Dougal Wilson

Dougal Stewart Wilson (born August 1971) is an English director of commercials and music videos. His work includes directing several John Lewis Christmas adverts and the Grammy-nominated music video for "Life in Technicolor II" (2009) by Coldplay. He is set to make his feature film debut with Paddington in Peru (2024), the third instalment in the Paddington franchise. Early life and inspiration Wilson was born in Heswall, England in 1971. In his youth, he played in a series of bands. Inspired by Stanley Kubrick's epic science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and interested in astronomy, Wilson decided to study natural sciences at Durham University. While studying, he began designing posters for university gigs and plays and making sets for some of those plays in his spare time. He was inspired to become a director after hearing a BBC Radio 4 interview with Ridley Scott and Alan Parker in which they said that they got started in feature films through directing commercials. The first advert Wilson directed was at the Leith advertising agency in Edinburgh, where he was working as a copywriter before moving to London. Career Wilson has directed commercials for companies such as Apple, IKEA, Orange, Stella Artois, Olympus, AT&T, Safestore, Beck's Brewery, and Coca-Cola. His Christmas adverts for UK department store John Lewis & Partners, including "The Long Wait" (2011), "The Journey" (2012), "Monty the Penguin" (2014), "Buster the Boxer" (2016), and "Excitable Edgar" (2019), have become a widely talked-about part of British popular culture. In 2016, he filmed the three-minute advert We're the Superhumans, promoting Channel 4's broadcast of the 2016 Summer Paralympics in Rio de Janeiro.