Interview with the director

Top director Saul Dibb was the man behind the camera for our TV ads featuring Sue, and Karen, Bill and Vicki, and Lorraine and Yvonne.

He recently directed Keira Knightley in The Duchess. Our roving reporter, Gemma, asks the questions...

What attracted you to this project?

When I read the treatment I knew I wanted to do the project immediately. It was very simple and bold but also had the potential to be surprisingly powerful and moving.

It would also be a challenge to elicit subtle emotional responses from ordinary people, rather than using actors as commercials too often seem to do. I felt confident that if we pulled it off these films would really stand out.

Have you worked on a charity project before?

No - but this was a very good experience so I'd definitely do another if the idea felt right.

The style is very striking and different to the style of most ads you see on TV – where did this idea come from? And how did you create it?

To be honest the general approach was already there - to create a series of moving, suspended moments that stand out precisely because they don't employ all the usual tricks that ads normally do.

What I did was try to accentuate what we were trying to achieve - a very honest piece of portraiture that was beautifully presented but also felt very real and unmediated.

To achieve this we insisted on using people with real experiences, and talked to them at length.

Then we shot each person on 35mm with a standard film lens but using a very shallow depth of field to focus on the eyes as much as possible - and played back their edited interviews in real time. We used a deep red velvet drape as a background which we allowed to fall off into black giving a vignetting effect around the people.

We also didn't allow any make up so we can see every detail in their faces, allowing the smallest movement on their faces to tell the story.

The result is something I'm very proud of.

What was it like working with real people and not actors? How did it compare to working on The Duchess with professional actors such as Keira Knightley?

Because I made documentaries for ten years before I made feature films, I'm very comfortable with real people. I'm not sure I see a massive fundamental difference in what you're trying to achieve - creating and revealing genuine emotional moments whoever they are.

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