Robert Campbell of Outsider Films imagines himself cast away on a desert island. Here, he relays to Jason Stone of David Reviews the films that would help him through his island stay.
The founder of Outsider Films is one of two well-known figures in the advertising industry called Robert Campbell, so it’s worth stressing that the man I interviewed for the latest in the Desert Island Clips series is not the co-founder of Beta or the ‘C’ of RKCR/Y&R because that’s an entirely different fellow.
As well as being one of the foremost producers of his generation, the Robert Campbell interviewed here has a well-deserved reputation as a raconteur. An agency TV producer who worked with him recently recalled how she and her colleagues spent each evening of the overseas shoot being “hugely entertained by Robert’s tall tales”.
It’s a compliment that does Campbell a disservice. His tales may be tall but I’ve measured them to verify their height. He’s just one of those people to whom extraordinary things happen.
This aspect of Robert Campbell is perfectly illustrated by his description of an unusual route into advertising. A childhood in Italy was followed by a move to America, where he worked on a dairy farm: “I’ve milked hundreds of thousands of cows; I’ve had my hands up cows’ arses and I’ve delivered thousands of calves – I once delivered a calf by caesarean section using a penknife – and I’ve exported them all over the world... but one day I was stood in a field in Quanzhou province in China – very cold, very wet – and I thought ‘I can’t do this any more’.”
He came to England where “a friend of a friend of a friend” got him a job as a runner: “my biggest failing was that I didn’t know how to make tea. We’d never drunk tea as a family. We’d drunk coffee in Italy and we’d drunk coffee in America... I hadn’t seen teabags before and I didn’t know what to with them so I put them in the kettle.” Despite this inglorious start, Campbell edged his way up the hierarchy – becoming close friends with movie star Andy Garcia while working as assistant to the director on “a shit film” – and eventually working as a producer on several pop promos for acclaimed director Michael Haussman.