One of the best commercial creative stakeholders Adam Smith has ever worked with walked into an edit suite where he was cutting an episode of cult drama Skins, watched the cut and asked if anyone wanted an ice cream.
“He went and got the ice creams, came back, and said ‘OK, I’ve just got some questions’,” Smith told B&T backstage at Cairns Crocodiles, presented by Pinterest, when asked how he defended his creative vision when stakeholders are always keen to put their ideas into the mix.
“He asked us three or four of the most pertinent questions. He never told us what to do. Maybe this is really advice for stakeholders, but he just asked us ‘do you think this bit is working?’ or ‘why have you done that?’, and they were all the parts we were struggling with the most in the edit.
“It was this curiosity to find the truth rather than getting into an ego battle, because no one gets anywhere when that is the case.”
Smith has forged a remarkable career in the film and music industry, directing and producing some of the most talked about musical moments and TV shows of the generation. In his TV credits are Skins and several episodes of Dr Who, but it is his single outing as a feature film director which prompted the stakeholder question.
In his on-stage interview with journalist and Curious Media founder Poppy Reid, the Londoner admitted he had found making the critically acclaimed Trespass Against Us with Michael Fassbender as the lead “quite difficult”.
“It was my dream to make a film but I got a bit distracted by Acid House, making visuals for music and raves and getting paid in bags of 300 pills by gangsters – that was a bit more exciting than going to film school,” he admitted.
“I thought I always wanted to make movies, and I got to make this film and it was really, really tough. It was like when a dream becomes a nightmare. I learned so much through it, I lost touch with that gut instinct and that feeling. There was a lot of pressure and a lot of voices and I didn’t surround myself with the right people, so as a result the film wasn’t the film I wanted to make.
“People enjoyed it, but it was one of those ‘be careful what you wish for’ moments.”
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Smith is sometimes referred to as the Third Chemical Brother, a reference to his more than 30-year collaboration with the dance music pioneers which has seen him create striking visuals for their live performances since their very early shows in the mid-90s.
To give a sense of the scale of this, the duo’s most recent tour which Smith and creative partner Marcus Lyall created, featured more than 9,000 lighting cues and giant screens synched up to play videos of their character creations which have become synonymous with the band.
He describes The Chemical Brothers as “the most amazing stakeholders because they really trust us and if they have any notes, which is rare, it is push it more, make it weirder,” he explained. “They’ve only rejected one piece of our work because it looks too slick and you’re taking people out of the moment and telling them how to feel.”
The Chemical Brothers have a rusted on and fanatical fan base, with many fans going as far as getting tattoos of the characters Smith has created. Despite this Smith said he needs to ignore fan feedback loops to stay true to his own vision for the music.
He explained: “It doesn’t work for me second guessing how other people think, I have to follow my instincts and listen to the music and if it’s moving me and I execute it well it’s going to move the fans.
“One of the things Tom from the band used to say was that the visuals have to be so bold that when you’re at a festival and you’re up against The Cure as we were at Glastonbury once, they have to be bold enough to make people ask what the hell is that, I want to go and see what that crazy clown is over there.”
Returning to the feedback conversation, Smith said he tries to now “pause when agitated” after receiving feedback he initially does not agree with, but stresses there is also an onus on a creator to perform what he calls “contempt without prior investigation”.
Put simply, it is the danger of rejecting feedback out of hand without at least trying out some of the suggestions and exploring whether they might actually work or not.
Talking about commercial work, which Smith has done for many brands including a vaunted 2014 short film for Jaguar featuring actor Damian Lewis, he said it is even more important to listen to that stakeholder feedback and try to make it work.
He explained: “People are paying a lot of money and of course they should have thoughts – but we should ask about their ideas and ask ‘that’s interesting, why are you thinking that?’ Often the demand a client is making still stays true to the idea.
“Sometimes they say something like ‘We have this maths that says if you have our logo on for longer people will buy more of our trainers’, and it is hard to argue with that. So what do you do, you keep the logo up for longer and work around those constraints. Often that is where the creative ideas come from.”
Written by Clear Hayes Consulting principal Alex Hayes.
