The success of his first feature and the completion of his final high-end Guinness commercial might take on a cosmic significance for some, but director Jonathan Glazer sees them as mere landmarks on a continuing journey.

Glazer's Sexy Beast is a dark crime caper that rattled critics and fans alike with its patiently realized and bloodthirsty characters and twists (for an interview with Glazer on the film, search boardsmag.com). You also may have heard of a little beer commercial he directed for Abbott Mead Vickers*BBDO (AMV*BBDO) involving some surfers and watery horses. The director did quite well by both projects, but rather than dwell on those accomplishments, he's been busy on other projects with AMV*BBDO that take the line separating advertising and entertainment and tie it in knots.

Collaborating with Walter Campbell (Tom Carty has left AMV*BBDO to pursue a directing career with Gorgeous Enterprises), Glazer recently finished the final spot in what has become a series of grandiose Guinness commercials from the London agency.

"I don't think Guinness wants to make an ad like this again; they are more interested in economics. I can't understand these corporate decisions," says Glazer. "But if they let me get on with what I want to do and I can shift their beer for them in the process then we all have a good time."

After cutting the commercial down from the initial eight-page idea and 25-minute run time, and then defending the concept from being watered down, the team traveled to Budapest, Hungary to film "The Dreamer." The spot is based around the nighttime journeys of a champion dreamer, who is part of a dream club that makes sport of REM-driven adventures.

"He falls asleep and dreams of the secret of life," says Glazer. "There are hundreds of people all trying to get to a hole in a curtain about seven or eight stories up, all climbing over each other in this human pyramid, scrapping and fighting to get to this little eyehole, since the secret of life is within. When they look in they come away in hysterics, sort of Plato's comedy idea. He gets to the top of the pile and you feel you'll see what he sees, but we cut back to him asleep; then a second after he looks through he is laughing hysterically. He doesn't wake up even though his friends are waiting for him."

Edited by Sam Sneade and scored by Peter Raeburn, the spot puts Glazer amongst his longtime creative collaborators. The sound design in particular fuels the epic pictures, and Glazer credits Raeburn with layering a pleasantly amateurish piano ditty with a soundtrack derived from a South Florida water aerobics class for the aged overseen by an elderly female instructor.

"With these epic pictures, it sounds like this benevolent voice of a figure in the shape of this 70-year-old woman in Miami Beach. It has a wonderful quality, not kitsch or ironic, just spacious and dreamy. It's really consistent to the idea; you can't write this stuff," says Glazer.

Also consistent with the idea was Budapest, a location that Glazer says offered an ungentrified, crumbling grandeur, hundreds of gypsy extras and fearless stuntmen. Many of the climbers were gypsies, whose strong faces Glazer admired both for their earthy realness and their uncosmetic appearances.

A similarly unpolished gem is another commercial Glazer directed for AMV*BBDO. After wrapping Sexy Beast, Glazer worked with the agency to film Wrangler's "Whatever You Ride" epic, depicting a lone cowpoke traversing a middle America diametrically opposed to the Midwest's supposed wholesomeness. Inspired in no small part by Kerouac works like Visions of Cody and Kerouac--kicks joy darkness, the shoot was a four-week journey by 16mm across Arizona and the Dakotas, with Glazer and creatives Nick Worthington and Paul Brazier capturing buffalo herds and placid suburbs set ablaze, and scored with the contrasting strains of "Follow The Yellow Brick Road" from The Wizard of Oz.

"The initial script was about this guy riding lots of different things, a plane or a pig, but it felt too pat for my tastes, so I convinced them to make it more eclectic and to try and have elements that were not dwelled on that were memorable and hopefully indelible," says Glazer, referring to one scene in which the camera rolls down a typical suburban street only to come across one household being consumed by flames and then passes without a blip. "Two or three years ago I would have shot the house and dwelled there, but I liked the idea of throwing it away. The irreverence felt consistent."

Filled with American iconography from a sleazy country bar to a gangbanger's hydraulically lifted "chomper car," the spot favors the surreal over the obvious and takes familiar ingredients into surprising, yet darkly believable territory.

Both Wrangler and Guinness consumed several months of Glazer's time, something the director has in shorter supply since Sexy Beast. But even though he's now developing three other scripts, he wants to keep his hand in commercials.

"I think plainly the things you learn in commercials by virtue of shooting, like set experience and problem solving, never become redundant. To be honest, I only do one or two commercials a year; I can put money in the bank and not take movies I don't want to do," he explains. "From the creative point of view, I'm trying to push the envelope each time, and have a healthy disrespect for it. You've got to go into it thinking there are no rules rather than thinking there aren't any to break."