With Atom Egoyan’s recent first venture into spot direction, there’s a renewed focus on those directors who bounce between television, feature film and spot work. Although Egoyan was unavailable for comment, commercial/feature directors Bruce McDonald (The Partners’ Film Company), Boris Damast (Angel Films), Stephen Surjik (The Players Film Company), Rob King (Minds Eye Pictures) and American feature legend John Frankenheimer took the time to share their thoughts on this trend to cross-over migration. In every case, the directors confirmed they would like to continue working in both milieu.

For McDonald, director of such popular Canadian feature films as Highway 61 and Hard Core Logo, commercial work is about money. With rare honesty, he explains the motivation for his foray into spot direction.

‘Money is number one. Commercials are all about money. That’s first and foremost. It buys [long-form] directors time to work on their scripts and invest in their art,’ McDonald says.

The director, who recently did a Levi’s spot about futuristic cat people, also appreciates the ability to concentrate on ‘detail’ that is not necessarily available on smaller budget features.

McDonald says coming from the feature world gives him an advantage in his spot work. ‘A feature director brings this sort of wide-eyed amazement about how things really work [on a commercial set]. You’re not really serious about spending four hours lighting this little box of cornflakes are you?’ he laughs.

‘I think the commercial world can get highly incestuous and sort of insane. So I think a feature guy can bring a little dose of reality to it sometimes,’ he adds.

Coming to the world of spots from the feature framework has given McDonald another advantage. ‘I don’t have to sell as hard in the commercial world. People already know the movies so they go, ‘Oh yeah, that guy.’ ‘

As for directors who try to keep their commercial work quiet, McDonald says, ‘They’re just pretentious. It’s the same thing as some feature directors who look down their noses at television. They don’t want to let people know they have to go and make money.’

Boris Damast made the crossover from the other direction. The agency creative veteran began his directing career with spot work before making the move to long form. Damast believes his spot experiences taught him ‘to communicate information within a very tight framework, [which] makes the energy of a longer piece much more interesting.’

The Pros and Cons director, who also does television work (he is slated to direct Barry Sonenfeld’s live-action pilot for The Tick in October), says, ‘Advertising is in my blood.’ His motivation for going to long form was all ‘about storytelling.’ For him, the desire was to help ‘create a characterization that exists for longer than 30 seconds.’ However, Damast says, ‘they both [long and short form] feed on each other. One strengthens the other in different ways.’

A main difference Damast cites between the two directing styles is the amount of time needed for production. When accepting a feature project, he must put his spot career on hold. Also, the lack of anonymity associated with feature work makes it all the more important that he be ‘very cautious of the kinds of feature projects’ he takes on.

Stephen Surjik, director of Wayne’s World 2, took a different route from spots to long form. His break came when, as a music video and commercial director, the Kids in the Hall comedy troupe approached him to direct the short films that ran between studio sketches in their tv series.

‘The Kids in the Hall were looking for a commercial director organized in a commercial way,’ Surjik begins. ‘In their first year, they were involved in a lot of overtime and there were a lot of discussions on the set trying to get things worked out. And when I came on, [I brought this] very preplanned, pre-thought-out commercial approach to very non-commercial material.’

Surjik’s years of directing Kids in the Hall led to his ‘relationship with Lorne Michaels and his whole comedy machine.’ As a result, Surjik was hired to direct Wayne’s World 2. ‘So that was kind of my steppingstone to the feature world,’ Surjik says.

Like an elastic band, Surjik bounced back to spots with his new feature experience under his belt. The Wayne’s World experience was a definite help in his spot work. According to the director, he became ‘less intimidated by the actor and the actor’s process.’ Also, the ‘higher pressure situation’ involved in high-profile feature making was helpful. This sort of experience, when brought back to a commercial set, ‘brings a certain confidence with it,’ he says.

In Saskatchewan, Rob King says being based on the Prairies makes it easier to go back and forth between long form and commercials. Fewer professional directors and a more intimate industry are probably factors contributing to what King says is ‘a bit of an anomaly.’ King, who began as a commercial director, has helmed such features as Something More and Without Malice.

The director, who divides his time between long form and commercial work at about a 70-30 split, loves doing features ‘because now we can really tell the story.’

Now comfortable as a long-form director, King found it ‘hard at the beginning’ to go from spot direction to features and dramatic series. ‘Unless you’re shooting some $80-million picture, you can’t really go in there and spend three hours to get one shot,’ he explains.

Another gap that King had to bridge was the way he dealt with actors. ‘When some guy comes in to do a commercial and says, ‘What’s my motivation?’ it’s kind of half a joke. You walk from a to b and you look happy, angry or sad while you do it. That’s about as simple as it gets. Whereas in a feature, the actor wants to know who this character is, and who he was 20 years ago.’

Adding to the notion that money may not be the only reason people move from features into spots (at least for Americans), John Frankenheimer, director of such cinema classics as The Manchurian Candidate and The Bird Man of Alcatraz, was in Toronto last month shooting a spot for 7-Up through his commercial representative, Johnson-Burnett Productions. For Frankenheimer, who has directed spots for at&t and Elizabeth Taylor’s line of perfumes, commercial directing is fabulously refreshing.

‘I enjoyed them all,’ Frankenheimer says of his spot work. ‘Basically the problem in a commercial is that you’ve got to tell a very complicated story in a very short period of time. And that is very good for someone like me.’

However, Frankenheimer cautions that spot work is not an exercise for him. ‘This is an art form unto itself,’ he says. ‘Yeah! I enjoy it. I like working it. I like doing things that challenge me. And this challenged me.’

Frankenheimer, who was shooting in Toronto for the first time, really enjoyed the project but only described working in Toronto as ‘okay.’ For the fabled director, the quick turnover in spot production is something he ‘loves.’

‘If you put [long form and commercials] in terms of sports, one of them is a marathon and one of them is a sprint. And the trick in doing a feature film is to keep your energy, interest and strength for 60 or 70 days and not let down. And doing a commercial – it’s a much shorter period of time,’ Frankenheimer explains.

He concludes: ‘I just enjoy shooting spots and I enjoy people asking me to do [them]. And I hope they continue to do so.’ *