Johan Renck

Johan Renck is a Swedish-born director who co-founded Renck Åkerlund Films. His award-winning commercials include work for H&M, Sagem and SOS Live Earth. He has made a feature film, entitled Downloading Nancy, and directed episodes of TV shows Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead. A former Swedish pop star, Renck has also won acclaim for music videos such as Madonna’s Hung Up and Robbie Williams’ Trippin’. Here he talks to Diana Goodman.

I live in New York City, in a New York City way. No wife, no children and no age.

I don’t like being interviewed at all. I’m enough of a narcissist to want to talk about myself, but back in my days of pop stardom in the 90s, with Stakka Bo, I was subjected to it a lot and my answers were always twisted. Eventually, you grow very apprehensive.

I would describe myself as curious. Curious about things I don’t understand, about emotions, about myself. It’s a determining factor in what has made me, and in my work.

I had an adventurous and love-infused childhood. My father is a doctor and a professor, but of the old-fashioned, Swedish-socialist model. It was not about career and money; it was about doing the right thing. My mother was a nurse and a second-hand-shop owner.

As a child, I was afraid of absolutely everything, particularly diseases and violence, which made me jittery. Other than that, I’ve always required a high dose of stimulus.

My first memory is of a grey day on some northern European beach. It’s vast and shallow, far out. I must have been about two or three. I am playing in a tide pool. There are almost no people there. I still have no idea of where that beach is, but I always get Marcel Proust-derived emotions when I see something of this kind.

As a family, we travelled the world: Miami, the far north of Norway, Kuwait and all sorts of cities and villages in Sweden. We never lived for more than three years in the same place. I’ve never really understood why, but my father was curious and adventurous. And once you start moving around, you can’t stop.

I remember vividly that when I was five, we moved from a bleak, cold Sweden with two state-owned TV channels to Miami, with 400 channels, Disneyland, colourful fish in the ocean, palm trees, hamburgers and stores with 200 flavours of ice cream; it was a mind-blowing experience as a kid. Back in Sweden, the icecream kiosks had maybe three flavours and the grocery stores then were like Poland: two types of vegetable and one cereal. Once you’ve done that transition, you can never go back to living contentedly in Sweden.

When I was teased at school, it was about my nationality. Or not being in with the gang. Or having red corduroy pants.

I think the first-ever advertisement to make an impression on me must have been Jean Paul Goude’s Egoiste [Chanel]. I still love that film. I even paid tribute to it in a spot I did for H&M with Karl Lagerfeld.

How did I get into advertising? I slipped. When we made our first record in 1993, we had no money and I did the music video. It became the mostplayed video on MTV and eventually I directed videos for very big artists. Somewhere along the line, I was asked to do a public service spot regarding children’s rights in society.

I first met my [business] partner Jonas Åkerlund in the Swedish countryside, in a small fishing village on the south-west coast. We were six or seven. He was wearing a peaked cap. We were inseparable from that day on.

I have no idea how my work is distinctive, to be honest. But sometimes I get a call from friends who say: “We saw something on TV and it must be you.” They have the ability to see that it’s mine, even though I can’t define it.

I’m very critical about myself and I pretty much cannot even look at stuff I’ve done. Years later, maybe, I sometimes think: “Oh, that’s good.” But mostly I think: “That’s horrible, who did that?” Perhaps that’s part of why we do this, because we always think: “Next time…”

I do like the video I did for The Knife, Pass This On, because it’s beautiful and sad and profound and weirdly surreal. It has a melancholy and some askew reality.

Melancholy is my favourite emotion. Why? The Swedish Lutheran and Calvinist culture? Or the fact that I am at least 33 per cent Goth? Or because I don’t like pretty but I do love beautiful? I think pretty is cute, but beautiful hurts a little bit and it contains something that’s broken; there’s a crack where the light comes in. Pretty is devoid of shades and shadows. But advertising likes pretty and it’s very rare that you can get beautiful into ads. They’re afraid of it.

I also like my feature, Downloading Nancy – which is about a woman who asks a man she meets on the internet to kill her – a lot. I’m really proud of it. I knew already when I was making it that there were flaws in the script and the one thing I learned was to never shoot a movie until you’re 110 per cent happy with the script.

The film is a love story, basically. What it says is that you can’t really love someone until you amputate a significant part of yourself and replace it with their needs. Nancy’s husband doesn’t understand that. He always puts himself in first place and it’s tremendously hurtful.

Since Nancy is a terminally dysfunctional woman, her unfulfilled life eventually leads her to kill herself. It’s true: the movie is completely bleak and nihilistic, but often a film is not about reality; it’s about how it makes you feel, what you take away from it, who you identify with.

My intention was not to be provocative. When I did it, I never thought that people would say: “Why the fuck do you want to make a movie like that?” But actually, still to this day, I receive letters from people who say they’ve never identified with a character so profoundly as Nancy’s.

When I was making the film, my marriage broke up and my emotional state definitely affected the work at hand. My wife was not being given what she should have been by me.

Have I ever been involved in self-harm or thoughts of suicide? Haven’t we all?

The part of the working day that gives me most satisfaction is when I am completely and utterly submerged – like a kid with Lego. That reminds me; when we were kids, I only built black Lego things. I was, apparently, already then a Lego-Goth.

My worst experience in advertising has been all the idiots who don’t understand that they don’t understand. The best: the heaps of thrills we all have, making some of these brilliant little snippets of film.

As a consumer, I don’t react to advertising. As a consumer, and as a person, I am terminally jaded.

A big chunk of the advertising industry is in the claws of their ignorant clients, which forces them to be about 20 years behind in both methodology and psychology. So the problem isn’t the advertising industry per se. Everybody gets the film/campaign/ad they deserve, right?

The reason we have advertising is that all products are exactly the same. So the belief in one, or other, needs to be affiliated with values; they’re what you really need to believe in. Me, I believe in the people I work with. Then I believe in the ideas. That’s all I need.

I will never work on any product that is, somehow, affiliated with the far right wing.

An advertisement I still love is that ‘I wanna fuck you in the ass’ film for some language course company [Soesman Language Training Institute Daytrip].

I watch close to no TV. Wait, I watch South Park. And Iron Chef Japan. Oh, and I direct for two American TV series – Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead – and I am a fan of both. And I watch soccer – probably more than any of the above mentioned.

I don’t have any mentors or gurus; I’m too much of a solipsist for that.

The people I most admire are Mum and Dad.

I prefer working in whichever medium is the most difficult for me at a given moment. I really like to be out on thin ice. In fact, I keep looking for that.

I don’t want to find comfort in anything; I enjoy having discomfort and being frustrated by the emotions we all have. I work hard and party hard – always at a very high tempo. Some people say it’s running away, but I love the fact that lighting the candle at both ends creates a beautiful light.

I am not a fan of Stieg Larsson. As to whether Sweden is as corrupt as his books suggest, one shouldn’t use pulp fiction as a source of information.

I had some fun years in my band, met some intriguing people, saw strange places, then realised I didn’t have the talent I so badly wanted, so I left.

If I could create any project I wanted, I’d create a human child. But the difficulty is that the perfect relationship is hard to conceive. And to add children, and still keep it vibrant and fuelled with the reasons one first got together, is a very tricky – but not necessarily undesired – prospect.

At the same time, I am a romantic. I’ve been engaged a couple of times and married once, and I am still very close to all my ex-girlfriends and my ex-wife; we’re like a weird, big, dysfunctional family.

Am I ashamed at the amount of money earned/spent in advertising? We are all oil in the devil’s machinery.

I don’t care about possessions, but in a fire, say, I would save three things: a 1929 original, signed poem by Aleister Crowley; a print by Jack Smith, an American photographer in the 60s and 70s who made a strange, surreal film called Flaming Creatures, and I have a print taken during that movie; and a stuffed raven given to me by my ex-wife.

The most expensive thing I’ve ever bought is an apartment in New York. And I have a summer house in Sweden. But, to some extent, I’ve never been interested in money; I make a decent buck directing commercials, but I’ve never invested in anything and I really don’t care about it.

In my case, the money made in advertising supports my life for six months to try to work on a movie project, or an art project or writing music. A few years ago I did get speed blind with very big, lucrative ad projects, and I had to pull the handbrake.

Drink and drugs have never been a problem for me, but definitely an obscurer. Still, I’ve never really had the time required to indulge in voluptuous excess.

I am a vegetarian but I eat fish. I’m not perfect, because I do drink milk and eat cheese and eggs; I have to balance my eating to compensate for my drinking. To stay healthy, I also run to the brink of unhealthyness.

Politically, I’m a post-modern Swede socialist. I am a firm believer in a lot of the philosophical ideas around the Swedish system. And how well everything works there. And the mechanics of friendship and social life.

I use the internet a lot, if not for everything. It is the greatest human invention of all time. It dwarfs the wheel. And fire.

I think my profound love for music has an effect on absolutely everything I do. But other than that, I changed sides and will hereafter be looked upon with dubious eyes. I’m an interloper. A quisling.

I am currently reading movie scripts. Yeah, I know.

I would judge a person very apprehensively. I am terribly bad with new people.

How much do I care what others think of me? Am I getting old when I now want to answer all questions with a quote? Here’s an old song from a great Swedish emo band: “Mock us if you will, we’re moving; you’re standing still.” Having said that, I walked up to a guy at a party recently and said: “How are you doing?” And his reply was: “I don’t like you.” I really thought he was joking, but he said: “I just don’t like you.” When I asked him why, he said: “I don’t have to answer that.” The day after, I was feeling really bad and I suddenly realised that I really do want people to like me – even though I’m arrogant enough not to go out of my way to achieve it.

I’ve had quite a lot of therapy, both in terms of clearing myself out and to deal with busted-up relationships. It’s much easier to live with yourself if you understand that you’re not alone in being a certain way.

I grew up in a very atheistic home. But I’m such a romantic that I would love for there to be a god. And experiences I’ve had also suggest something of the kind. For example, when I was seven years old, all the other kids had soccer shoes, but my parents were fucking morons with no money and for me it was out of the question. One day, we went to a field to beat up a refrigerator or poke a dead hare, as kids do, and the whole time I was completely obsessed about why we were broke and I couldn’t have shoes. When I got home, my mother said: “I’ve got something for you.” And it was football shoes. Ever since that day, I’ve always thought there is some kind of god.

The person I’m closest to is probably my brother, Martin, who’s a graphic designer in Sweden. He’s just one year younger than me and, because we were moving around so much as children, we needed a strong liaison.

My greatest strength is that I always end up doing The Right Thing.

My greatest weakness is my vanity.

What makes me really angry is injustice. And when I am stupid. For example, I’m quite tall and I constantly hit my head on low-placed objects. It makes me infuriated.

I cry every time I am on an aeroplane – and I’m not afraid of flying. We debate this and the theory I like is that flying always means leaving something behind – more or less irretrievably – and this loss instantaneously comes out with tears.

The closest I’ve come to death was twice in 12 hours in Thailand. We were flying back to Sweden and I popped four Valium and drank half a bottle of brandy for the flight. Later, I was violently shaken awake by my girlfriend because two engines had broken down and the plane was turning around. Three air hostesses were crying like crazy, so I knew it was serious. We made it safely back but I was still fucked up by the Valium and brandy, and my girlfriend almost had to carry me off the plane. We were taken to an airport hotel and I took four steps onto a deck chair and fell asleep. When I woke up, hours later, I was completely overheated, and so dehydrated that I rolled straight into the pool. And that’s when I came closest to dying. I sank to the bottom, thinking this feels so blissful and cool, and I started falling asleep; I remember literally drifting away. Just before I was about to pass out, something inside said this is not right.

I’m not afraid of dying, but I am afraid of how little time I have until then.

If I could change the world, I would. Yeah. I would.

If I could relive my life, I would not have quit my piano lessons at 12.

What gives me real pleasure is women and music. That’s the god honest truth. Nothing in life is more blissful than being with the woman you love. And nothing makes me cry tears of joy as much as music does.

What, in the end, really matters is to keep on pondering upon this question.

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