“As the world’s leading premium gin brand, Bombay Sapphire incites creativity through a balanced and refined taste profile, offering the upmost versatility and a blank canvas for cocktail creation.”
English distillery Bombay Sapphire has enlisted Moulin Rouge! and Elvis filmmaker Baz Luhrmann as Creative Director for their “Saw This Made This” global campaign.
“Saw This Made This” is a global movement that seeks to embolden people to be creative. It’s an open invitation to everyone to take an image or a video of something you SAW out in the real world, and then share an image or a video of what you MADE based on that initial inspiration. It doesn’t matter what you come up with, it can be small, it can be grand, just take ordinary moments and turn them into something extraordinary.
“I truly believe that everyone is inherently creative, no matter who you are, where you come from, or what you do.” says Luhrmann, “You don’t have to be labelled an artist to be considered a creative. If you just give yourself permission to see the world as a gallery of inspiration and reframe how you think about things, you’ll unlock a part of yourself you didn’t know existed. By partnering with Bombay Sapphire, I want to encourage people everywhere to think about how they can turn the ordinary into the extraordinary and share this inspiration to make the world a more creatively nurturing place.”
In his role as Creative Director of the campaign, Luhrmann worked with award-winning advertising Director Juan Cabral to produce the film Saw This, Made This, an examination of Cabral’s own poetic expression and his pursuit of beauty in everyday scenes in the streets of his hometown Buenos Aires.
Bombay Sapphire and Baz Luhrmann are inviting the public to view the world as an infinite source of inspiration and celebrate creativity. Share your creations on social media with the hashtag #SawThisMade to join the live Bombay Sapphire gallery.
While most gins achieve their flavour by boiling their botanicals directly in the spirit, Bombay Sapphire utilises a Vapour Infusion process, which gives their product a different, unique taste. A unique taste that goes hand in hand with a unique filmmaker.
From his very first film Strictly Ballroom in 1992, Baz Luhrmann managed to establish a very distinctive, personal style. Saturated colours, frantic editing, and grandiose production design, his movies are operatic odes to beauty and excess.
Luhrmann borrows from the theatre the concept of Verfremdungseffekt — the word means “distancing effect” in German, — doing everything in his power to make the audience fully aware that what is being experienced is “just” a movie. Contrary to filmmaking that seeks to immerse the audience in an illusion of reality, Luhrmann explicitly tears down any pretence of realism in his movies, with a mise-en-scène that is unapologetically artificial, theatrical, and extravagant.
Anachronism, especially in his soundtracks, is a major tool to achieve his purpose. In Romeo + Juliet (1996) he made characters speak in iambic pentameter amidst a neon-lit, end-of-the-century aesthetic. All to the sounds of Radiohead and Garbage. In The Great Gatsby (2013), he replaced jazz with hip-hop. In Moulin Rouge! (2001) people in the early 1900s sing ‘All you Need is Love’ and party to ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. His successful repurposing and reimagining of pop hits is a trait that has left a permanent impact on the industry, influencing today everything from advertisement to movie trailers.
“That’s one of the things that Baz has a reputation for, treating the music like another star.” — Jay-Z.
Luhrmann’s relationship with music goes beyond his movies. In 1997 he used altered samples of Rozalla’s song ‘Everybody’s Free (To Feel Good)’ to accompany a reading of the famous essay ‘Wear Sunscreen’ written as a hypothetical commencement speech by columnist Mary Schmich. The song managed to reach 24 on the Billboard Hot 100 Airplay in the United States and landed spots in charts in Canada and the UK. Today Luhrmann’s version, “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)” has become a piece of viral internet history, continually shared and re-shared.
The soundtracks for all of his films have sold remarkably well, case in point, the Grammy-awarded, chart-topper ‘Lady Marmalade’ by Christina Aguilera, P!nk, Lil’ Kim and Mya. The long list of musical collaborators throughout Luhrmann’s career include Jay-Z, Lana del Rey, The XX and Bryan Ferry. In 2015, Sony Music’s RCA Records announced a partnership with Luhrmann’ to start a custom label, Bazmark, to launch the music from his movie, TV and theatre projects.
The “Saw This Made This” global campaign is not the first collaboration between Baz Luhrmann and Bombay Sapphire. In 2019 Bombay Sapphire gin brought Baz Luhrmann to host a celebrity dinner to celebrate the opening of the Los Angeles branch of the international art fair Frieze.
“We are thrilled to be collaborating with incredible, visionary creative champions on our latest mission to stir creativity in people around the world,” says Natasha Curtin, Global Vice President of Bombay Sapphire, “for over thirty years, Bombay Sapphire has collaborated with creators and artists with the purpose of giving support to and building a platform for creative self-expression. Like Baz, we believe in the importance of creativity – it is an essential part of what makes us human. With this campaign, we set out to show that creative inspiration is everywhere and to encourage people to reconnect with their own creative side.”
Visit Bombay Sapphire’s Saw This Made This site to watch, listen, and share your creative inspiration today.
