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.

Subscribers to shots.net and free trialists can read the full interview here, or in the new issue of shots magazine, issue 137, out now.

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