Director Michael Gracey on his career in commercials, from Evian’s ‘Roller Babies’ to Apple’s ‘Mixtape’

Michael Gracey was perhaps destined to be a visual effects expert. His father’s company in Melbourne, Australia, invented the Flame image compositing software in the early 1990s, which quickly became the industry standard. Gracey learned to use it early on, even working directly with Peter Webb, who wrote the Flame manual. In his twenties, Gracey was able to pitch his VFX services to top Australian directors including Baz Luhrmann. After directing his first music video, Gracey signed with production company Partizan for commercial work. He’s directed spots ever since—many of them, such as Evian’s megaviral 2009 spot “Roller Babies,” featuring pioneering visuals. (Another Gracey spot that same year, for T-Mobile, popularized a different kind of spectacle: the flash mob.) But visual effects are a means to an end. Audiences also need to care deeply about the story. Ad Age recently spoke with Gracey about how he’s able to excel at both—and how his lengthy career in commercials has helped him in crafting his feature films, including “The Greatest Showman” and the Robbie Williams biopic “Better Man.” The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. What do you recall from your early years of making ads? At the time, Michel Gondry [also repped by Partizan] was the most sought-after commercial director on the planet. You had Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze and Jonathan Glaser. Everyone wanted them, and they were always bidding against each other. What Partizan said—and this was actually really smart—they said, when Michel is unable to pitch on a commercial, we will put you forward. Just to be clear, you’re never getting the job. You don’t have a reel of the kind of work they’re after. You don’t have a name. You’re never getting the job. Plus, there was already the disappointment that they came for Michel Gondry but they’re getting Michael Gracey. But Partizan said, go all out on your pitch. Shoot a test. Storyboard it. Do concept art. Put stuff together in Flame. Do whatever you can to get your creative ideas across. Because what will happen is, the agency creatives will see it and they will think of you for something else. I pitched for almost a year and I didn’t get a single job. And then bit by bit, every agency I pitched to would come back with a different job. Not for Nike or Coca-Cola, but something smaller. That’s literally how I got my start in commercials. You work in features now, yet you keep making commercials. Why? I love commercials. The first one I ever did out of the U.K. was a Marks & Spencer Christmas campaign. That kind of set me up as a guy who does spectacle. When you work on commercials, you get to work with amazing artists, cinematographers, production designers. You literally can work with the best of the best in the world, which I have over the course of my career. You can get these people because it’s a creative sprint. That’s how I met Erik Wilson [the cinematographer on Gracey’s 2024 film “Better Man”] and Ashley Wallen. Ashley is a choreographer from Australia who I did my first live-action music video with in my twenties. We went from music videos into commercials, then into film. We all still do commercials together. And we do films together. Which early advertising projects felt like breakthroughs for you? Evian “Roller Babies” obviously became quite a thing at the time. They had news presenters talking about the commercial and then playing it as prime-time television because it became such a viral hit. It was in the Guinness Book of Records for the most-watched commercial online. It was a really difficult commercial. It was four months in post. We shot 128 babies to get the right takes. It was a crazy thing. There was also the T-Mobile flash mob at Liverpool Street station. People always go, “Oh, you started that flash mob craze.” But it was Saatchi & Saatchi that pitched the idea. Their very clever conceit was, whenever anything out of the ordinary happens in a public space, people bring up their phones to take photos. They wanted the commercial to involve dancing, because when people dance spontaneously, people just bring up their phones. To which I said, well, the best example of dancing spontaneously is in Terry Gilliam’s “The Fisher King,” when Robin Williams is at Grand Central Station and he sees the girl he loves and everyone breaks into a waltz. So really, I was taking my lead from Terry Gilliam and “The Fisher King.” For the next five years, I got offered every flash mob idea anyone ever had. I turned down all of them except Oprah. Other than that, I was like, no more flash mobs. What is it about theatricality and spectacle that you’re drawn to? It’s interesting. In advertising, you have this thing where you’ve got 30 seconds or 60 seconds to engage people and hopefully make them feel something. Music is such a big part of that. If I look at the commercials I love, they’ve always got music driving them that really gives you goosebumps or is memorable. I remember doing a Cillit Bang commercial. The conceit is, it’s a guy in a mechanic shop who has to clean the mechanic shop overnight. He puts in his headphones, grabs a cleaning product—Cillit Bang—and washes the store. Concept wise, it’s like, eh—no one was like, please let me shoot that. But the mechanic is dancing to “Maniac” from “Flashdance.” All of a sudden you start smiling because it’s different and you go, OK, this could be fun. It’s that song that changes the entire concept. Music does that—either from a nostalgic point of view, like a song from “Flashdance,” or new music, which is much harder to do but can also be absolute magic. I love doing both. I love when you get a nostalgia hit, and I love when you hear music for the first time and you get to literally craft it to the picture. Music is different than visuals. Visuals are great, but with the advent of computers, spectacle has taken a big hit because at a certain point we all just switch off and go, well, they didn’t really get 100,000 people. That’s just effects. And it’s sad. You have to work much harder today to make people believe in spectacle. Even more so with AI. Right, even more so with AI. Along with spectacle, you’ve got to have people care. You’ve got to care about the character. If you can do that over 60 seconds, that is a real skill. If you can do it over 30 seconds, that’s even a bigger skill. For me, music is a tool that, time and time again, I find to be a shortcut to making people care. People look at visuals and they process them. For some beautiful reason, when we hear music, it bypasses the cerebral and touches you somewhere in here. As a result, it’s a great way of connecting. You did another big Christmas spot, Sainsbury’s “The Big Night.” What are your memories of that one? Absolutely loved it. Again, the song plays such a big part in that. I’m also a big believer that the environment you create on set comes across [in the finished spot]. If people are yelling and screaming and they’re angry and there’s tension, it doesn’t matter if everyone then plasters on a smile—no one buys it. You look at people’s eyes and you’re like, I don’t buy any of this, not for a second. And the opposite is true. If you can create an environment that is fun and people are laughing, then you just shoot it. You’re getting so much for free. So much of that Sainsbury’s commercial is exactly that. So many of those shots are outtakes of the kids just getting themselves ready and laughing. All of that excitement that you read as real, is real. We just literally put on a little show. When we did that confetti drop, the kids were literally freaking out. You don’t them you’re doing a confetti drop. So when the confetti comes down, these kids are literally laughing. You have a wealth of material because you’ve set it up in a way that doesn’t feel like work. It feels like fun. I was really fortunate on “The Greatest Showman.” The cast members used to come down on their days off. The first AD [assistant director] said to me, listen, you’ve got to understand this is not normal. Usually that’s the most precious thing you can have is time away from set. And you had these A-list actors coming to set on their days off, literally just to sit behind camera and clap and cheer for the other performers. They are genuinely having a great time, and they don’t want to miss out on something. That is really special. I don’t take any of that for granted. How do you create that environment, especially in advertising, where there’s no shortage of jaded folks around? I think it’s the rehearsal process. A lot of stress comes from fear. On a commercial set, you’re dealing with millions of dollars that are going into 30 seconds or one minute. It’s so much money, and people are panicked. To me, as long as I can show everyone what I’m intending to do, the level of panic goes down. If I can say, here’s a really crude rehearsal that I’ve cut together with the music just to show you what we’re planning to do. With the agency, quite often I’ll go back and forth with them, so the creatives get a chance to iterate on that rough version of the commercial. That allows everyone to go, oh, there’s a really solid plan in place. This allows people to focus on what’s important, which is the performances. If you’re just focused on the performances, then it becomes joyful—if you’ve got the right person cast. That isn’t always the case, by the way. Sometimes the client wants a certain person because they look a certain way. And you go, yeah, but they’re a vegan and this is a burger commercial. You’re never going to buy them loving that burger. It’s going to be a disaster. But when you’ve got the right person cast, it’s a joy, because you’re laughing every take, you’re smiling every take. With Sainsbury’s, you’ve got these kids who were just smashing it and you’re spoiled for choice. We could have cut four commercials with the amount of footage we had of those kids performing that number. You recently shot Apple’s latest Chinese New Year film. That looked like quite the production. Shooting on the iPhone must have been interesting. What’s wild is, in my rehearsal process, I shoot so much on the iPhone anyway. It was amazing to be able to just shoot on the iPhone. The picture quality blew me away. On a film like Apple, you’re choreographing the camera as much as you’re choreographing the people. That’s literally how Ashley [Wallen] works. Along with being the choreographer, he’s also the camera operator. It’s kind of wonderful to have the freedom to move a camera with a choreographer who’s also a camera operator, because so much of the storytelling goes into where you place the camera. And I must say, [cinematographer] Erik Wilson is a master at doing that. Some of the things he drifts the camera on to and then comes back … I would love to say I directed it all, but it’s the joy of having these amazing camera operators take the audience through those beats. And again, so much of this comes from, how do we do this in 30 seconds? How do we do this in 60 seconds? The storytelling discipline that comes from that is why I will always shoot commercials. It literally is why I will always shoot commercials. I take it you’ve brought these lessons over to the feature world. Absolutely. I did a Christmas commercial for John Lewis. It was all one take of people taking the products of John Lewis and building them into a shadow of a lady with a dog. That was a three-day shoot, and it was one take. It was two days of programming the camera and running the action to stopwatch. We didn’t roll one bit of film until the third day. So you can imagine how nervous everyone was. By the third day, they were like, “You’d better roll some film!” Things like that are a precursor to things like the Regent Street scene in “Better Man,” where you have the confidence to go, this is going to be a one-taker and it’s going to work. We just need to rehearse it. Time and time again, there are ideas I’m either playing with or learning from in my commercial work that I apply to what I do in features. I’ve always loved that kind of formal camera experimentation in ads—stuff like the Johnnie Walker film with Robert Carlyle. And you can experiment with cameras as well. All the new toys that come out—new rigs, new cameras, any bit of new tech. Trying it out on a commercial is 100% viable. Advertising people actually like the fact that you’re using something no one’s used before on their spot. With Apple, shooting on an iPhone and wanting it to look as cinematic as the best digital cameras out there—even that, as a technical challenge, is so exciting. The fact that you can do it is kind of mind-blowing. It seems like you’re getting more experimental as your career goes on. “Better Man” was a wild experiment in many ways. Is that because you’re more confident in knowing what’s possible when you shoot? I think so. With commercials and with film, you take the lessons learned. You shoot something and you look back at it and go, that worked, that didn’t work, that process worked, that process didn’t work, those people worked, those people did not work. And you refine your process and your creative team. A lot of the confidence I had going into “Better Man” was a result of having done “The Greatest Showman.” And all the commercials I did between “The Greatest Showman” and “Better Man”—you refine how you communicate. There are sequences in “Better Man” that are super quick with an enormous amount of storytelling going on. That is a direct lift from years of trying to tell 60-second and 30-second stories. And I’m still learning. “Better Man” was right in your wheelhouse of spectacle and theatricality, too. The great thing about spectacle and theatricality is that you’re in a heightened world. When you’re in a heightened world, the audience—once they allow you to exist in that world—they will allow you to go to much more imaginative places. Whether it’s directors like Terry Gilliam or Guillermo del Toro or Tim Burton, they often tell stories that are in heightened worlds. I love the license that it gives you. Theatricality is a wonderful thing, and imagination—getting to play out something that’s a little more surreal—is also a beautiful thing. This is what I really learned on “Better Man.” Stepping between a heightened world—whether that’s a musical world or just a theatrical world—stepping between that and pure fantasy is a very short distance. I knew I wanted to explore Robbie’s external life, but I also knew I wanted to explore his internal life. Stepping between a theatrical world, the external life, and his internal life, which is pure imagination, that became really fluid. I loved being able to do that. And that’s something I want to explore more as a storyteller. What can you tell us about upcoming projects you’re working on? I’m doing something on stage. If you look at my work, you’re like, man, that guy is screaming to be on a theater stage. Please let that guy into a theater! It’s with the music of Luciano Pavarotti. Jacob Collier is doing all the music, and working with him has just expanded my imagination. Jacob came in and did all the vocals for the song “Better Man” and did the most incredible arrangement. So yeah, so I’m very excited about doing a stage production. On the film front, we’ll see. There’s multiple things I’m working on, but you never know what will move forward. Until then, I’ll be shooting commercials.

Director Michael Gracey on his career in commercials, from Evian’s ‘Roller Babies’ to Apple’s ‘Mixtape’

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