Epica d'Or 2002

The 2002 Epica d’Or was won by Euro RSCG MCM Milan’s "The Sculptor" commercial for the Peugeot 206.

Creative team Roberto Greco and Giovanni Porro joined Euro RSCG MCM in July 2000 from BGS D’Arcy. They were hired to work on the Peugeot account, and "The Sculptor" is the second commercial in a series (the first featured a Japanese girl who breaks up her Peugeot 206 to smuggle it through customs).

The spot stars an Indian man who crashes, bashes, hammers and welds his Hindustan Ambassador into the streamlined shape of the 206, before taking it for a drive with his mates to show off to the girls. Greco comments:

"The film is essentially about desire for a beautiful object. In common with its predecessor, which takes place in Japan, we set it in a country where Peugeot does not exist – so you can only dream about it. While the 206 is the best-selling small car in Europe, our Indian character has to go to extreme lengths to get one."

The ad was shot in Jaipur in the square outside the Maharaja’s palace, with Dutch director Matthijs Van Heijningen and an Indian film crew. Two major problems were the 48 degree heat and the fact that the first choice for the lead actor broke his leg shortly before shooting began.

"Luckily the actor we found as a replacement, who comes from Bombay, turned out to be perfect for the character we wanted – a dreamer, but cool too," says Greco

Matthijs Van Heijningen adds: "We had to go to 20 different places to rent camera equipment – and because the owners couldn’t insure it, all those 20 people were on set." The script also called for an elephant, but this proved easier than expected. "We got him from a farm around the corner, and trained him so he knew how to sit on a car."

While along with the elephant the ad features a host of local extras and Indian music, the creative team wanted to avoid making it too ‘Bollywood’. Van Heijningen comments: "What you see is the real India, dusty and chaotic, but full of optimism and good humour."

All the 2002 category winners were candidates for the Epica d’Or. The final shortlist included work for The Economist, Axe Deodorant, Levi Strauss, Nike and a film for the anniversary year of the Barcelona architect Gaudi. After a process of progressive elimination, the Peugeot commercial won over the Economist "Missing Piece" poster by a narrow margin.

 

Bombay Dreams

by Lewis Blackwell

The 2002 Epica d'Or winner went a bit further than the usual automobile commercials to show the lengths people will go to acquire their dream car. Instead of a familiar mix of stunning landscapes, rock music and beautiful girls, it featured urban India, cars being smashed up with hammers, elephants and Indian pop. In this Peugeot 206 spot, The Sculptor, product shots were abandoned: its creators decided that the actual car was so well known that the commercial should focus on its personality. But to make it memorable they would need a great script, entertaining characters - and an unforgettable location.

When creatives, Giovanni Porro and Roberto Greco told their Peugeot client that they planned to set the commercial in India, he was apprehensive. Peugeots are not available on the sub- continent and he was worried that European audiences might think the company was somehow exploiting a less privileged society. Porro, however, was able to reassure him: his knowledge of India and its culture is considerable and long-standing. The art director's grandfather was a well-known Italian orientalist who spent several years studying Indian society in the 1930s and 40s and his brother is a doctor in southern India who spends his free time travelling elsewhere in the country, studying its traditions and ways of life. Porro had also spent extended vacations there and was determined that the Peugeot spot would capture the real spirit of India.

Porro and Greco, then joint creative directors at Euro RSCG MCM in Milan (though Porro is now at DLV BBDO), combined two briefs into one. Peugeot International wanted them to make the car"irresistible" and the Italian marketing group added that it should be associated with the cool young "bad" - or slightly nonconformist - guys who were role models for their youthful target group. So they devised a script that showed a hip and handsome young man determined to achieve the 206 image, even if he could not get his hands on the real thing. That meant shooting in a country where Peugeot is not available - like Japan, where their first 206 spot was set: it featured a Japanese girl breaking up her car to get it back home through customs.

The Indian spot was also based on the idea of going to extremes for the sake of this incomparable vehicle. Porro had seen at first hand the astonishing results of Indian creativity in customising cars. "I was amazed by the automobile sculptures I saw driving on the roads there," he says. "They were made up from bits of Mercedes, Suzukis, even Rolls-Royces - and of course the ubiquitous Austin Ambassadors." As Porro points out, this strong creative and practical ingenuity epitomises India, often compensating for a lack of western consumer goods and technologies by developing homegrown alternatives.

India also represented a total visual contrast to the earlier setting in Japan, the world's temple of technology, while retaining the original idea of the campaign: however boundless - or limited - the local resources, there is no substitute for the Peugeot 206. The Sculptor - a young taxi driver, typical of a new generation of trendy young Indians - knows this and carries a magazine picture of the car around in his pocket like a talisman. As he gazes at it longingly, he glances at his mundane Ambassador and inspiration strikes: he decides to become a latter-day Michelangelo, chiselling an exquisite new form out of a hunk of metal. He sets forth, crashing, bashing, hammering and welding his old vehicle until it resembles the streamlined shape of a 206.

Finally, it is ready for a cruise around town where the car attracts envious and admiring attention from cool youths and pretty girls It helps, of course, that the driver is a strikingly good-looking guy.

The lead actor, with his expressive features ("his crazy artist's eyes", as Porro puts it] and cooly confident but endearing demeanour, seems perfect for the role but was in fact a last- minute stand-in when the original candidate broke his leg a weel before the shoot. There was also an anxious day or so when the lead actor was briefly sick himself: ironically, he - a wealthy Indian - was the only one on set to suffer any health problems, apart from the European cameraman who fainted in the 48° heat after the first two hours of filming. Otherwise, the crew stayed fit by drinking 8 or 9 litres of water a day - and Porro actually felt
better without the five kilos he lost on the shoot.

For the client, there were a few nerve-racking moments as he watched two new 206s being taken apart and reassembled. Like the rest of the crew, he was also awestruck as two French stunt-drivers drove the cars into a specially constructed wall four times - twice head-on and twice in reverse. Ambulances and medical staff were on hand but thanks to the professional expertise of the drivers their services were not required.

Filming in India created no special problems and the proximity of Bombay's "Bollywood" film industry - the world's second-largest - conferred the advantage of a consummately professional crew. "It was like filming in Los Angeles," Porro enthuses. "There were 80 people on set, including 30 electricians, who made it very easy to work." More unpredictably, acquiring and training an elephant to sit on the car - part of the process of its transformation - was rather easier than expected. A suitable animal was cast from a nearby farm and played his role perfectly after just two days' training. The rest of the cast were local people, an entirely authentic group representing a cross-section, neither desperately poor nor hugely wealthy, of contemporary India.

Porro and the Dutch director, Matthijs van Heijningen. admit that the setting for the commercial could have been a much dirtier, dustier location. In deference to their client's concerns that
that might arouse indignant reactions, however, they chose the picturesque square outside the Maharajah's palace in Jaipur. Van Heijningen had been there before: he also travelled through India for several months when he was younger and remembered the spot. Like Porro, he feels that the setting and the cast represented "the real India, dusty and chaotic, but full of optimism and good humour."

Van Heijningen loves shooting in unfamiliar cultures: "In the end the language of film is the same everywhere," he explains. But he is particularly enchanted by India. "I think it's one of the most interesting places on earth... the culture, the beauty of the people and of nature, everything." Since he was initially attracted to the "absurdness" of the whole script concept, his film follows it very closely. "When something is good you shouldn't change it," he believes. But he did initiate the idea of the final scene in which the cast burst into a spontaneous dance routine. This was inspired by a 70s style open-air disco, complete with Elvis-like DJs, that the crew encountered when driving through Jaipur.

The creatives and director clearly enjoyed sourcing the music for the exuberant finale. They bought 50 CDs of Bollywood pop musicbut failed to find a prototypically right track. Eventually, during the few days of editing in Paris, van Heijningen found some music in a scruffy Indian shop and got a Dutch musician to mix a new track based on its sound. The composition was an unexpected success, becoming a Top Ten hit in several European countries.

Not quite as successful as The Sculptor commercial itself, however. Not only has it won the Epica d'Or and other awards, it has been hugely popular with audiences all over Europe, decisively banishing the Peugeot president's fears that it might annoy the Indian communities of, say, France and England. In fact, the reaction from these groups has been highly enthusiastic. Director van Heijningen is not surprised. "Critics (who say the commercial is patronising] are patronising Indian culture...It's comedy, it's just fun and we don't say anything bad about India."

Perhaps more remarkably, they don't say anything particularly flattering about the Peugeot 206. And it is surely a first in car commercials that, without a single product shot, The Sculptor nevertheless establishes it as an ultimate object of desire.

Lewis Blackwell is the creative director of Getty Images, the world's teading provider of images. For many years he was the editor-in-chief and publisher of the magazine Creative Review, and now contributes columns to several titles worldwide. As a writer he is also known for several critically acclaimed books on communication, including the bestselling creative title The End Of Print. His most recent book is Soon: Brands of Tomorrow.