Robbie is in Wonderland – and so are the Dogs.

Phil Sansom and Olly Williams aka Diamond Dogs, having spent most of the year working on their new short film, return to promos with a beautifully made, satisfyingly slow burn of comic surrealism for Rob – who makes a utterly charming White Rabbit.

It’s proper good stuff – and great to see Phil and Olly at last getting the chance to show what they can do with a decent budget. If only to hear the rigger calling out “Oi Olly, which way do you want your carrot to swing?”….

Robbie Williams
You Know Me (EMI)
Directors: Diamond Dogs
Prod co: HSI London
Exec producer: Nicola Doring
Producer: Lucy Booth
PM: Heather Johnston
DoP: Will Bex
Production designer: Olly Williams
Art director: Ben Ansell
Stylist: Marcus Love / Hannah Glossop
Make up; Gina Kane
Hair: Oliver Woods / Leila Mauro
Choreographer: Jerry Reeve
Editor: Phil Sansom
Grade: Tom Russell at Prime Focus London
Online: Prime Focus London
Commissioner: Carrie Sutton
Watch: here

Olly Williams on the making of the video for Robbie Williams’ You Know Me

“This brief was perfect for us. We had originally written another idea with Rob as a different animal, which he liked but came back to us saying “nice idea, but I want to be a rabbit…”. So we decided on the idea of an autumnal wonderland where everyone’s gone home and left the White Rabbit all on his lonesome. The track is essentially all about missing a girl who’s gone away, and we loved the idea that he’s been up all night caning the carrot juice. The opening scene where he’s sat in his burrow is all about that feeling of the morning after the night before, when the sun comes up and you’re still feeling down about missing the girl.

“There’s so much ‘Wonderland’ type stuff around at the moment and we didn’t want to conform to that cliché, so we took our main inspiration from the 1970s Royal Ballet Tales of Beatrix Potter, with Jeremy Fisher dancing around outside his house, and Trevor Nunn’s production of Wind in the Willows at the NT about 15 years ago. We really wanted to keep it all real and in-camera, and had a really fantastic art department working on it. We didn’t want any greenscreen, so everything you see on screen was there on set (apart from some beautiful flourishes from Prime Focus) It was so satisfying to design a set of that scale, and not have to give it over to another director. …

“We worked with our long time collaborator Will Bex on this, and really enjoyed being able to pull out all the stops and give him all the toys he wanted. We lit the fuck out of it, had a nice big crane and a brilliant Steadicam op (Peter Robinson who operated ‘Atonement’), which was such a satisfying change to the usual promo constraints.

“The rabbit roar at the end was an inspired last minute idea that I got to hand to Phil, it was the last thing we shot with Rob, and he was obviously enjoying the suit so much we just had to shoot something else in it.

“The girls were inspired by The Coens’ dream scene from The Big Lebowski, and it just made total sense that a rabbit would have a dream about “carrot-tops”. One of my favourite lines of the shoot was from Pat the rigger. I walked onto the set for the dream scene and he shouted down from the rigging: “Oi, Olly, which way do you want your carrot to swing”. I think he’d been waiting up there all day to say that.

“We shot so much great stuff, whilst Phil was cutting it there was nearly a point where we were going ask to use an extended version of the track – we had so much good stuff that we couldn’t use.”

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