Interview with Alex Cooper
We spoke to newly-signed Movidiam Talent writer and director Alex Cooper about his route to filmmaking and the importance of comedy.
Take a look at Alex’s profile on movidiam.com
You’ve recently gone from creative business to freelance…. Why now?
For me, it’s about flexibility. I love directing, but I’m also doing a lot of writing, so it’s about focusing on the things I love doing. Running a business takes a lot of time, energy, and people management. I recognised that it wasn’t what I ultimately wanted to do. I want to make films so going freelance was my way of prioritising that ambition.
Do you find having the ability/skills to act as well as produce and direct position you with a different level of consciousness when working?
I think every experience I’ve had, including being an account director at M&C Saatchi helps. Being a producer and account manager helps give me the perspective of reality. We’re using creativity in a commercial capacity. It’s not art, it’s advertising. Being an actor means adding those layers to the character. As, even though it’s an advert, it gives the director more, on-screen and in the edit.
It’s about reactions, natural moments and authenticity. If you treat it as just another advert, you’ll miss that richness. From being part of the stand-up circuit, you also realise the power of testing material, which is why I always do rehearsals.
As a writer, it’s about understanding the best angle to sell the product and then ensuring that the comedy is complementary not superfluous. It’s also about learning that if someone’s not happy, then it’s not the right idea. There is no one way to write an advert and having those parameters are what I really relish as a test of my creativity.
Finally, being a director is all about collaboration. The crew you build around you are experts at what they do, so I set the creative challenges, and then we work together to bring it to life. It’s about leading by example and making creative decisions. However, it’s also about preparation.
Shoot days are, for me, ticking off all the shots I’ve been preparing for the weeks and months before. Whilst I like to factor in experimentation and improv with the actors, I don’t rely on this, as then you’re leaving something to chance, which is reckless in my eyes, when it’s someone else’s budget.
Is the ‘last supper’ a comedy commissioning conversation starter?
It is indeed. Before broadcasters commit time, energy and money to an idea, they’re asking to see test films, sample scenes, scripts, anything that helps bring the idea to life, and make them know what they’re buying into.
It’s very similar to the advertising world — broadcasters, like brands, want to know they’re in safe hands and that the concept will work on screen.
No matter background, comedy is a universal language people will polar experienced and context will find the same thing funny — unlike other mediums. Is commissioning comedy more risky for a brands that commissioning other forms of video content? If not why not?
Not at all. A consumer is not obsessively looking at your platform and wondering why you’re shifting genres. Comedy is a hugely powerful tool in engaging people in advertising. If you make them laugh, you’ve done what 99% of other adverts have tried and failed to do, generate a reaction in the consumer.
Comedy is a genre of advertising that brands are only just starting to fully embrace, I think, because of a lack of confidence, which is stunting brands before they’ve even started the creative process. The writing is just one of several parts that make a film funny — so it’s having the confidence to explore it, and then hire people who know what they’re doing. Confidence for me comes from assembling the right team to bring the project to life.
Is it possible for the timing to be ‘off’ but remain funny, or is timing everything?
Timing is key in comedy, but you don’t necessarily need to find this on the shoot day. For me, it’s about the skill of the editor in finding that timing, as it’s about the precise cutting of shots to generate a reaction from the viewer.
I count a lot in the edit suite, as sometimes it’s a fast response, or when it comes to awkward humour, it’s all about holding the pause between reactions — the tumbleweed moment. John Cleese said, ‘comedy is not watching someone do something funny. It’s about watching someone watch someone do something funny’. So by engineering those reactions, with an editor who specialises in comedy, you can find those moments.
Is comedy honestly just built-in truth and reality? If everyone can access the work, and find it funny, why can’t many people create it expertly?
I’ve realised recently how so much comedy comes from identification. That feeling when you think to yourself, ‘I’ve done that’.
However that doesn’t mean it’s easy to access. Comedians like Michael McIntyre are thinking about acute comedic observations as their career and even they don’t get it right all the time.
It’s about testing material, sharpening and finding out what those moments are that are truly funny and insightful, compared to those that everyone does but aren’t funny, either because they’re too generic, or because they’ve been spoken about or shown too many times.
One thing I’ve learned though is the power of specificity. Comedy is about being visual and by being more specific, you actually generate more resonance and humour, than if you’re trying to be too general. Brands all too often try to appeal to so many people, they don’t appeal to anyone.
It’s also about being honest about how your brands sits in the market. Similar to Hertz ‘we’re number 2 so we try harder’, most brands can’t face saying something bad about their product. However, with Laphroaig ‘Opinions welcome’ and Marmite, you recognise that being brutally honest about how consumers view your brand, is infinitely more compelling than lying to yourself and your consumers. People can spot dishonesty from a mile off.
How many people have asked you to create something ‘viral’ and why is that so challenging? Expectations and reality?
Haha — everyone asks me to create a viral film. However, if it was that easy, everyone would be doing it. The key for me is showing endeavour, and committing to the comedy, rather than watering it down.
When you push ideas away from the centre, that’s when you’re going to create something different from the thousands of other films and clips consumers are seeing on their newsfeed. It’s about the 10,000 hours rule. If you’ve studied making online films, and spent a huge amount of time either writing or directing them, you’ve got a better chance as any to create something that does well.
However, it isn’t a science and something might go viral at a particular point in time, but the same thing wouldn’t happen even an hour later. One of my films went viral and we had absolutely no clue that it would. In 1 hour, 170k people had watched it online and it trended on Reddit. The only thing we learned — you can’t predict the outcome, you can only control what you can control which is the quality of the film itself.
Then it’s also about being smart with the strategy and playing into reactive or topical news events so you can try to embed it into existing conversations, as a brand by and large will never be able to kick-start a conversation that’s not already being had.
Is your best work about simplicity or complexity?
It’s about making something complex look simple. That might be in reducing an idea down to its most simple, or by making a complicated shot look seamless.
Script-writing, especially when creating adverts, is distilling things down to their essence, so you never see the huge amounts of work that have gone into it. Simplicity as a word is misleading. For me, it’s masterful articulation.
Does anything unplanned end up on screen or in the final cut? What role does improvisation play in your work?
It plays a huge part. I’ve studied improv at the Free Association and it’s an amazing tool to get more comedy from your films. However, improv is a skill, and you need the acting talent to facilitate this. So whilst I build it into the back end of the day, I don’t rely on it. So anything we get is an amazing bonus.
In Bad News, our comedy sketch, we got our weather presenter to use a lighter as if he’s flicking between scenes. That was something never rehearsed but on the day, it worked so well and added a layer of comedy that we never imagined it would. So it’s also about being flexible enough to go with the flow on the day.
What is your wildest directorial ambition?
To write and direct a Disney film. Whilst I would love to also be in the running to shoot Gladiator II because I studied latin at university (niche), an animated Disney film would genuinely be the dream.
That or Rush Hour IV. As I mean come on. Who wouldn’t.
