Responses by Benoît Oulhen, copywriter and Mickaël Jacquemin, art director, DDB Paris

Background: Our client Délégation à la Sécurité Routière, or French Road Safety, was looking for a new approach to raise awareness on the risks we take every day on the road, especially during the holiday seasons. After a gloomy year and as French citizens started to recover a greater freedom of movement, it was the right time to try something fresh and new, maybe less dramatic and dark than usual. The Road Safety campaign had to target all drivers and make everyone feel concerned, which is the main challenge for these campaigns. People never perceive themselves as the risk-takers. But we all, at some point, make mistakes.

Reasoning: Many road safety communications use feelings of fear and guilt to change people’s behaviors on the road, showing the worst that can happen. We wanted to try the opposite approach: a completely positive celebration of life. The strategy was to compare people’s deepest desires to all the immediate temptations on the road, like answering a phone call or running a stop sign. Then, we looked for the most relatable execution. We didn’t want to show over-the-top amazing moments, but rather the simple, ordinary, cheerful slices of life, like a guy singing in his bath, a couple making love, a father and his child and a family playing a game. All these small moments make life worth living.

Challenges: The first challenge was to find the right scenes. We wrote dozens of moments before choosing the right ones. It couldn’t feel scripted; it had to be very simple, almost nothing, yet something nice to watch. The second challenge was more of a direction one: make all these little stories sound true to life. We had to capture the perfect choreography, light and acting in one single take. Director Arnaud Desplechin did a great job and his long experience in cinema certainly helped.

Favorite details: The whole direction of the films was exactly this “celebration of life” we were looking for. The great actors, light, settings and production details helped to create these true moments and elevate them into something more.

Visual influences: We had lengthy discussions with Desplechin about the scenes we should shoot and, of course, cinema was a great influence because movies have this ability to show real life in a striking way. The work of the Coen Brothers, Deplechin’s other movies, Abdellatif Kechiche, Terrence Malick, and even Garry Marshall’s Pretty Woman were referenced.

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