In an era where the boundaries of creativity and technology are constantly being pushed, the world of commercial production is experiencing a transformative shift. Where is it heading? What can be changed for the better? How can we reinvent the approach towards production pipelines? We keep questioning ourselves, and so do our heroes. Welcome to our new series: Next-Gen Production. Every episode is dedicated to those who stay curious and find their own paths, redefining the traditional thinking of commercial production.
In our first interview, we dive into the innovative collaboration between two visionary directors, Xander Bartole and Niels Thomsen, who recently joined forces to co-direct a captivating food commercial. Join us as we uncover the challenges and triumphs of co-directing.
Agnieszka Celej: How did the idea of co-directing come about? You didn’t even meet in person before the project, right?
Niels Thomsen: No, we’ve never met before. Well, not in person. We’ve just very spontaneously seen each other on a call.
Xander Bartole: But obviously, I had known about Nils’ work for a long time. His reels are always an inspiration, especially chocolate and coffee. It was more or less a joke because we were actually, I don’t even know if we’re allowed to say this, but we were like pitching against each other.
Niels: Yeah, well, yeah, you can tell. Actually, you were the trigger to this idea.
Xander: I just said it as a throwaway because usually or a lot of the time, you just don’t know who you’re pitching against. This time the production was very open about that. When they said I’m pitching against Nils, I was like, ‘oh, man, I would love to work with that guy!’ I literally just said, what if we just do it together? The producer thought about it for a second and decided she would check if Nils was even considerate.
Niels: And she knows me very well, maybe she already sensed that this might work. It’s so funny because, of course, I know all of Xander’s work, he’s like this crazy star popping up with his cool projects. I’ve heard he’s a really kind guy to work with, but I never even knew if he speaks German. I always thought he’s a native English speaker. And then it occurred that he has lived in Berlin for 20 years.
Xander: My agent once told me that there was this rumor going around that there were people thinking that I’m Brazilian and that my dad is like a big Brazilian multimillionaire. But no, I am just a Venezuelan kid with a German dad. I just came here 20 years ago and started directing.
Then I realized that Niels was at the start of the whole thing that was going on at The Marmalade. I watched every single reel of Marmalade released in 2007, 2008. It was the thing that made me want to go into visual engineering and tabletop and all that stuff, so even without knowing Niels, I think he had a big part in inspiring me to take on this job.
So obviously, whenever the opportunity came up to work with him and hopefully even learn from him, I was like, yeah, let’s do this. And during this whole process I had this voice in my hand ‘Can we really do this?’. Because it was such a constellation, normally you can’t do this, it’s not like two directors pitching against each other can just team up and do the job together.
Niels: I think that the agency and production were also happy that they didn’t have to read long treatments and pick only one director, as we had these chemistry calls and they felt they liked both of us.
Xander: We also have to say that we chose a DP that we had both worked with – Alejandro Madrid. He was our visual bridge in a way, since we both trust him. So it was basically more than a duo; it was a triple, a creative collective.
One of the things worth mentioning is that Niels had already worked in a directing duo at some point. I also started my career as a directing duo. So we were already used to collaborating with another person on a project. If you look at agencies, it’s also mostly couples who work on these projects. So I think it makes a lot of sense.
You could feel how, in certain moments, this collaboration worked really well. Especially in this project where everything had to work very quickly. We had a lot of locations, we had to move fast and make things work, and we didn’t have much time to prep. So whenever, after a couple of takes, we felt like things weren’t working out instantly, one of us would come up with a very good solution. We could just build on top of that.
