The Creative Vision Behind Nike’s “Awaken Your Madness” – Exclusive Interview with Director Sam Pilling!

Hey, community! We’re beyond excited to welcome Sam Pilling , one of the most talented directors in the world, to FilmmakersWorld Magazine.

We first came across Sam’s work years ago through one of our early contributors, cinematographer David Procter, who worked on the powerful music video “Nobody Speak” – directed by Sam Pilling, which remains one of our all-time favorite music videos. (Keep reading to unlock a special bonus at the end of the interview!).

Recently, we had the pleasure of meeting Sam in person at the Ciclope Festival, where he led an incredible panel with Nike VP Brand Creative Jordi Pont and W+K’s London Creative Director Becca Pottinger. We couldn’t resist bringing you closer to the magic of this exciting commercial.

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In “Awaken Your Madness,” Sam Pilling took on one of the most ambitious projects of his career, capturing the raw intensity and relentless drive of elite athletes like Kylian Mbappé, Erling Haaland, and Vinícius Júnior. Each athlete’s unique style is brought to life through stunning transitions, analog film shots, and a high-energy atmosphere. This project audaciously encapsulates the essence of Nike, blending visionary creativity with a surreal sense of storytelling.

In this exclusive interview, Sam Pilling takes us through the production journey, sharing insights on everything from the logistical challenges of working with world-class athletes to the creative decisions that made this visually spectacular ad come to life.

Happy reading – and you’ll definitely enjoy this one. There are also some funny anecdotes inside! Let’s start!

Sam, you’ve created works that have become true visual icons, like ‘Nobody Speak’. For those who may not be familiar with you and your work, could you tell us a bit about yourself and how you started your career in the film industry?

I’m the son of a drama teacher and an English professor, so perhaps I was always destined to be a Director? However, originally I thought I was going to be an illustrator or a graphic novelist. I’ve always enjoyed telling stories and had a slightly dark, twisted sense of humor.

I studied Visual Communication (Graphic Design) at Central Saint Martins, but whilst on the course I became fascinated by the storytelling potential of ‘moving image’ and spent most of my time at uni messing around with Bolex cameras and learning how to edit in Final Cut.

Then in our final year, a mate of mine started running on music videos to gain experience, so I went along to help. After a while, we were getting paid as runners (and although it was only a small amount, this was extremely useful as a student). I learned so much about how a film set works from my runner experiences on set. 

Then when I graduated I sent as many emails as I could to as many of the UK production companies that I knew existed and asked for an internship. After doing a week at Blink, I started a 3-month internship at Pulse Films where I started out on reception. 

However, they soon found out I was afraid of the telephone, but I could find images, write ideas and use InDesign, so I became the in-house visual researcher/treatment writer. But on the side I was trying to direct my own projects, working with friends from uni and shooting stuff on a 7D. 

Then about 10 months later I was offered the chance to make a music video for Riz Ahmed for £2k. We filmed the whole thing guerilla style, without permits, including a car chase through the Blackwall tunnel with my mate hanging out of our car window filming Riz driving. Pulse then signed me off the back of that video!

Then another fortuitous thing happened half a year later, I’d just made a £5k music video for SBTRKT, and Usher’s, Manager’s, daughter saw it, and made her mum watch it, who showed it to Usher, who then wanted me to direct his next music video. So I flew out to Atlanta and made a video for Usher.

The video isn’t anything to write home about, and the label ended up taking the edit, but it meant that suddenly Pulse had to fast-track getting me a US visa, which opened quite a few more doors commercially.

Let’s move on to the Nike commercial. The campaign has a frenetic, almost surreal rhythm. Why did you choose these three athletes, and how did you make sure their unique styles and stories came through authentically in the visual narrative of the ad?

Nike wanted these three athletes because they are some of the biggest footballers in the world right now and they wanted to show off the ‘footballing madness’ that they possess, in order to be the best. 

As such, I wanted to create something that had a real mood and dramatic feeling to it, something that visually represented this madness and almost showed these athletes like crazy vigilante superheroes – constantly working away to become better and better players. We always made sure that each scene or vignette had some basis of truth to it, or represented the specific player in some way, whether it was Mbappe shooting hundreds and hundreds of dead balls, or Haaland braving the elements to be a more powerful player, or Vinicius dribbling himself round in circles.

We wanted to show that these players had possessed this ‘madness’ from a very young age, so we started the film with footage of the players as kids – already acting in a mad footballing way. In order to make these moments feel as authentic as possible, we filmed them on a Hi-8 video camera in 4:3 aspect ratio, giving them a nostalgic texture and quality that meant they felt more like an archive, than something we had orchestrated.

What guided the choices in the tone and atmosphere of the ad? Was there any specific visual inspiration that helped you build this dreamlike and immersive world?

Nike really wanted to make something that caught people’s attention and had a strong tone of voice, so I started riffing off psychological thriller and horror movies, to create a dark, moody, brooding atmosphere full of silhouettes, smoke, and intense close-ups. 

We then used locations and built sets that had a cold, clinical feel to them, and evoked a feeling of psychiatric centers. This was something we talked a lot about as there is a real visual similarity between hospitals and psychiatric wards, and sports training facilities.

But obviously we were not just saying these players were crazy, we were saying they were badass for being so crazy, and as such there was an element of superhero about the way we were depicting them, and movies like the recent Batman were a great reference for that. These sort of obsessive heroes of the night, training and working away whilst we’re tucked up in bed.

A big guiding reference was the title sequence to David Fincher’s Se7en – full of glitchy, extreme close-ups that are so frenetic and visceral that sometimes you’re not even sure what you’re looking at. This felt like the perfect visualization of ‘madness’ and so I applied this technique as a sort of connective thread to join the three players’ journeys together.

I think we all had a lot of fun coming up with close-ups but we tried to make them feel relevant to the players themselves, or things that all football players must endure, like injuries, etc… but we chose things that would also feel quite intense or even gross when we filmed the action up close.

My particular favorite was the fly… which happened by total accident… we were in an apartment gathered round a food blender, juicing some berries with an extreme macro camera lens shoved in the blender, as you do – when our DP saw the fly buzzing around… we were both like – we have to film it!

Just because, we had an insane macro lens on, and, well, we were all going a little mad by that point… it was only later, in the edit, when Fouad and I realized that the ring of the oven looked a bit like the white football pitch markings… from that point, it had to be in the ad!

At the Ciclope panel, the unique transition techniques used and the choice to shoot on film were discussed. Can you elaborate on how the decision to use analog film influenced the overall aesthetic of the commercial?

Given that we were trying to create quite a moody palette, that was a cinematic visualization of madness, our imagery needed to have a real texture and grit to it, so shooting on film was a no-brainer. We wanted everything to have a very tactile, authentic quality to it, which film really helps with. Then when it came to the transition from the real world into the mad space, I wanted to make sure this moment felt as tactile as the rest of the film, so I thought it would be fun to use a contra-zoom technique, to give the effect that the real world is literally shifting further away from Vinicius as he bursts from reality into the mad space. 

However, in order for the contra-zoom to work, the subject has to be static, so we had Vini running on a treadmill on the side of the football pitch, with several grips holding an easy-up tent, and mushing it in, to create a moving flag over Vini, so that the lighting changed on him as he went from the outdoor pitch, to the interior mad space. 

Then we filmed a contra-zoom in each location and our post company TBA married the two shots together. But as cool as the effect was, I felt like it wasn’t quite mad enough, so that’s where the decision to burn the negatives and re-scan them came in, to create a weird warping feeling that added to the effect that Vinicius is bursting from one dimension into the other.

Our DP, Norm, had a friend who owned his film processing lab in Canada, so we asked him to try different ways of messing up the negatives – using a hairdryer, lighter or a blow torch. After getting back some tests we landed on the lighter technique, but the trouble was this was not an exact science, as it’s incredibly hard to control how the negative burns, so we gave the lab several copies of the action, hoping one of them would work!

The burning would crinkle the negatives up, which would mean they then couldn’t fit back through the film scanner so he ended up using an iron to re-flatten the burnt negs, before re-scanning them.

There’s a movie called Linha De Passe (life’s a pass) which I’m obsessed with, and I really loved how realistic the football scenes in it are. I feel like football game scenes always end up looking the same in commercials, and I really wanted to avoid this so I decided to shoot the footballing sequences on TV broadcast cameras, to make them feel as realistic and epic as possible.

I’m not going to lie, this was a pretty ballsy decision and to my knowledge, it had never been done on a commercial before. Deep down, I was slightly worried that it might not look ‘cinematic’ enough but something told me, if we did it right, it would really stand out. 

Which meant I had to deal with a Matrix-style monitor set-up, which looked cool on the gram, but in reality, was a total nightmare. Trying to track each camera angle was bad enough, then talking to the various operators, trying to craft the movement and crash-zooms, take after take, with different operators in each country that we shot in, and some of whom didn’t speak much English. Made it another mad aspect of an already mad job.

Could you share more details about the creation of the futuristic pod where Vinícius Júnior is shown resting?

Marco Puig our production designer, worked with Machine Shop and his team to design and built this cool cryo-chamber for Haaland. This came from an insight that a lot of footballers use these chambers as part of their routines. We began shooting the Haaland body-double day but then we got news that Vini Jr rests in an oxygenated sleep chamber to speed up recovery.

This felt like an even better insight. More authentic and madder. So we decided to re-write the scene. Package up the cryochamber, fly it from Manchester to Madrid and re-purpose it as a sleep chamber for Vini, and shoot it 3 days later.

Projects like these require calm and collaboration among the agency, creatives, producers, and top-tier talent. We recall Jordi Pont mentioning a moment when everything became last-minute during the panel. How did you handle this challenge, and how crucial is mutual trust and collaboration in a project of this scale?

To be honest, we had two options; try to tame it, have a rigid idea in mind that isn’t adaptable, cause we’ve done it like that before, OR just go with it – throw the timing plan out the window, embrace the chaos, hopefully even add to it. Adapt and improve the work as we go. Obviously, trust and collaboration are key to this. 

From the first meeting with the Wieden+Kennedy team, it was clear we were all on the same page and all had the same energy and enthusiasm for the project. Then we had a brilliant chemistry meeting with Nike in Amsterdam before the job was awarded. So the job was single-bid to me and started with the same kind of conviction that we all had to have for the rest of the project.

It really was madness from beginning to end. We shot for 19 days, we went back to the same location to shoot 3 times. We wrote 178 budgets and had daily ‘team meetings’ that involved everyone from all sides. By the end, we completely scrapped the second video village and were huddled around one monitor together. It was chaos but I think the perfect example of the kind of fluid and slightly mad working relationship, and squiggly non-linear process, that you need to take work to the next level. 

I think this way of working gets results for a few reasons. One of the big ones is that no one stays in their lane. Everyone on the project felt able to overstep the mark by 10%. So we got the best of everyone. Two days before shooting, one of Haaland’s scenes had to be rewritten. We moved from him eating cow hearts in a canteen to studying tactics in a training facility. We all sat on a Zoom together on a Saturday morning, job titles went out the window and we brainstormed ideas together. Jordi was helping with art direction. The junior creative was thinking in terms of production. By Monday we were shooting it in Manchester. 

And I think, when your back is against the wall and it’s all a bit chaotic you tend to come up with better ideas. The solves you find are braver and ultimately more exciting I think. You are forced to trust your gut. But not just your gut but everyone else’s too. You don’t have the luxury of seeing options and making a call on it. So collectively you make better decisions. There isn’t time to sit on stuff and overthink, and ultimately complicate it.

When you trust that everyone is pointing in the same direction, that’s when craft magic happens. When you trust that everyone is committed to making the work as good as it can be, no matter what the circumstances.

I remember there was a particular difficulty at one point with a footballer who had qualified for the final stages of the Champions League, and this situation almost jeopardized everything. Could you tell us more about that?

We were halfway through the project, and were about to fly to Madrid to shoot Vinicius when we found out he had just gotten into the final of the Champions League and his manager said they couldn’t risk doing any filming before the game. So the whole shoot schedule shifted back by 2 weeks!

We also saw one of the most iconic footballers in history, Ronaldinho, in the commercial. How did the idea of involving him come about, and why did you choose to present him in that way? If you could share any behind-the-scenes stories or anecdotes related to that scene, we’re really curious to hear them.

We really wanted to have an OG footballing great in the commercial but someone who embodied ‘footballing madness’ not just for being an awesome player, but who had a mad attitude and charisma too. 

We originally wrote the scene for one OG, then flew to Madrid to shoot it, before finding out he couldn’t make it, then we re-wrote the scene with a different OG, but he couldn’t make it before finally finding out that Ronaldinho was up for doing it. What was great is that he felt like the OG of OG’s and most appropriate for the role anyway, as his footballing flair and skill are legendary.But in truth, we shot this scene three times, with three separate footballer body doubles, before finally going back to Madrid to shoot Ronaldinho.

I loved the idea that Ronaldinho would appear in this surreal ‘mad space’ by hanging upside down like some sort of 50-cent-esque, footballing Batman – heroic but utterly mad. But we obviously weren’t going to actually hang the main man upside-down (especially given that he’d been out celebrating at the Champions League final the night before) so we built a platform and lit him from below, then turned the image upside down and comped him into a plate shot, then filmed his body double on all the wide shots.

How did the audience respond, and what were some of the most memorable reactions you received after the release of ‘Awaken Your Madness’?

When the ad dropped a lot of the online comments were saying that ‘prime Nike ads are back’ and there were comparisons to the iconic ‘Write The Future’ advert, and a lot of fans picked up on the attention to detail we’d gone into when recreating Mbappe’s childhood bedroom, complete with CR7 posters on the wall behind him.

And a creative director said it had the best-looking football gameplay sequence he’d seen in a commercial. All of which was obviously very flattering, but one of the best reactions for me was hearing from Mbappe’s team that he really loved the advert and that this was the sort of project he wanted to be a part of. That was cool.

Looking to the future, what stories or themes would you like to explore in an upcoming campaign, maybe with Nike or other major brands?

I’m always interested in brands and commercials that are looking to make creative work that isn’t the same as what’s gone before it, or shackled by the more formulaic or ‘commercial’ conventions in advertising.

And any idea that is more narrative-focused or character-led, and has a bit of heart, soul, and grit, is incredibly appealing.

In conclusion, Sam Pilling ‘s incredible creativity and brilliance are truly inspiring. We are deeply grateful for his insights on the Nike project, providing a glimpse into the mind of a true genius.

Thank you, Sam, for your invaluable contributions to the world of filmmaking and for inspiring us all with your artistry!

And, thank you, fam, for reading. If you wanna learn more about the work of Sam Pilling, go check his website, and in case you missed our previous mag piece, go check it out!

Much love!
FilmmakersWorld Team

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Full credits👇🏻:
Agency: @wk_ldn Wieden+Kennedy London
CDs: Becca Pottinger & @albertpukies / Albert Pukies
Creatives: @damcrockett / Adam Crockett, Will Wells & @sammywstan / Sammy Watts Stanfield
Head of Accounts: @matthew0wen / Matthew Owen
Agency Producer: @clobradley / Chloe Bradley
AP: @leageorgiev / Lea Georgiev
Production: @magna.studios / Magna Studios
Director: @s45mpling / Sam Pilling
EPs: @jsorton @davud_k / James Sorton & David Karbassioun
Producer: @neil_andrews / Neil Andrews
PM: @bennyburdock / Ben Burdock
Coordinator: Michelle Cheung
Director’s Assistant: @maxiwithani / Max McLaughlan
1st AD: @julianrichards3 / Julian Richards
1st AD: Catalina Parra
DOP: @norm_li / Norm Li
Production Designer: @marcopuigfilm / Marco Puig
Wardrobe: BRATSK @julie.vojtovics
Product & R10 Wardrobe: @jszv
Casting: @kharmelcochranecasting / Kharmel Cochrane
Storyboard: @koreantonsen / Kore Antonsen
Specialist Props UK: @machineshopsfx / Machine Shop SFX
Sports Choreography: @sportsonscreen / Sports on Screen
@b.ohdan @andyansah, @zakansah , Seth Dakin, Frankie Sawyer

Service // Madrid & Paris: @twentyfourseven_______tv
EP: @lolepr
247 Ambassador: @jordimollacastillo / Jordi Molla Castillo
Producer: @naylasoffita / Nayla Soffita
PM: @Ale_plansadt
Madrid 1st AD: Javier Prieto
Gaffers: @Alexgarlhop_gafferspain, Sergio Fuidía
Key Grips: Alfonso Lujan, Leando Iruzun
Equipment: @Madcrew_ms @Sipublicidad_
Camera: @epccameras / EPC camera
Operator: @Laurenpoulain_DP
1st AC: @Felipe_larrondo / Felipe Larrondo
2nd AC: @Joelpg / Joel
Loader: @Vivianyann / Vivian Yann
Playback: @Celitonoia @mimetiksystems
SFX Supervisors: Cesar Alcaide, @paucostasfx / Paul Costa
Stunts: Cuco Usin
Wardrobe: Imma Rondan
H&MU: @milkomakeup / Milko
FX Make Up: Rodolfo Mario Dellibarda
Art Director: @delfinemiliano / Delfine Miliano
Service // Manchester: @thelsproductions / The LS Productions
EP: Sarah Drummond
Producer: Emma Hughes
Rain SFX: @evolution_sfx / Richard Van Den Bergh
Art Director: Sami Khan
FX: Snow Business
Paris Producer: @ben_zorrilla / Ben Zorrilla
Paris 1st AD: @fabrice.jeandemange / Fabrice Jean Demange
Edit: @fougaber @trimediting / Fouad Gaber
MD: @jemma.daniel_ / Jemma Daniel
Edit Producer: @harry___watts / Harry Watts
Film: @kodak_shootfilm / Kodak
Film Lab: @cinelabuk / Cinelab
Analogue Effects: @filmhouse.world / Filmhouse World
VFX: @timebasedarts / Time Based Arts
Post Producer: @chrisaliano / Chris Aliano
3D VFX: @samposborne / Sam Osborne
2D VFX: @miguelwratten / Miguel Wratten
Sound Design: @samashwell @750_mph / Sam Ashwell at 750mph
Music track: Screaming Jay Hawkins ‘What’s wrong with you’
Music: @curation.music / Curation Music
Supervision: @sunny.kpr / Sunny Additional Music: @mstrpape @lcvchoir / Mr Pape & London Contemporary Voices choir

As promised, here’s the BTS of the TVC “Nobody Speak,” one of our all-time favorites!

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