For Mike Mills, a subversive take on work, life and existence itself has made for a diverse spread of work spanning way beyond commercials into music videos, short film and graphic design.

Working out of Los Angeles' The Directors Bureau, Mills' creative portfolio, be it film- or graphics-based, shares a similar bent. Mills gleaned his education at two top-notch institutions: Cooper Union in New York and the mean streets of Santa Barbara from a skate's-eye view.

"I'm not sure where I learned more. Skating is where I first got introduced to people that are the same kind of people I admire now: interesting but non-conformist artists who don't fit into any modes," says Mills, guessing that his roots in skate graphics schooled him not only in creative visuals, but in dealing with clients, subjects or themes.

Mills pioneered the "Everybody in..." Gap aesthetic blending spry hipsters and tailor-made musical selections, and has directed spots for VW, MasterCard, Adidas as well as Nike, including many from the springy "Boing" campaign. His videos for Air defined the French smoothies' graphic identity while others, like "Temperamental" for Everything But The Girl amp up the song with hyper-real emotional and narrative significance. Shot in The Bureau's regular casting facility, the video portrays the heartbreak of one girl hoping to break into show biz, with directors Roman Coppola and Michael Patrick Jann making cameos as Hollywood archetypes.

Short films like Paperboys and The Architecture of Reassurance troll Mills' own youth in the Southern California sprawl and the disjuncture between characters and their environments. "For me, Santa Barbara was a bright, sunny, perfect place I didn't fit into, that I rebelled against and made me feel sad. A lot of my work is about people who are supposed to be happy but aren't," he says.

His graphic design work, ranging from simple photography to complex ideas conveyed with simple line and color has graced album covers for Sonic Youth, The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and the Beastie Boys, shows in Tokyo and New York's Alleged Gallery as well as his superb "Visual Sampler," released in a 12" package by Mo Wax records.

"A lot of my stuff has an attention to flatness and staticness, which comes from the graphic influence," he says. "Especially in ads, people come and want that style: awkward framing and timing, lots of shots with quietness. That has become a little bit too much of a style for me so I'm eagerly trying to avoid that. I've gotta morph my instincts."

Turning his attention to subverting his own aesthetic seems to work for Mills. His first Gap campaign, more musical than visual was one of his self-morphing endeavors.

"The way I like to do ads is to mess with whatever expectations people have for the ad, the product or me," says Mills. "I like stuff that has a subtle sense of humor, that isn't playing into mainstream ideas of what is funny or good-looking. I'm interested in having content that's related to comedy or a humor sense but not of one visual style."

A definite testament to these tastes is Mills' video for Divine Comedy's "Bad Ambassador." Black and white and set in a cavernous industrial space, the video's protagonist is a burly, yeti-like fellow who escapes his repetitive job by fantasizing of his co-worker stripping away her dungarees and dancing, cabaret/roller disco style with him across the shop floor. Misty-eyed moments of the pair tommy-gunning the world and exchanging a tender woman-to-monster smooch are interspersed with the sad Sasquatch's industrialized existence. Mills says the idea of a monster who loves a beautiful woman has had several incarnations in treatments, one of which puts the codependent monster in a therapy session with Moby after his bestial jealousy results in a backyard full of torn-off arms. "Bad Ambassador" just fit the idea for Mills, who says all his video ideas are solidly linked to the song.

"[Before I do a video], I put the music on repeat for a day and listen to it several hundred times. It brainwashes you and you don't think consciously of the song anymore. You are unconsciously bouncing ideas off of the song, even if it's going against it or is consciously opposite to it," says Mills, explaining the Divine Comedy vid's production on a more technical level. "It was exactly storyboarded because we had one day to light and shoot. In one 14-hour day you have to be so precise; you can't think on set because you're moving so fast. In my videos, all the boards are really exact; we put it on the camera and go from that."

His ad work is delivered in a manner every bit as precise. The orange, fluorescent space he crafted with Wieden + Kennedy, Portland for Nike's "Boing" was intentionally designed to be flat, dumb and far from fancy or mysterious. Along with being "retardedly obvious," Mills says the spots referenced early 20th century photographer Eadweard Muybridge's flat, frontal time-motion studies of runners. One VW spot out of Arnold, Boston, "Tree" has two confused slackers trying and eventually succeeding in freeing their Jetta from a treetop. Mills' cut builds on the slow pace of the spot with neighbors in still life deadpan observing the situation. Barely lit, the 30-second cut is one locked-off shot with the car dropping from an out-of-frame crane.

"I am pretty much an in-camera guy. Today is so filled with every kind of post you can imagine, but I like one take where everything happens," he says. "Part of the reason the VW ad is funny is that the car drops out of the tree without a cable or [using effects]. There's something irreplaceable about something actually happening."

Between working on feature projects like Walter Kirn's Thumbsucker, Mills writes his own scripts that he's too shy to talk about and hesitantly considers book offers, despite his morbid associations with publishing.

"People want me to make a book, but it seems like you are dead," he jokes. "But I've got so much shit in my garage, I should make a book of it just in case it burns down!"

Webfiles>

The Directors Bureau> www.thedirectorsbureau.com

A Visual Sampler> source.astralwerks.com/mills/