Fredrik Bond

...Bonds have more fun

While jetlag leaves most of us feeling tired and disoriented, Sonny director Fredrik Bond believes it makes him more creative. Here he talks to Tim Cumming about his jet-setting work schedule and making it in London.

Pinning Sonny director Fredrik Bond down to any one time and place, or indeed any time zone and continent, is no easy matter. His travel itinerary, like his career trajectory, is at one with the jet stream. Bond’s eye-watering schedule sees him shooting in South London one night, flying out to Los Angeles the next morning, jetting back to a Soho cutting room a couple of days later, then heading off to Europe for a continuoTHus, month-long itinerary of scripting, shootings, scoutings and meetings stretching ahead.

He wears those travel miles well. This is a man who does time zones the way other people do drugs. “It makes me more creative,” he laughs. “When you’re in jetlag and different time zones you get ideas you don’t normally get. You shake your routines around. It’s a healthier way of being creative and getting ideas.” He’s ensconced in a window seat of the Dean Street Townhouse Hotel in Soho early on a midweek morning as grey winter skies clear to dazzling sunshine, sipping from a decidedly rococo latte, barista’d so beautifully it seems a crime to actually drink it.

He is a director in demand and at the top of his game, ranked as one of the hottest in advertising and with plans recently announced to shoot his first feature, a sci-fi drama called Twelve Years. He is currently in the middle of shooting the sequel to Heineken’s The Entrance, with the same team and collaborative, creative dynamic in place. The Entrance is a bravura performance on all fronts – even the extras get their own mini-films – and, since December, the campaign has clocked up more than 3.8 million online views on Heineken’s Facebook and YouTube sites. It streams onto the world’s TVs in spring.

Egalitarian method

“We have a great relationship with those guys, with Eric [Quennoy] and Mark [Bernath] at W+K Amsterdam and Sandrine [Huijgen] at Heineken,” says Bond, a man for whom relationships are at the heart of the business. “We put all the ideas into one big pot and play it out and rehearse it. It’s a unique method. Basically, we don’t work from a storyboard. It is very rare that clients allow you to do that. There’s very few of those projects around. There’s always a bunch of boundaries and hierarchies, but this is very egalitarian. We have a lot of fun and it’s based on everyone helping each other and liking each other.” A few evenings earlier, I’d watched the director working in the midst of his regular crew, including his editor, Tim Thornton-Allan, who often joins him on shoots.

W+K ECDs Bernath and Quennoy and Heineken’s global communication manager Huijgen were also on set at an undisclosed but quite remarkable location in South London. “Fredrik writes the most wonderful treatments I’ve ever read,” enthused Huijgen in a break between shots. “He has a very vivid way with really strong visual references, and he puts some of himself in those treatments and he brings a lot of his ideas into it. We discuss and go back and forth.” With major campaigns for adidas, Levi’s, Monster.com, Nike, Carling, Guinness and countless others behind him, Bond has forged a reputation for high-concept spots, visually spectacular but with an intimate human scale to grab onto and an eye for the ‘tells’ that can bring a key moment, a character or a mood to life.

Of The Entrance’s hero, he observes: “We had to find little quirks there to make him less smooth. I think you fall for him when you see there’s an imperfection about him, a wobbliness. We like people with vulnerabilities. I find it easier to connect when the actor has a little bit of an Achilles heel. When he’s not completely perfect.”

Training opportunity

Bond’s first shot for perfection was a short film for Levi’s about photographer David Sim’s work for the brand. “My stepfather was a fashion stills photographer,” he remembers. “I thought I’d be a documentary photographer but it never led anywhere.” The journey from still to moving images came via his cousin, a director who gave him training at his company, letting him see how things worked. “It really opened my eyes,” says Bond. “Sound, movement – everything was coming together and I started to edit for him.” His father was also well established in the industry as a producer who worked for Swedish TV. “He edited a lot,” continues Bond. “He loved editing. He did a lot of documentaries. His heart was always in portraits of people. I saw a lot of his fascination and obsession with people. I think my love of actors comes from him in that respect.”

Bond’s childhood home in Sweden was one where a video editing suite, rather than household clutter, filled the basement. His first experience of cutting began here – not with his own films but with British commercials assiduously videotaped during Christmas visits to London with family friends. “I became quite obsessed with the commercials in Britain,” he says. “They had so much more storytelling and character. They were so fun. I would bring them back to the editing suite and start making little stories out of them, edited together out of different commercials – the Strongbows, the Hamlet cigars. That’s how I really got into it. Then eventually I started to edit for other directors in Sweden.”

Bond worked on documentaries, entertainment programmes, commercials and music videos. “Then a director who knew I didn’t just want to edit employed me as his creative assistant,” he says. When the Levi’s film came through, the director turned to Bond to pick up the reigns. “From there, I thought it was going to launch me,” he adds. It would take a while longer. “For a few years, I tried to figure it out,” laughs Bond. “How do I get to do the good commercials – the great commercials – out there that we could see on shots? That was the Bible,” he adds. “We watched every new reel.”

The problem lay in the strength of the competition: the likes of Jonas Åkerlund, Traktor and Jonas Love – “big, great directors that basically sucked up anything good”, says Bond. In desperation, he and a friend made three spec films to demonstrate their powers. One found its way to the offices of shots. “It got on to the next reel and – boom – it just took off from there.” He grins, still revelling in that early coup. “I was so proud of being in shots’ New Directors section.” Proud, and suddenly very busy. “The Italians, Germans, French, Finnish… It became crazy. The phones were ringing and we couldn’t believe our luck. It was like Christmas for us,” says Bond.

But his goal was making it in London and he steered his boats there in 1999, immediately setting about forging relationships that have lasted to this day. “I decided to go and see every production company in town, and over the space of two weeks I went to see four or five every single day,” he adds. “If I didn’t have an appointment, I would go in there and basically meet everybody.”

Award-winning campaigns

The strategy worked; his trajectory rose steeply with the likes of 2001’s Clio gold-winning adidas Makes You Better, the hilarious Monster.co.uk ads and Skoda through Fallon, which bagged a couple of gold British Television Advertising Awards. “Those three campaigns really launched me,” he says. “I couldn’t believe my luck.”

In 2007, Bond set up Sonny with Helen Kenny and has gone on to direct campaigns for Carling through BMB London and, most recently, Heineken with W+K. In the Carling spots – featuring polar explorers, laddish Lawrences of Arabia and a posse of cowboys – his exploration of the simple, rather than guilty, pleasures of male friendship is woven with a subtle humour that has heart to it, and just the right touch of sentimentality.

“I like it when something borders to tragedy and the joke has a vulnerability to it,” says Bond. “A bit of pain for the character. I love to create great visuals on top of that. I really loved doing Carling and Fridge Magnet for Guinness. With those big visual films, I always want to find the little thing too. The opening character in Guinness, the confused man on the street who doesn’t know what’s going on. Finding the smaller, more human thing – the look in the eyes. The bigger the effects, the more intimate you want to go. I never want to lose that humanity.”

That look in the eyes is important. The human scale of Bond’s epic productions perhaps has its roots in his father’s way of seeing. “When I was a little kid, he’d always point out things to me,” he recalls. “He’d say: ‘Look at that man across the hallway there. Look at his eyes. They’re dead; there’s nothing there. His soul has gone.’ Then he’d turn around and say: ‘Look at those eyes there. Look, aren’t they amazing?’ He highlighted to me people’s energies and charismas and I notice that now, when I’m directing. Sometimes you need characters that have a bit of isolation, that don’t radiate so much. Other times you need maximum – like Eric in The Entrance. He has an extremely charismatic presence. But at times I go back to being with my dad thinking about those eyes, ‘look at those eyes’.