Face to Face with... thirtytwo

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Tell us how you met and started working together...

We met at university in Liverpool, England. However we later found out that our paths had crossed years before when we both attended the same Saturday morning kids club at the Victoria Cinema in Cambridge in the early eighties. So in a sense we were first brought together by films [including Pete's Dragon, Supergirl and one of the Herbie films - possibly Goes Bananas] years before we even spoke to each other! We did our final year documentary together, and started a production company immediately after graduating. Surprisingly [as no one involved had any idea how to run a business] it was relatively successful, and had a fairly decent client base, but after a few years we realised that the business side of it wasn't really for us and the type of work we were taking on to keep it going and pay the salaries wasn't creatively satisfying by any stretch of the imagination. So we swiftly bowed out of the corporate world and headed to London just over three years ago. It turned out to be the best thing we could have done.

What's the story behind the name thirtytwo?

This is a question we get asked a lot, and we always wish we had a better answer! There's not really any great anecdote or mythology behind the name. We were finishing off one of our first music videos and needed a name to present it under. A friend of ours was telling us about a fine art student he knew who had managed to enrol on his course under the name 32 [spelt numerically with no surname] and insisted that he be addressed as such; no one knew his real name. That made us laugh so we stole it, thinking it would be temporary, just for that video and that we would come up with something better, we never did. Names are quite hard [to come up with].

Tell us about the Radio 4 Film Season brief...

As huge film lovers we absolutely loved the creative on the Radio 4 Film Season as soon as we heard about it. It was a relatively fast job - we were in Nashville working when it came through, the brief was to take iconic images from famous films and put them into real life situations. So the finished film would be a series of vignettes that nod towards moments or images from films. We spent our entire return journey compiling lists of films [sadly this is probably what we would have been doing anyway - after so long working together you run out of things to talk about so a typical time-passing conversation might be to 'Name 10 films with titles that include parts of the body', 'Jaws, Head, Funny Face, My Left Foot...' and so on. Sad but true]. Anyway, we were straight off the plane and into a meeting at Fallon, which went really well. The creatives, Gary Anderson and Tony Miller, are also film enthusiasts so the job was really good fun. We had to take out a few of the more obscure references and put some easier ones in, but on reflection it was a good balance. As directors it was a good opportunity for us to do something a little more considered compositionally as a lot of our work to date has a more immediate, documentary feel.

What makes a good film?

That's a difficult question. Films can be good for so many different reasons and there isn't really any formula. In the end it's completely subjective, it depends what you're in the mood for and what you want to feel like. Obviously though the most important aspect of a good film is narrative - it has to have a good story, it can look beautiful, have the best soundtrack ever, the most explosions, etc. - but that's all secondary. If there's nothing to engage with emotionally, that becomes worthless. A good test for us is if you can watch a film all the way through and not start to analyse it from a professional or [even worse] film student perspective, 'I wonder what Lens they used there' or 'I can see where they've cloned the extras' or 'what a terrible third act', for example. If you can get to the end still fully immersed then that's a good film. That's the worst thing about this job, you forget how to watch films for enjoyment, and that can be really, really annoying to other people. I've been told.

How would you describe your shooting style?

A lot of the stuff we have shot leans towards a direct, immediate documentary style, handheld intimate photography, concerned with capturing moments, interactions and relationships in a way that is real. But we are also very concerned with how it looks - finding a balance between realism and aesthetic. There is a design to it but it's not as detectable as a big art-directed shoot. The decision to shoot that way has always been a considered creative one, and it's certainly not the only way we shoot, it just felt right creatively for so many of the projects that have come our way. The mood of our Franz Ferdinand video, Ulysses, could only be captured in that way - we wanted it to hark back to the American New Wave, so it had to be ragged and druggy and loose. With our Blur documentary, No Distance Left To Run, it was essential to us that it felt cinematic as well as intimate so we built in a number of much more designed sequences and segues. Likewise, Slow the Pace for Kronenbourg had to strike that balance between feeling real and looking good.

What do you prefer shooting?

That depends on the project. Live music is okay, but personally we've never got the thing about watching live performance after the event - there are only a few people who've ever managed to truly capture that feeling of actually being there and the electricity of amazing live performance. When we occasionally do it now, we try to borrow from documentary makers like the Maysles Brothers and Pennebaker and try to limit the number of cameras and really concentrate on what is going on personally for the artist and the audience, to concentrate building atmosphere rather than cut around a million angles. Music videos can be great, but the budgets can be frustrating - although they seem to be getting better now the charts have a more urban slant. But we don't really have a very urban reel. Our biggest interest at the moment is longer narratives. Having whetted our appetites last year with our documentary work, we're working on another documentary and a documentary/fiction hybrid. There's something really satisfying about putting a story together and the intense teamwork it involves. We have a great team on our feature projects, the same producers, DP, etc and whilst the projects are challenging, it's a really fun and productive collaborative environment and that kind of thing translates directly to the screen.

Tell us about Slowing the Pace for Kronenbourg...

That job was great fun, a chance to meet a living legend. Lemmy was every bit as grizzly and uncompromising in person as we'd hoped. The best thing is that we were actually in the studio directly influencing the re-recording of Ace of Spades - which didn't always go down too well, but was, nonetheless, totally amazing. We've been really lucky with our first two commercials in that the creative was so great. The script by Ian and Matt from BBH was fantastic and we were so happy and appreciative that they went with us for it.

What inspires thirtytwo?

This sounds clichéd, but that's what clichés are for so we'll say it anyway - not too many people are lucky enough to get paid for doing something they absolutely love doing, so that's pretty inspiring - that we've had the fortune required to do this as a job rather than a hobby. And children. What are you working on at the moment and what's happening in 2011? Two feature-length projects, another documentary and our first feature. They're both at early stages so we can't say too much, but we're really excited about them. Hopefully this year will see some of our long-form project plans come to fruition and we'll continue to work in commercials and music video.