpret the same body of information differently. And different people will interpret the same brief differently.
Devising a strategy & brief to solve a client problem isn’t about being right or wrong.
It’s about provoking a reaction. Creating a feeling of nervous excitement (or should that be excited nervousness?). Pushing people just a little bit further than they thought they could go.
And I think that’s what these four briefs do.
