Last night Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s “Nike: Write The Future” ad won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Festival of Creativity

Inarritu and dp Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki shot the footage a year and a half ago (January and February 2010) in Manchester, London, Madrid, Turin, Los Angeles and Kenya.

“It was made to to be show during the World Cup soccer tournament,” Inarritu says in an e-mail from Beijing. “And it was an insane massive production because the logistics of shooting during the winter in Europe and the amount of football soccer stars plus Kobe Bryant, Rover Federer, Homero Simpson and even Gael Garcia Bernal playing a cameo as Cristiano Ronaldo.

“It was the most visited online ad n 2010 and because most of the players did a very poor job during the World Cup, in the viral crazies people said that it was a ‘cursed’ commercial. But thanks to the Spanish guys the commercial was saved !! Anyway, it was a fun globally interconnected narrative experiment.”