The Grey Poupon mustard commercial "Pardon me" is considered by most as one of the greatest spots of ALL time (for those of us too young as it first hit our TV screens back in 1981, the original spot showed two distinguished gentlemen share a jar of Grey Poupon Mustard between their chauffeur-driven cars) And the spot elevated the brand way beyond a common condiment, establishing Grey Poupon as THE premium quality brand.

In the new two minute, mini epic the Grey Poupon is still "borrowed" but this time we see the 'lost footage' and what happened next… The jar wasn't returned! And the two chauffeur-driven aristocratic English gentlemen begin to battle it out in a car chase complete with machine gun champagne corks, caviar car slicks and a golf club duel.

The Grey Poupon spot “The Chase” was a job that took a bit of strategic hurdling both with schedule and budget. The job was awarded late, and originally set to shoot in Mexico City, where we began casting. We quickly learned we were to use cars from the 70s that we rigged to look like Rolls Royce’s because we were not allowed to use actual Rolls Royce’s due to clearance issues. This became a new issue as the cars were unable to be transported to Mexico- so we quickly re-worked the shoot to shoot in Los Angeles.

We chose to film a lot of the stunts and explosions practically and then the Mill cleaned them up in post. We also decided that the car crash into the grocery store at the end was most effective if the cars crashed from above. So we built a massive set that was able to stand the weight of lifting a car and having it crash into a constructed grocery store.

We overcame a major budget through VFX by only shooting one car make the jump over the bridge and crash into the grocery store but used two cameras to two get two juxtaposing angles. The Mill took these shots of the same car and tinted the colors then matched the shots up- making it look like two different cars made the jump and crashed through in the same shot thus overcoming a larger budget issue.