Commercials are also any opportunity to meet new crew and work with new kind of rigs. You can explore working with different people without having to make the full commitment of having to do an entire feature film with them and see whether you like them. Also it's great for testing out new equipment, like on the last spot we just did, I used a lot of drone technology, really cutting edge drone stuff, more than I've ever done before, and it worked out really really well.
Paul W. S. AndersonIt's a very different experience shooting in 3-D because the camera rigs are so large. Everything we've become accustomed to in the last ten years as filmmakers, which is cameras getting smaller and smaller and you can just throw them on your shoulder and stick them in a car and do whatever you want, you can't do any of that now. You're forced to put things on dollies and track and cranes.
Paul W. S. AndersonSo each of the commercials- basically it's an action movie clichรฉ. "Bus" is very much inspired by Speed obviously, where you have a high-jacked out of control bus, and you have heroes who are trying to jump from a moving vehicle to the bus and they just can't do it because the moving vehicle can't get close enough, because all these VW cars have this distancing technology, which is really fantastic.
Paul W. S. AndersonWhen that technology becomes widespread and it's on every car on the freeways, it's going to save so many lives. Especially in America, so many people get killed in these multi-car pileups on the freeways.
Paul W. S. AndersonI'm a very collaborative person, so that's not the way I work any way. Once VW got over the idea that I was going to blow their cars up, then we shot the thing really fast and it came out really good. Like I said, it won a bunch of awards and that really was the start of working in commercials.
Paul W. S. AndersonI never really thought I went away because I've written all of the movies and I'm produced them all and certainly provided services about and beyond the average producer on two and three. I was on set most of the films and called action and cut a lot of times and did all that good stuff.
Paul W. S. Anderson