Johan Kramer: The Way I See It

We’ve all made those small choices – a loud tie at a job interview for example – that have proved to be career-defining moments. Dutch director Johan Kramer recalls his decision to wear a chicken suit to a company talk as a turning point. He and fellow chicken, Erik Kessels, got fired and set up the highly successful agency KesselsKramer in 1996. In 2006, Kramer left to concentrate on directing and has since stormed international film fests, winning awards for works such as the documentary The Other Final. He tells Joe Lancaster he’s grateful to have a job that’s a “beautiful waste of time”  

I was born in the middle of The Netherlands, in Utrecht on December 4 in 1964. My father was a building engineer and my mother was a nurse.

My earliest memories are of projection evenings at home. My father would show the most amazing images from my parents’ time living abroad in Curaçao, Indonesia and Canada. I just remember the vivid colours. They were shot with a Rolleicord camera that I now use a lot in my photography. It’s a camera I treasure.

I had a happy childhood, playing football all the time. We lived in a forest and my father cut down some trees to make a small pitch for me. The only setback was that my older sister was a better player, but I got over that.

I joined a football club and soon after I started writing for its magazine. Most of the stories were completely fictional. When I think back, I realise that I do more or less the same nowadays; telling stories. The only thing that’s different is that my audience has grown.

My passport says Jan Jasper, but when I was eight years old I changed my name because I was crazy about a Dutch footballer called Johan Neeskens. I was really shy but one day I stood in front of my classmates and told them that from then on my name was Johan. A few years ago I made a feature film, Johan Primero, about this name change and Johan Neeskens.

After school I enrolled to study law at university but it only lasted two months. When I opened the books after the introduction parties, I realised it would be extremely boring so I stopped immediately.

I read an article about advertising and decided to visit all the agencies in Amsterdam and offer myself for free just to get experience. They all showed no interest. Finally, with some help I got a placement in a small agency in a small town. I stayed there for some months and then got the chance to start as a junior writer at BBDO. It’s something I always remembered when I had an agency myself; to make myself available for young talent to make sure we always had students in.

In my early career I was playing around all the time. I always found everyone so serious. I also started directing really early. At that time the Dutch directors were just filming the storyboards of the agencies and I thought it could be done better so I went out and started directing music videos, spoof ads, wedding videos – just anything to get more experience. I was pretty fanatical and driven to do something new.

Three words: You are fired. That’s the best piece of advice I’ve ever been given and they were spoken by Naresh Ramchandani and David Buonaguidi, at that time the creative directors of ChiatDay London.

I had worked there for a couple of months with Erik Kessels. It was 1995 and the day before, we’d had a motivational company trip and when everyone was ready for a serious talk, Erik and I came in dressed in yellow chicken suits dancing to the sounds of The Birdie Song and this didn’t go down very well. Naresh and Dave were right that we didn’t fit into their culture and the day we were asked to leave it was somehow the start of KesselsKramer, because at that moment, we realised we were much too stubborn and independent to work in the system of an agency.

The best day of my career was at KesselsKramer when we turned down a client who at the time was providing 70 per cent of our income, because we really didn’t agree with the brand name they wanted to use. We told them if they chose that name we couldn’t put our heart and soul into it, but if they gave us two weeks we’d come up with a better name. They decided to leave but came back a week later and gave us the chance to think of something better. This was the start of a Dutch Mobile network called Ben. This decision to really stick to our principles was an important part of the KesselsKramer DNA, and I believe it still is today.

I would say to a young person who wanted to work in advertising to be really true to yourself and that’s really hard. I noticed it all the time while looking at portfolios. Often I saw student work that was really fresh and personal, but when I met the same creative a few years later quite often the work just looked like anything else in the industry. The logo of each ad was on the bottom right and the personality of the maker had vanished.

I would also encourage a person starting a career in any creative industry to use his or her talents for the good of us all. Try to see something beyond promoting endless consumption.

The worst day of my career was my first shoot as a director. It was in Buenos Aires in a football stadium to direct a worldwide Coca-Cola spot for Wieden+Kennedy. A few seconds after I said ‘action’ for the first time, the sky opened up and it rained so heavily that cars started floating down the streets around the stadium. The shoot day was over.

Advertising seems such an old fashioned word. I’ve always believed we’re in the business of ideas, so when I think about stuff I’ve done that I like, the first thing that comes to mind is The Other Final. We had opened KesselsKramer and I was directing most of the commercials and I really wanted to do a documentary. I found two countries that had never won an international football match, Bhutan and Montserrat, and I thought it would be great if they played a game on the same day as the World Cup Final 2002. They agreed and then I started making this documentary about the event I invented, which turned out to be the most amazing working experience of my life. Although it was produced with the help of KesselsKramer, it was my first step towards directing full-time.

Leaving my own agency KesselsKramer and my friend Erik in 2006 was not easy. On the other hand, it had been 10 years and we celebrated that with a fantastic exhibition in the Rotterdam Kunsthal and a great book, so it also felt that it was time to move on, to challenge myself. I wrote and directed most of the commercials by the agency and I noticed that I had started repeating myself. Somehow you stay within your own limitations. Now I really enjoy working with scripts that other people have written, quite often ideas that I would never have had myself.

Nowadays, even big ideas only last a day if you’re lucky, and even the term ‘big idea’ is becoming old fashioned. We’re experiencing a continuous creative process, an ongoing campaign that needs to be renewed all the time. It’s the best time ever to work in advertising, because there’s such a need for great content. We see the same development with feature films; the format is getting boring and predictable, that’s why TV series like House of Cards and Homeland are such a blast, where there’s so much more time to go deeper.

If I could change one thing about myself I would become more direct. I find it very hard and usually avoid conflict.

Money is always a means to an end. When we started KesselsKramer one of our missions was to become our own ‘client’ so that meant investing in creative projects, to gain experience in new areas, to have fun. We did lots of free work for the Hans Brinker Budget Hotel in Amsterdam and because of that work we got the worldwide business for Diesel Jeans. It was never the intention, but just a nice result. This is still how I feel today. I mix commercial projects with my own projects like music videos, children’s art projects, short films and photography exhibitions all the time, because I just love creating stuff. This is exactly the spirit of the Dutch production company that reps me here: 100% Halal. It reminds me of the naïve energy we had when we started KesselsKramer.

If I could time travel I would visit the film set of Jacques Tati during the shoot of Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot in 1951 and spend the summer there on the beach of the little French town Saint-Marc-Sur-Mer during the production of the film. It’s one of my favourite films and he’s one of my favourite directors.

One summer holiday I visited all the locations of Tati’s films together with my wife, driving in an old cabriolet. If you look at the holiday pictures now, it’s a combination of lots of old French villages where Tati filmed and my broken car on the hoist of another small French garage.

My greatest fear? There’s a beautiful saying originally by the Dutch poet and painter Lucebert; ‘All things of value are defenceless’. If you relate that to family, you get the idea.

The closest I’ve ever been to death was when I was 12 years old and I cut my wrist badly climbing over a football pitch’s fence. I was bleeding heavily and luckily the groundsman showed up and got me to hospital just in time. I recorded my voice telling the whole story because I knew I would have to repeat it many times. In the days after the accident, when I was at home with my arm in a bandage, people would call me to ask me about it and I would play the tape. Unfortunately, I don’t have it anymore.

The worst days of my personal life have obviously been when I’ve lost people I loved like my parents but after that, it was the day Holland lost the World Cup Final in 1974 against [West] Germany. That still hurts and will always leave a mental scar. The best days were the ones when I held my daughters [Isabella and Lila Shu, now 11 and 9] for the first time in my arms.

I am a member of my favourite football club FC Barcelona. I watch all the games and visit the stadium often. I have other hobbies; I walk each day. I collect Super 8mm cameras. I love coffee. I do a lot of photography. I hang out with friends. I play tennis and I read books with my daughters.

In the world of directors, I really enjoy the work of Wes Anderson, Mike Mills, Michel Gondry and Martin de Thurah, but my real hero is Lionel Messi. For years he has given me so much pleasure. The level of football played by him and his team is just amazing and I don’t miss one single game. I am pretty obsessed with football.

The news makes me angry. It’s funny that we live in a world where so many great things are happening all the time, but we are bombarded with negativity and fear.

I have Googled myself and I care what people think about me. In general, I hope that people like what I do, but I am also happy in my own world.

I don’t know how it happened, probably during one of the interviews I did at KesselsKramer a long time ago, but once I said as a joke that I used to be a professional football player at Ajax, my favourite Dutch team. Since then this has popped up all the time and people keep asking me about it. I even once worked on a German commercial with their national football team and the manager was really disappointed when he found out that the director didn’t play for Ajax at all.

The greatest human invention is the camera.

The worst human invention is the atomic bomb.

If I was Prime Minister of the Netherlands for one day I would give the Ministry of Education 10 times more money to innovate our school system, which is, like anywhere else in the world, still modelled after the factories of the industrial revolution. It’s funny that we live in a society where the profession of a film director has more prestige than that of a teacher.

I always dreamt of having my own coffee bar, so I am opening a small one. It’s the extension of my coffee blog; myfirstcoffee.com. Since I love coffee, I thought it would be nice to go out with my camera and interview coffee experts about their first coffee of the day. Now I will move into different areas like artists, football players, anyone who likes coffee. I hope to be successful as a part-time barista. Another dream of mine is to write children’s books.

The word ‘ambition’ sounds so serious. Same as the word ‘career’. I’ve never felt like I had one. I feel I’ve been really lucky with the work I’ve done so far and that I’ve had the chance to meet some great people along the way. That’s what it’s all about: doing nice jobs with nice people. I never wanted to be the director who flies from one shoot to another.

I plan my trips very carefully. My family is far more important than going to another part of the world to do a lecture on work that I did 10 years ago. I really like to focus on the new. The next thing I will do is a short film project with my friends at Chelsea, the production company that reps me in The States. The next job – that’s how far I like to plan ahead.

I would like to be remembered as a nice, friendly man. Let’s be clear about this; we’re not doing anything special in our industry. We’re not saving lives, we’re not teaching our children, we’re not cleaning the streets, we’re just lucky that we can do the work we do. It’s just a beautiful waste of time!

At the end of the day, what really matters is to be in time for yoga class. My teacher is tough.