Christian Eaglecastle: DAMER

To say that Danish director Christian Eaglecastle has had an eclectic route to directing would be an understatement. At only 32 years of age he has already dabbled, rather successfully as it happens, in two previous careers, but has now firmly and finally settled on directing as both his present and his future.

Talking to Eaglecastle [his real name is Christian Ørneborg, with the literal English translation of his last name being the heroic-sounding Eaglecastle. “I changed it because people couldn’t pronounce Ørneborg,” he says] it’s not surprising that he tried a few career paths before making an ultimate decision because during his childhood he was surrounded by a wealth of artistic family members. He grew up on a small island off the west coast of Denmark where his mother was a ceramicist, his father a DJ-turned-sailor, his grandfather a jazz drummer and his grandmother a ballet coach.

“I’ve always thought they were interesting and crazy people,” says Eaglecastle, “and I was surrounded by music and art through most of my childhood. We didn’t have much money but I learned it was not necessary to have money to be happy, as long as you did something you liked. I’m very happy I grew up where I did.”

Model, sailor, soldier, spy

Despite his fondness for his home, when it was time for Eaglecastle to attend high school he felt he needed to expand his horizons and move off the island, so he went to live with family in Copenhagen. At the same time Eaglecastle had a girlfriend in London and he went to visit her. While on his fi rst visit to the city he was approached by a model scout. Up to that point he had planned to be a sailor but ditched the idea in favour of a life in front of the lens as a model, “with a little bit of acting too”.

The sudden career change came out of nowhere, but Eaglecastle says that after a few years of modelling he realised that standing in front of the camera wasn’t for him, and that he was far more interested in what the guy holding the camera was up to. So, he taught himself some photography basics before moving from modelling to become a photographer’s assistant, to renowned fashion snapper Dennis Stenild. Eaglecastle explains that Stenild helped with his photographic education, allowing him to borrow equipment and shoot his own stuff but that throughout his three years in photography, “I felt that I could not express myself quite enough through my pictures”.

Eaglecastle then met Martin Werner, a commercials director and co-owner of Danish production company Bacon, and decided that making films sounded exactly like the sort of thing he wanted to do. Far from stepping straight from one discipline to another though, Eaglecastle learned the ropes, starting as a runner and learning as much as possible about all areas of film production. After six months as a runner Bacon took him on as a full-time researcher. “It was great to see how the clips, images and music I found were used in the films and I felt, for the first time in my life, that people actually listened to me,” says Eaglecastle. “They made me part of the process and I was allowed in the edit suite, I gave advice and was involved in sound production. It was brilliant to be constantly learning something new.”

Bacon was effectively Eaglecastle’s film school as well as his full-time job, and he says they had a huge amount of faith in him and were very supportive when he expressed a wish to direct himself. Eventually Eaglecastle approached Werner and his business partner, director Kasper Wedendahl, about shooting a film. After some discussion [initially Easglecastle wanted to shoot a 40-minute film, but they persuaded him to make a shorter version first], they agreed to help him with it, creatively and financially. The result is Damer, which translates, in English, as Women.

“I wanted to write a tribute to women,” the director explains, “because I realised how important they are to me. All my best memories always include women. But all I could think of was a movie about a guy and four hookers in a hotel room, and that was a movie I didn’t want to make.” The film he eventually did make owes more to his own background and features a sailor with a woman in every port. Written with the help of a friend, Gustav Toftgaard, Damer is a beautifully shot, dream-like short that features a seemingly lovelorn sailor on board his boat dreaming/fantasising about different women, all the while narrating about the positives and negatives of the female of the species; ‘they’re hard to live with, but impossible to live without’.

The eight-minute short is an unusual but compelling debut and one that announces Eaglecastle’s arrival on the directing scene with some style.

Seeking out opportunities

As befits his history, Eaglecastle doesn’t wait around for opportunities to find him but seeks them out pro-actively. He recently moved from Copenhagen to Paris where he worked with production company Henry de Czar before moving on to Buenos Aires, which is where shots caught up with him. He moved there for a few months to work on a short film idea and will put that together before moving, he thinks, back to Paris for a while. He is represented exclusively by Bacon – on which he lavishes constant praise – but says that he likes to explore working with different people and in different ways and wants to expand his already quite expansive horizons.

“When directing and writing,” he explains, “it’s important for me to push myself, to have balls but also to be honest. For the moment I would like to focus on making projects that will improve me as a director, [be they] music videos, commercials or shorts. I see directing as a life-long education, and hopefully I’ll keep on improving.”