Immigrant Story

Budweiser’s history is the history of America. On the set of the brand’s epic super bowl spot, a poignant tale for these contentious times.

- Kristina Monllos

The mud is thick and sticky, the kind that threatens to pull off your boots when you step into it. Flecks of it are splattered on the Victorian-era dresses and suits being worn by two dozen extras. It’s a dreary, drizzly day in mid-January, made grayer by plumes of smoke from a noisy fog machine, and these actors have spent hours wandering in and out of this gummy scene for the first wide shot from director Chris Sargent during the three-day production of Budweiser’s 60-second spot for the Super Bowl on Feb. 5.

“The first thing everybody said to me is that, typically, period pieces are fucking terrible,” says Sargent. “They stand out in advertising. The suspension of disbelief is gone because you’re watching TV—and as soon as you see it, you know it’s a commercial.”

But his ad, he insists, will be different.

We have been invited to document the making of the latest in a string of attention-grabbing spots by long-running Super Bowl advertiser Budweiser, and are sitting in the back room of the Living Cornerstone Church, which is being used as a makeshift wardrobe closet, just outside New Orleans. A wooded area down the road stands in for St. Louis, Bud’s hometown. Sargent has been tasked with telling the story of the Anheuser-Busch InBev brand’s co-founder, Adolphus Busch, and his 1857 journey from Hamburg, Germany, to the city that would make him famous. Mood boards plastered with stills from The Revenant and Peaky Blinders help Sargent create a gritty, compelling short film that will be seen by more than 188 million people, per National Retail Federation projections. It’s the American Dream writ large—an immigrant landing in the United States with the vision and determination to create the world’s largest brewer.