Simon West Reflects on 'The Boy in the Bottle'

Director Simon West recalls flying to an idyllic island to squeeze a small boy into a giant Pepsi bottle for a hit 1995 Super Bowl spot – a job that led to a life-changing romantic decision...

The ‘boy in the bottle’ was part of a massive production line of comedy spots I was banging out at the time. After directing music videos for bands such as Mike & The Mechanics in the UK, I moved out to LA to get into commercials. I only had one test spot on my reel, which happened to be comedic, but suddenly I was being offered all these comedy spots. At the time I was doing around 25 ads a year.

The script came in from a creative team at BBDO New York, who I’d worked with on previous commercials for Little Caesar’s and Budweiser, so I was used to their style and sense of humour. It was a very basic idea – a boy is so into Pepsi that he sucks himself into the bottle – but nobody knew how to do it. These were the early days of CGI.

We needed a location that could look glamorous and aspirational, with beautiful blue water – but we had to stay within the States. In spite of all the propaganda, the sea in Los Angeles is actually rather brown and cold; often overcast and windswept, so we had to look elsewhere. Eventually, we found St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Then there were the technical challenges. The only tool we had at the time was a Harry, a basic picture manipulator. It could do overlays and composites, and you could bend the picture a bit, and that was about it. Now, it’s so easy. We spent a lot of time working out how to pull this off, and in the end it was a combination of in-camera effects and the Harry.

One of the tricks that I used a lot in those days was oversized props. I had a giant bottle made, which was probably three or four feet high, and a giant straw, so we could get these big, beautiful close-ups inside the bottle. When the little boy was actually sucked into the bottle, it was a progressive kind of collapse.

We rigged his hat to an old-fashioned suction pump, which sucked it down onto his head to make it look like his hat and his head were being compressed. And then the Harry stepped in to bend his ears back, squash his head and move his image down into the bottle. The rest I shot in front of a green screen, with half of another giant bottle and the little boy squishing his face against the glass while we shoved fake arms and legs made of latex in around him. He had great fun pulling weird faces, like all kids do; it was a dream come true for him!

What sells [the spot], though, is the revolted reaction of his sister. Funnily enough, the little girl I cast happened to be a doppelganger of the creative director at BBDO New York [Donna Weinheim], with lovely, curly red hair and freckles.

We shot the whole thing in a day –in fact, it took us longer to fly to St. Croix than it did to shoot the ad. It was the smallest, simplest little spot, so I never expected it to have the impact it did. When I saw the front page of USA Today, the day after the Super Bowl, I thought, ‘Oh wow, it must’ve gone down well’, but it was only when I was shooting a Budweiser commercial in Louisiana that I realised how popular it was with the public. This guy with no teeth was paddling us through the swamps and asking what other commercials I’d done – and as soon as I said ‘the boy in the bottle’ he knew pretty much every shot in it!

As well as topping the USA Today Ad Meter it ended up in New York’s Museum of Modern Art as a classic example of American advertising. It sort of took on a life of its own. When I went into big action movies, I was known as the guy who made the ‘boy in the bottle’ commercial.

I probably should have gone to Cannes and relished the glory [of winning a gold Film Lion] but at the time I didn’t really understand the advertising industry at all and never went to industry parties or awards. I didn’t really know what Cannes was, to be honest.

I think the ad has endured as a classic visual gag that translates and travels well, like slipping on a banana peel. It’s not witty dialogue or an ironic concept, it’s just great, visual slapstick that verges on the surreal. I didn’t realise until later that that’s also my [directing] sensibility: a lot of my work has a surreal tinge to it, though I think I’m doing something quite normal.

The main reason I remember the ‘boy in the bottle’ is from a ‘rest of my life’ point of view. St. Croix was so beautiful that I called up my girlfriend and said, you should come out and stay – and we decided to get married on the beach. I arranged the wedding in two days and now we have four kids together. So the ad was sort of incidental.