Academy Award-winning director Martin Scorsese has taken a break from his usual tough-guy films to direct the TV commercial for Chanel’s next men’s fragrance.
The campaign, which will begin running globally in September, features French actor Gaspard Ulliel, who is the face of the new fragrance and will be featured in all advertising for the scent. Andrea D’Avack, president of Chanel Fragrance and Beauté, declined to reveal details about the scent, including its name.
The ads were shot earlier this winter, D’Avack said on Monday. “The ads have been shot in New York, the city which is so inherently part of Martin Scorsese’s cinematographic vocabulary,” he said.
This confirms a report that ran in WWD on Jan. 12.
“Chanel has a tradition several decades long of working with the most prominent movie directors in the world,” D’Avack said. “To work with Martin Scorsese, who is one of the best, if not the best movie director alive today, is a privilege Chanel has been seeking for quite some time.
“What was needed was the appropriate project — i.e., the launch of Chanel’s new men’s fragrance,” D’Avack said. “There is such an obvious connection between the identity of the fragrance and the cinematic world of Martin Scorsese that the partnership came to be,” he said without elaboration.
Past cinematic Chanel pairings have included Nicole Kidman and Baz Luhrmann and Audrey Tatou and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, both for Chanel No.5 at different times.
“Chanel works with movie directors because they bring depth, emotion and what we call in French ‘a supplement of soul,’ or an added dimension,” said D’Avack, pointing to films such as “Taxi Driver,” “Raging Bull,” and “Goodfellas” as examples of Scorsese’s vision. “In the case of Martin Scorsese, we knew we would definitely have a man’s world full of complexity that is also adrenaline-driven, and of course, amazing images.”
