Watch a bizarre Taco Bell commercial directed by Sean Baker
You may remember Sean Baker from his 2015 comedy-drama Tangerine, a fascinating exploration of transgender sex workers that was famous for being filmed using iPhone 5S smartphones. Two years later, Baker maintained his indie filmmaker status with The Florida Project, a brilliant coming-of-age drama featuring a ‘slice of life’ story of a six-year-old girl’s summer days. Baker has earned consistent praise for his contributions to cinema, such as a Filmmaker on Edge Award and six Independent Spirit Award nominations. However, the movie world isn’t the only outlet in which this creator shows his vision, as he has also created adverts for food chains such as Taco Bell.
The director recently teamed up with Taco Bell to produce a creative marketing tactic to mark the comeback of a menu favourite, the nacho fries. The result is a two-minute commercial titled Fry Again, written and edited to assimilate the appearance of a high-budget action blockbuster with sci-fi elements. The advert shows a young woman meeting with her friend to grab lunch together, speeding off to the chain restaurant in her yellow car. Once they arrive, the two buy the popular nacho fries, with one saying, “I wish you could always have nacho fries”. The first girl then shares how she can do this despite the item having a limited run, as she is “stuck in this infinite time loop” and uses the opportunity to eat the nacho fries.
We then cut to an evil nacho fry gatekeeper who is listening in on the girls’ conversation and is shocked at what he hears, declaring this person is “violating the nacho fries limited timeline”. Following in the footsteps of all great villains, this character suddenly teleports to the Taco bell car park, shouting: “Say goodbye to Friday”. A typical comedic moment follows, with the girl’s friend asking if this guy appears every day, to which she replies: “No, he’s new”. The girls speed off in their car, starting a clichéd chase sequence. It has all the ingredients for a captivating yet not-too-revealing action movie trailer.
The advert was produced in a partnership between Taco Bell and Deutsch LA, the advertising company based in New York. “This campaign is a great example of how a simple shift in the power dynamics between fans and brands can generate unparalleled results,” says Lincoln Lopes, the company’s creative director (via Little Black Book). “This idea was born from the belief that brands, no matter how big they are, should be nimble enough to ride culture at its same speed.”
Fry Up is a U-turn in Baker’s previous choice of visuals and style, straying away from his solemn and melancholic indie atmosphere that deviates from the Hollywood spectacle. Some fans even joked that this Taco Bell advert has the highest budget of anything the filmmaker has worked with. This experimentation with directing commercials after working on films echoes previous filmmakers’ careers, such as David Fincher, who made a name for himself by creating adverts for successful companies such as Nike and Chanel before directing the anti-commercialism film Fight Club.
Watch Baker’s jump from moody indie films to cliché-driven commercials below.
