‘You need more than to tell jokes’

Omar Hilal is one of only a handful of directors from the Middle East to crack the international market. Iain Akerman caught up with him

“So many creatives are now becoming directors and my concern is the level of creativity. It needs to go back to where it once was. I want to work on great scripts,”says Egyptian director Omar Hilal.

The director Omar Hilal is sitting opposite me at Paul in ABC Achrafieh. Outside a sandstorm has struck Beirut. It’s hot, sticky and Hilal has a flight to catch back to Cairo in a few hours.

“I shot a commercial here once,” he says. “Right at this very table. It involved a bear and a sword and man who wouldn’t listen to his wife. It was very popular. Very funny.”

Hilal smiles as he remembers. We order coffee.

Hilal has done what very few directors from the Middle East have managed to do. He has begun to crack the international market. Having signed with United Kingdom-based production company Great Guns in January this year, he has already shot two commercials for clients outside the region. One for the UK market, the other for Singapore.

In a world where directing talent is usually imported into the Middle East, it is refreshing to see someone head in the opposite direction, even if Hilal strikes a sometimes solitary figure.

“I’m enjoying the Great Guns experience right now,” admits Hilal, who is in Beirut grading a Mobinil job. “I just got some scripts from Tokyo, some from New York. We’re bidding but it’s nice to be on that level. It’s been years that I’ve been trying to break into the London market. It’s not been easy. But ‘Mangos’ was a film that gets you through the door.”

The ‘Mangos’ he is referring to is the ‘Swimming Mangos’ spot for Dolceca by JWT Cairo, which won gold in film craft at the Dubai Lynx in 2014. It was the film that essentially got Hilal the Great Guns gig, although the majority of his work continues to come from this region.

“It was a 30-second script but I made a two-minute film,” says Hilal. “The 30-second spot is not that good, because you have to tell that story in length. But that’s what I do. I like to tell big stories. If I had to pigeonhole the style of work that I like to do, it’s big stories with a smart or comic twist.”

Hilal’s work for IN by Vodafone has just broken, while the Mobinil campaign he is colour correcting is expected to be released later in the year. If anything, he is busier than ever.

“The Egyptian market is very ripe,” says Hilal, who was one of the first agency creatives in the region to quit and become a full-time director. “It’s full of work and I think Cairo still holds the best position in the Middle East. But what creatives aren’t doing any more is writing for the duration that they have. They can write a fantastic idea but it needs 70 seconds or 80 seconds to tell. And they say ‘come on, you can do it in 30’. But it never really manages to shrink back into the 30 seconds.

“The pie has grown by not more than 10 per cent in terms of the amount of work that’s out there and the top level of directors remains the same. They still get the same amount of work, the same amount of demand. But it’s the others that are fighting over the rest. They are getting less and less work because the pie hasn’t grown that much and there are more and more directors. As such the quality is falling, not only in terms of directors but in terms of the creative.

“So many creatives are now becoming directors and my concern is the level of creativity. It needs to go back to where it once was. I want to work on great scripts. You could call it a wish more than a concern. But I wish that the good creatives would go back to writing rather than attempting directing.” Why has the level dropped? “Because the creatives are gone. Most of them are trying to direct or there is a sort of challenge inside agencies to do the funniest spot. It’s all about funny, funny, funny, funny. Who’s going to have the joke that goes viral. It’s a really bad way to approach work and people are also copying each other’s styles, and that’s so wrong.

“The neo-creatives now are these guys who are very popular on Facebook and Twitter. Guys with tens of thousands of followers who write stuff that makes me go ‘seriously?’ But these guys are now the creatives in agencies. They’re the hot stuff. They’re guys who can write something that can be popular, but they’re not creatives. Copywriting is an art and it’s that one job that’s art and business combined. You don’t have to write a joke to sell a product.” So where now? “I want to make movies. I’ve got two ideas for films but it’s very hard to sit down and write. I can’t even write a bloody treatment. I’ve got three treatments to write by the end of today and I don’t have the time. The pressure is there every day. For every script. Because I want to keep doing good stuff. The first time I went to an awards show I won the film grand prix and you think ‘hey, I’m going to win the grand prix every year’. But it’s not like that. You have to work hard. You have to love what you do. And I still do.”