CFP-E/shots YDA: Djawid Hakimyar

Young, gifted and winning at the cfp-e/shots Young Director Awards this year. Our pick of the newbies explain their work with violent hamsters and grandads

What was your route into directing?

Pure accident. I went to an interview for an internship at a commercial production company thinking they produced TV shows. An hour later I was dressed in a polar bear costume for an ad shoot in a snowbound film studio in the middle of summer. It was then that I fell in love with the crazy film industry.

How did the idea for your Wet Dream film come about?

In the beginning we were joking around with the idea of a linguistic joke – Djawidoff Pool Water – a fake Davidoff perfume. The story was: a nice pool party at a villa, I jump in the pool, a kid pees in the water and at the very end we will sell this pool water as a perfume. That was the basic idea.

How long did it take to make? Tell us about the process.

After the fun idea became more serious, we tried to get the script straight. We started to cast extras at a public swimming pool, then we found a nice private swimming pool and used Google Earth to find the garden and house location for the last shot.

We were all ready to shoot, but then the autumn came, so we had to put the project aside for a year. We did different projects and then finally we were able to shoot it last year.

What was it like directing all those people at the same time to create the overall picture?

A nightmare – and, at the same time, it was the most fun moment of the process. I was counting to three all the time and everybody had their own cue – some at the count of one were holding or repeating the action, some at two were performing a big action and a lot were at two-and-a-half or two-and-a-little-bit-of-a-half or two-and-not-so-much-but-a-little-bit-less-of-a-third and some at three, if I wanted them to stand still and wait for something. Mostly I was telling the extras that they had to do the action either a split second faster or slower. But at the end it worked very well and was a lot of fun for me, the team and the extras.

What was the most challenging aspect of the production process?

The weather and the extras. It was cloudy and raining on both shooting days and we had more than 80 extras to deal with. And the pool water was very cold. I think there were a lot of more challenging things during the production process, but I had a great team, so I could focus on letting the hero jump into the ice cold pool water 15 times. Sorry Arne [Fiedler, the hero].

Tell us about the action and how you came up with all those different poses?

Every picture has its own theme. For example, the three big pictures are gluttony, sunbathing and sports. So we came up with a lot of ideas for each theme and I searched for tons of mood pictures on the internet. I would cut out all the pictures and sort them on a table and choose a few for the final picture. That helped me to arrange 20 people and the set design in the framings. And of course there were a lot of spontaneous decisions on set for the poses.

Tell us about the filming technique you opted for and the process of slowing down the shots…

We used the Phantom Flex [high-speed digital camera] and shot everything in 1000fps to capture each moment as if it were real life becoming paintings.

And what about the sound?

I knew it way before we began to shoot it. The geek hero gets in his wet dream all the attention he wants and the people look at him as if he’s the new sheriff in town. I liked the idea of a Spaghetti Western kind of music when he’s swimming. Only Ennio Morricone does this to perfection, so our music version is a homage to him, the master of this genre.

What was the most important thing you learned from making the film?

Whatever you have in mind, just do it if you have the chance to as sometimes it works out! And of course, you should always have fun with whatever you do.

What’s your next project and what are your directing ambitions?

A TVC went on air this week for L’Tur travel agency we shot in Mallorca. Soon I will release my latest film school project for Perlweiss teeth cleaning and there will be more projects hopefully coming very soon.

What does it mean to win a Young Director Award?

I’m fucking proud and happy.