Canada: 3 x The Charm

Canada comes to Catalonia as the Barcelona-based collective – comprising the talents of Nicolás Méndez, Luis Cerveró and Lope Serrano – offers a fresh, furious, and occasionally explicit, NSFW approach to ad and music videos across the globe. David Knight gets plugged in to their electrifying brand of collective creativity

Every so often a music video drops seemingly from nowhere, generating waves of excitement and delight as it spreads through the blogosphere. This phenomenon occurred late last year with the appearance of the video for super-hip Spanish musician El Guincho’s track Bombay – an irresistible compendium of random, comic-surreal vignettes connected mainly by the regular appearance of naked female breasts. Which explains much of the excitement and delight.

With a Carl Sagan-style introduction by El Guincho (aka Pablo Díaz-Reixa) inviting viewers to explore the wonders of the cosmos with him, he then chronicles life as we know it with his trusty tape machine – which happens to largely consist of nubile girls, topless while riding bikes, topless while playing with catapults, topless while patrolling hills with guns... It’s not all like this – there are also some fully dressed females, and some men too – all doing notably silly things.

The playful subversiveness and naturalistic film look of the Bombay video harks back to 60s and 70s ‘permissiveness’, with its copious female nudity and acid-tinged, ‘way-out’ surrealism. It is also Spanish, which is itself quite surprising. Cutting-edge music videos have never featured high on the list of leading Spanish cultural exports. Nor indeed, interesting music video directors. But things are clearly changing.

The Bombay effect

El Guincho was directed by Nicolás Méndez of Canada, which refers not to the North American country, but a production company-cum-creative entity. It is a Barcelona-based collective comprising a trio of creatives – the aforementioned Méndez, Luis Cerveró and Lope Serrano.

For the past few years, this Canada has been creating striking work in ads, promos, fashion films, TV and more. They are successful ad directors in Spain – represented by commercials house Sopa De Toro in Barcelona – with work for Orange, Nokia, Häagen Dazs, McDonald's and other major clients to their credit. They have also worked with fashion house Mango, and made channel idents for Spanish TV networks.

They have also directed a number of low-budget music videos for some of Spain’s best indie-rock bands – and the international success of their El Guincho video has changed everything. Not long after its appearance, the team signed to Partizan for worldwide representation outside Spain. Shortly after that they made their first English-language music video, for US glam-pop favourites the Scissor Sisters. With Nicolás Méndez again directing, the video for Invisible Light is another awesome bombardment of beautifully composed non-sequitur imagery – sometimes disturbing, and sexually provocative.

Creating the Canada collective

Lope Serrano then directed a video for Irish indie rockers Two Door Cinema Club, and Canada have just completed another for New York art-rock combo Battles, directed by Luis Cerveró. More Anglo-American videos, including one for new British band The Vaccines, are also in the pipeline.

“Signing for Partizan is a big thing for us – all these international labels, all these amazing bands,” reflects Méndez, assuming the role of English-speaking spokesperson for the trio. “We made a lot of videos, and nothing happened, then we make El Guincho, and the video is seen everywhere – it’s all happened very suddenly.”

All three were active as directors well before they combined forces as Canada in 2008. Cerveró and Serrano met while working at a TV station in Barcelona, while Méndez also worked in TV as a scriptwriter. Méndez explains that they became big admirers of each other’s work back in the early noughties and talked about working together for a long time before it actually happened. The main obstacle was that while Cerveró and Serrano were in Barcelona, Nicolás was based in Madrid.

“We used to send each other DVDs of each other’s work,” he recalls. “Whenever I was in Barcelona we had dinner and got drunk, and we’d talk about getting together. Not just improve our working methods, but improve the process of doing ads. With the agencies and ads it’s very hard. We thought if we worked together and split the job in three parts it would be easier.”

Becoming a collective entity, and self-producing, also meant that they could work directly with smaller advertising clients on interesting low-budget work – and also on music videos for their favourite bands. “We wanted to try to give a name to those things we produced.” But when Méndez finally moved to Barcelona, the name they chose was not one usually associated with the hot-blooded sensibilities of southern Europe. So why ‘Canada’? “We’d never been to Canada, but we liked the fact it’s very large – we love the forests, land, animals,” he claims, before adding, rather more convincingly, “We liked how it sounded – three syllables, each ending in A…”

More importantly, they established the working method that goes a long way to explaining their visual style. In their mainstream spots, such as Orange’s Animals and McDonalds’ California Grill, it has manifested itself in well-cast, seductive films. In their lower budget work, including their music videos, it has liberated their more left-field, artistic side with some amazing results. 

“We try to be together as much as we can,” Méndez reveals. “We arrive at the office at ten in the morning – and we don’t know when we’ll leave. We don’t decide who’s going to do [a job] at first. We think of ideas together and really capitalise on the partnership, and if possible we’ll try to write the treatment together. Finally, if the project is approved, then we decide who is going to take charge.”

Then they tend to shoot a lot of material, with one of the team as lead director, and another directing second unit. When it comes to their videos, this generally involves the creation of a dazzling array of images reflecting an encyclopedic knowledge and appreciation of film history. Also, it really is about the primacy of the image over narrative in their videos – which may explain their tendency towards sexually suggestive content.

“We like eroticism everywhere,” Méndez declares, “We try to find or think about images that turn us on in every way. I think that’s why we have lots of little ideas. We like the image to work itself. It’s a very physical thing.”

Watching the loosely connected vignettes in their videos can also be like viewing a 70s cult movie never previously seen. In the Luis Cerveró-directed video for Triangulo De Amor Bizarro (trans: Bizarre Love Triangle)’s De la Monarquía a la Criptocracia, young ladies dabble in dangerous Satanic rituals in a series of scenes that could come from a classic low-budget Italian giallo.

And Cerveró’s video for Mishima’s Tot Torna a Començar is a direct homage to Danish master director Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 50s movie, Ordet: the band are gathered around the coffin of a dead woman, but the seriousness of the situation is increasingly suffused with humour and delivers a miraculous ending.

Cutting it with the Scissor Sisters

They have also used and manipulated existing footage, mainly on more experimental, no-budget projects, and Méndez says, “Now we like to shoot everything, but it’s really strange how the process of appropriating images works. When you put them inside your own work they become yours.” That is particularly true with their video for the garage rock band Mujeres for the track LA, directed by Serrano. It splices a rollicking rock ’n’ roll performance by the band with rotoscoped cut-out footage from the 1949 MGM movie Little Women. The team were inspired by the similarity in names of band and movie (Mujeres means ‘women’) and what seems incongruous actually blends superbly well together.

“We love the book and the movie,” says Méndez of Little Women. “We love so many movies and so many things. We use them with all the respect in the world.” Among their influences he cites Dreyer, Blake Edwards, David Fincher, Jonathan Glazer – and rather surprisingly, Will Ferrell and Adam Sandler… “We like comedy, we’d like to do more. Comedy is important.”

With Bombay, Méndez explains that the video came out of El Guincho’s obsession with producing a ‘hi-fi’ sound associated with the likes of Quincy Jones in the 50s and 60s. From that came the idea of him putting a compilation together like the Golden Record – a disc containing a selection of music representing humanity sent out into space with the interstellar satellite Voyager 1 in the late 70s. “We thought it was a good idea for Pablo to record a ‘golden tape’ of how he thinks the world is: love, fear, everything… The video is a compilation of all these things.”

As with their other videos, Canada also insisted on achieving the organic film look by actually shooting on 16mm film – and then spent days accumulating the required shot list. So like several others, this negligibly budgeted video was entirely achieved through favours from friends – behind and in front of camera. And despite the international pop star status of the Scissor Sisters, Méndez reveals that the budget was not exactly huge for the Invisible Light video either. However they were determined to pull out all the stops for their first ‘international’ production.

Hooking stunning images into a loose narrative of a beautiful woman under the control of a demonic hypnotist, Invisible Light flashes between her reality and sexually charged subconscious, building to a delirious climax. “Dreams, reality, interpretations of her contradictions... You could do anything you wanted in this concept,” notes Méndez, who took the lead as director. “We created a script in which we did a scene, and then added inserts [of her subconscious] that seemed to match with that main concept. We ended up with four different themes, with four different lists of inserts.” In other words the three creatives crammed enough ideas for at least three videos into one production, and the execution matched the level of imagination.

Innovation on a budget

The video for Invisible Light is a tremendous achievement and clearly had the desired effect for the directing team looking to step onto the world market. Other Anglo-American artists have been beating a path to their door ever since, looking for something similar. But perhaps not surprisingly, Canada would prefer not to be pigeonholed.

“We’ve started to make different treatments – the opposite of El Guincho and Scissor Sisters,” Méndez reveals. As a result, their subsequent video marked a change of direction – less ambitious, more contained and arguably more conventional – with Two Door Cinema Club performing What You Know amid a group of dancing gym girls in Lope Serrano’s video.

But it seems that some bands will not be denied. Canada have returned to the ‘big idea’ approach for their new video – for New York art-rock darlings Battles’ new single Ice Cream – and, according to Mendéz, “it’s even more crazy than Scissor Sisters.” With the video entering post production after a four-day shoot, Méndez – who shot second unit on the video with Cerveró directing – is bold enough to predict that, “its the best thing we’ve ever done. Maybe I’m wrong, but what we were shooting the other day, its really promising.”

Méndez is also quite certain that the situation that he, Serrano and Cerveró find themselves at the moment, with music videos dominating their workload, is almost certainly a transitional stage. Making videos for super-cool American and British rock bands may be great for their profile, but they are finding that it still does not replace the rewards of their commercials career back in Spain. And it is a lot of work – even with three hands at the tiller.

“It’s taken up our lives, and we’re still figuring out how to manage all this,” he says. “There is a bit more money, but not much, and many favours still involved. So, unless the budgets come up it’s going to have to stop some day.”

In fact, they have already completed their first ad campaign through Partizan, for French telecom giant SFR, suggesting their return to commercial directing has already begun. But they also know that working with their great rock ’n’ roll heroes really is now within the realms of possibility, and it’s an enticing prospect.

“There’s definitely some bands that we’d love to work with. Like anything that Jack White is doing – we’d love to get involved with that…”