Martin Krejci: An Advertising Odyssey

An early Monday morning in Soho, and Martin Krejci sits in a large, nearly empty café and orders an espresso. “A strong one,” he tells the waitress, in a very quiet voice.

Krejci has just arrived in London on the overnight flight from Los Angeles, and will attend the grade of his latest Heineken commercial later in the morning. Only the day before he was shooting an Audi commercial, for the American agency Venables Bell and Partners.

He has found time in his busy schedule to sit down with shots. But he is so tired he can barely speak above a murmur (the first few minutes of our meeting are spent edging the recording device ever closer to the interviewee). So there’s only one thing for it. Martin needs a proper breakfast to go with that coffee: scrambled eggs, mushrooms, hot buttered toast…

Which is highly appropriate. After all, this is the man who elevated the creation of a simple egg-based meal to epic proportions in an award-winning British ad last year. Kitchen Odyssey, Krejci’s commercial for Lurpak through Weiden + Kennedy London, is a stirring call-to-arms to the ordinary British man (or woman) in the street to reconnect with cookery, and create something amazing via a big knob of butter in a hot frying pan. With its macro shots of exploding eggs, giant cutlery, flames shooting through gas pipes and melting, sizzling Lurpak – topped with stirring choral music and Rutger Hauer’s fruity voice-over – Kitchen Odyssey is one of the most viscerally enjoyable and inspiring commercials about cooking in a long time. And it has the quality that distinguishes Krejci’s best work – it engages both the emotions and the intelligence of the viewer.

That quality is present in his series of ads for German home improvement store Hornbach, where honest manual labour by grizzled characters is rendered splendidly heroic; in Adi Dassler, for adidas, he tells the story of the company’s brilliant founder via an elegant animation; in Next Generation for Ford he shines a light on creation itself, with awesome shots of baby animals in the womb; in IKEA Play Fight, a couple demonstrate considerable on-screen chemistry through an epic pillow fight in their tree house bedroom.

Inspiration, entertainment, emotion

The aesthetic can vary greatly: his reel also includes action movie thrillers for the Royal Marines and Philips, and Tornado, an FX blockbuster for Guinness. There is a very good chance you’ll be a happier person after spending a minute watching one of Krejci’s commercials – and quite possibly inspired to make an omelette. Or even build a shed. “For me, a good commercial should be a little bit emotional, whether it makes you laugh, or it’s a good drama,” he reflects. “Of course, the purpose of the commercial is to sell, but I think the best way, and actually the most powerful way, is to sell by entertaining people.”

Krejci is now sufficiently revived by his hearty breakfast to provide some insight into how he conjures up a wide variety of instantly convincing worlds in his ads.  They are invariably cinematic – he’s passionate about shooting on film rather than digital formats – but he explains that Kitchen Odyssey is a good example of how everything stems from the idea behind the commercial.

“What I like about making commercials is that you can try different approaches,” he says. “But the technique has to be driven by the idea. When the Lurpak script came along you could tell instantly that there was a really brave idea behind it. To do an ad for a basic thing like butter, and do it in a way that makes it really epic and extraordinary – that was a really nice challenge. Suddenly I knew what I wanted to do and I wrote the treatment in about 20 minutes.” Kitchen Odyssey, which won a silver Craft Lion at Cannes in 2011, encapsulates all of Krejci’s technical virtuosity as a filmmaker. But at 33, he already has over a decade’s experience of directing commercials behind him. 

Getting behind the camera

Born in 1978, he grew up in Prague, and was 11 years old when the Berlin Wall crumbled, ending Soviet domination of what was then Czechoslovakia. Not long afterwards he bought his first Super 8mm camera. “When I was a kid I desperately wanted to be an actor and actually got a part in a movie,” he explains. “It was a very stupid movie, but on set I saw all the toys that the grown-ups were playing with and decided that making films would be better than acting. And I was very bad at sports, so I thought the only way to help me attract girls was through the camera…”

A few years later he was accepted into the prestigious Film and TV school at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU), straight out of high school. He enrolled in FAMU’s Documentary department, where (unlike in the hallowed Directing department) he could get experience with all aspects of filmmaking, including using the camera, editing and controlling sound. Amazingly, his commercial-directing debut, at the prodigiously young age of 19, followed soon after, when a short film he made in his first year at FAMU won awards and then came to the notice of a Prague production company.

“I never thought that I would do commercials – I was militantly against them,” he smiles. “But when the offer to make one came along I didn’t say ‘no’. The director who ran that company was someone who I admired. He liked the movie and said: ‘you make it and I’ll put my name on it’ – because the agency wouldn’t accept a 19-year-old having made it.”

But he was soon directing ads for the Czech market under his own name, and although he did graduate from FAMU in 2004, with his impressively mounted short fiction Fricasse (“they wanted to get rid of me so they let me graduate with a fiction,” he says), he had already made a commercial that had brought him international attention.

His IKEA spot That Family was shot in Singapore in 2002, featuring a real multi-generational family eating dinner together. The teenage son is encouraged to show everyone his party piece – removing the tablecloth under a fully set dinner table – with catastrophic but hilarious results. This ad with a documentary approach garnered Krejci several awards and offers from production companies outside the Czech Republic. One of these was Stink – founded by Czech producer Daniel Bergmann, and home to fellow countryman (and FAMU alumnus) Ivan Zacharias. “At the time I was very depressed that a feature film project I was working on wasn’t going anywhere – plus I had a few personal issues. They were looking for new directors at the time and said: ‘come with us’. So it was great for me to take this opportunity and it was probably the best thing I’ve ever done.”

Creating wombs with a view

Relocating from Prague to London in 2004 expanded his horizons. He says he found it easier working within a longer-established commercials industry, and having made a powerful viral for Amnesty International, highlighting the issue of domestic violence, his big break came with Ford’s Next Generation for Ogilvy London/Stockholm. Featuring a number of wild animals – an elephant, dolphin and twin polar bears – floating in the womb, just prior to birth, this audacious piece of automotive advertising is beautiful and affecting, with a real ‘how did they do that?’ quality. “People always think we must have done it in CGI, but we did it for real,” he says, before explaining that it was not quite genuine nature photography. In fact, the animals were built by Artem, the physical SFX company, then shot in an amniotic-like fluid, replicating an animal womb.

It was the first time he had worked with visual effects supervisor Tom Sparks, who has since become another highly valued member of Krejci’s team of regular collaborators, together with his regular DP Stephan Kucera and editor Filip Malásek. But after Next Generation brought him a lot of attention, he also successfully resisted being pigeonholed as an effects-driven specialist. He says the treatment-writing process has been crucial in him being able to retain his creative integrity. “I try to write treatments as specifically as possible, to avoid future misunderstandings. So usually if the agency and client say ‘yes’ to it then there aren’t any problems.” It’s not always that straightforward, and he readily admits that some of his most high-profile ads have been his least pleasurable experiences – often when his original treatment has been compromised.

Over the top with the Marines

He has also experienced controversy with his gripping campaign for the Royal Marines that depicts the Marines in action, deep in enemy jungle territory. When the ad, titled A State of Mind, was broadcast it provoked an official complaint from the Malaysian parliament. It turned out the rebel leader, who gives a warmongering rant in the ad, was mainly speaking Malay (the filmmakers had been assured by language consultants on the shoot that it was an amalgam of south-east Asian tongues). Not surprisingly the ad, shot in Brunei where the Marines have their base, had to be withdrawn. “I have a moral issue that we did it – but at the same time it was an interesting experience,” Martin reflects. “Coming from an ex-Communist country, we tend to look at public service as something that you would laugh at. But I found out that the sense of patriotism means something real to those kids, which I was quite impressed by.”

Then he was all set to shoot what he calls a ‘dream project’ for Stella Artois, when the account moved from Lowe to Mother. The original script, the last in the classic Jean de Florette-influenced campaign, was scrapped, but he then made an impressive job with La Bouteille, as part of the interactive campaign – a sweet, shaggy dog story of a gallant waiter with a crush on a female customer.

His ad/short film for adidas, celebrating the life and work of the company founder Adi Dassler, for 180 Amsterdam, has a similarly warm period feel but with the added dimension that it is rendered in a very reserved style of stop-motion animation – a method that he arrived upon as an alternative to using stock footage or casting an actor to play Dassler. “Funnily enough, that was the closest to documentary work that I’ve ever done, because we researched Dassler on everything he’d done,” he says. “We decided to go for the opposite of usual, very caricatured stop-motion animation and make it super-real, and all the props in the ad are actual miniatures of Adi Dassler’s real props. We replicated everything at a smaller scale.” 

Hornbach – a study in humour and heroes

While his Dassler film tells the intriguing story of his life without congealing into sentimentality, Krejci’s campaigns for Hornbach, out of Heimat, Berlin, as with his Lurpak ad, elevates the ordinary into something epic, without drifting into satire. Starting with the acclaimed Faces and Cow in 2010, these spots celebrate the hard graft associated with Hornbach tools, featuring a cast of characterful, mostly middle-aged men as its heroes – initially through the super slo-mo photography of Faces. In the darkly humorous Cow, two men glancing at their pristine chainsaw after being interrupted in their work by a cow (with annoying cowbell) provoked a storm of protest against cruelty to animals.

Krejci has recently completed two new ads for Hornbach – Festival and Symphony – and there’s another “really intense” one on the way. He works very closely with Heimat creative director Guido Heffels on the Hornbach ads. “Guido’s a very strong personality, very opinionated, but a very warm person. He has this relationship with the client where they trust him totally – that’s how he can come up with such strong ideas. It sounds clichéd but I’m so glad I can be part of it. For the last few he just calls me with the idea and we grow the script together. That’s a really great way to work.”

He’s got a lot of bottle

Krejci also evidently has an excellent relationship with Heineken. After his previous ads Bottle (a Heineken bottle’s journey from brewery to party) and Opera (a Champions League bumper ad), he is, when we meet, about to finish the brewer’s next big global spot through TBWANeboko in Amsterdam. More than six months in the making, The Switch features a shabby drinking den being magically transformed into a perfect bar – all shot for real in Prague’s legendary Barandorf Studios. “It’s quite brave for the client to accept our approach,” he says. “It was supposed to be very special effect-themed, but we decided to do everything in-camera. It looks a bit DIY, but that’s what we wanted – and they seem to really like it.”

Krejci is living back in Prague now, with his wife and two young children, but a new adventure is about to begin: he’s relocating to the US later in the year – partly to advance his commercials career (he’s repped by Skunk, the American outpost of Stink, in the States), and partly to progress one of two feature projects he currently has in development. “One is a co-production between Holland, the UK and the Czech Republic, and we just got the funding for finishing the script,” he reveals. “And then we have a small American indie project that I co-wrote. We have people who are interested in it, so it’s better for me to be in LA. If it happens, it could go very quickly.”

In the meantime, a Soho grading suite beckons, where a new Heineken ad has to be finished – so Krejci hurries away from the now rapidly-filling café. Hopefully he enjoyed his breakfast.