Dutch Courage
- Article 4 of 6
- The Post, November 2000
Will van der Vlugt seems a modest man, as interested in listening as talking and, despite the numerous awards he's won both as a photographer and a director, not just out for the glory.
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“It seemed like something so far fetched. I was a stills photographer and very interested in films as entertainment. I never thought I could combine the two.”
Will van der Vlugt is a modest man. He’s constantly worried that what he’s going to say isn’t going to interest people. And he’s not out for glory, despite the numerous awards he’s won both as a photographer and a director. He simply loves the challenge of a script that he knows he could turn into an interesting commercial.
“At times, when you’re very busy, you really want to do nothing for one or two months. All of a sudden, there’s something in front of you. A little script. You could make it interesting… That is my nature. I like doing it. I like the challenge.”
Based in Miami and Europe, the Netherlands-born director grew up with a love of films, going to the local cinema practically every night, even getting a job there as a projectionist. However, he never thought of his ambition as anything more than a fantasy.
“I found that the film academy in Holland was really a school more for social studies than film making. In combination with that, there wasn’t one film I’d seen from it that had made any kind of money. I decided I could pretend to become a film-maker but I’d still be saying it when I was 50.”
His father a stills-photographer, too, taking that as his trade was by no means a second-choice, he maintains. He grew up helping out in the dark room and shot stills at school, but was never the sort of photographer that “would go for a hike in the forest. I always much more wanted to do advertising.” But directing commercials was something that didn’t occur to him because of the quality of Dutch advertising at the time. “Commercials in those days were silly humour – people in kitchens holding up things saying silly lines. I was totally not interested.”
He was soon shooting spreads for film magazines, now having the unheard of luxury of days behind-the-scenes at movies to wait for the right moment to take the right shot (there was no Photoshop then, of course…). Between shoots, he managed to fit in time to put together some short films of his own and was able to go to the US to hold workshops on film-making. “They really did not have a direct link with my daily work. I just did it for fun. Then, the creative director of Ogilvy and Mather asked me to do a stills campaign for Shell. When they decided to do a commercial as well, he suggested that I shoot that too. After all, an agency has to take a risk to start working with someone new.”
Without a show-reel, van der Vlugt wasn’t an obvious choice for the clients, but O&M’s creative director simply held up one of his stills. “’This is what it looks like moving,’ he said, moving it along.” Which seemed to placate Shell. “There’s always been a silly discussion about stills photographers who don’t know how to move the camera. But there are people capable instinctively of knowing how to make moving images and there are people who study film-making all their lives who still don’t know how it works.”
And he should know, having won a bronze at the New York Film Festival in 1985 for that first campaign. He now has under his belt a Grand Prix from the same festival, numerous golds, silvers, two Lions de Bronze and a Lion de Argent from Cannes, Clios, and awards from the British Television Advertising Awards, the International Film and Television Festival of New York, the London International Advertising Awards, Eurobest, Midsummer Festival London, the Art Directors’ Club and Epica.
Van der Vlugt soon was getting requests for his unique visual style to be used in other campaigns. “My visual style became important but it shouldn’t be that important,” he believes. He’s far more interested in a strong narrative and good storylines.
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