Creative Connections: Kleinman and Frankel

It seems to work quite well” says Daniel Kleinman, one of the world’s most awarded directors, creator of eight Bond title sequences, and master of understatement. He’s speaking of his partnership with Johnnie Frankel, gong-laden producer and president of the award-winning Rattling Stick, which the pair founded a decade ago.

Over 15 years this dream team have created a vast and various collection of landmark ads, including NSPCC Ventriloquist and Guinness noitulovE. Carol Cooper finds they complement each other, frequently compliment each other and embody the principle on which they’ve founded Rattling Stick – Work Hard and Be Nice To People

“I knew Danny’s work – so to me it was like a golden ticket, a dream job,” says Johnnie Frankel with his customary twinkly-eyed enthusiasm. He sits slightly forward in his seat as if his surfeit of get-up-and-go might just propel him to get up and get on with something at any minute. He’s recalling the time he heard Daniel Kleinman was looking for a new producer from the “delightful [editor] Steve Gandolfi”. Frankel rarely names anyone without complimenting them; he has an abundance of goodwill. “So I contacted Bertie Miller [Miller and Kleinman had set up production company Spectre in 1998] and asked him if he’d like to consider me.”

“I interviewed one person,” says Kleinman: softly spoken, ruminative, leaning back in his chair. “That was me!” says Frankel joyfully, “and I managed not to fuck up the interview.”

Despite, or maybe because of, their markedly different ‘energies’ – one laconic; one exuberant – Kleinman and Frankel are a great double act. They share a quintessentially British sense of irony, trading knockabout, easy banter and, as you’d expect from a partnership that has lasted, and borne considerable fruit, for 15 years, they are extremely comfortable with each other.

Seeking a slightly smaller large

They worked together at Spectre for around three years before it merged with Stark and became Large – a size that didn’t fit them. “It was just too big, ironically,” says Frankel. “Too many people, too many overheads – it couldn’t sustain itself,” agrees Kleinman. Lasting just one year, Large closed in 2004 and the pair let the dust settle before starting up their own two-man unit, Kleinman Productions.

“Danny came up with that name,” chuckles Frankel. Kleinman reminisces: “It was literally just me and Johnnie sitting in a tiny office in Soho. It was great because it was so easy.” Frankel agrees: “We had no committee to tell us what to do, and we didn’t need a sales department – people just sent Danny scripts.”

Frankel tells me he thinks their first job was a road safety PSA with BBH New York featuring a “furry buffalo/elephant hybrid thing that represented SUVs”, but says he’ll have to check as he tends to make stuff up. Kleinman adds, “I can’t check because I can’t remember anything.” Frankel has the details exactly right. They both seem to prefer to conceal their sharp minds with modest masks of woolly-headedness.

While their early days may have been easy, there was a downside to being small. Kleinman was being tempted by various other projects – “which was rather selfish, but I wanted to be able to decide quickly if I wanted to do something else.” They needed to expand so they weren’t just relying on his availability. Luckily, at the same time, Ringan Ledwidge was looking to team up with someone. “He didn’t really want to join Kleinman Productions, though,” explains Kleinman, “so we decided to change the name. I suggested we combine our names and call it RingDanny.” They both laugh. “He didn’t like that,” says Frankel. “He’s picky.”

Cake recipes for disaster

So they became Rattling Stick and, over the last decade, the company has garnered countless accolades – Cannes Grands Prix, Clios and D&AD Pencils, been named The British Arrows Production Company of the Year four times, and topped the Televisual Peer Poll for the last six years. But while everything in the gong-laden garden is lovely, success does bring increased pressure. So how do Kleinman and Frankel handle that as a duo? Is one more adept at staying positive in the face of challenges?
“I think everyone would probably agree that Johnnie is more upbeat than I am,” deadpans Kleinman. “I’d agree with that,” laughs Frankel, going on to say that if he ever does get flustered, Kleinman’s calmness comes to the fore.

“Danny has a clarity of vision and will sometimes be able to see a way out of a problem that I can’t necessarily see. I think our relationship works well because we complement each other.” Kleinman adds: “We’re both pragmatists. We’ve been in the business a long time and both know everything is sortable. Neither of us panic. I like to think I’m not a histrionic director. I like things to be calm and easy-going – it wouldn’t suit me to have a headless-chicken-type producer.”

Kleinman explains his ‘not-cake’ theory of film production: “Some clients and agencies have this idea that a shoot is an exact science, that you put the ingredients in the oven for a certain time and out comes the cake, as per the recipe. Filming isn’t like that. It’s random. A billion things can go wrong and you have to adapt. But if you’ve got a good team that you trust, you know you’ll come out with something that might even be better than what you planned in the first place. The hardest bit is Johnnie’s job, which is managing people’s expectations.” He praises Frankel’s communication skills, saying that if anything on the shoot needs to change, he’s very good at ‘bagging it up’ and explaining the director’s decisions to stakeholders.

Kleinman is quietly confident about the decisions he makes. “If people who’ve hired me don’t want my opinion then that’s their prerogative. But I don’t just change my mind because they don’t like my opinion. They’re not paying me to think what they think, they’re paying me to think what I think!”

Among the many illustrious clients who’ve been pleased to pay Kleinman for what he thinks is, famously, Bond production company Eon. The duo again display a slightly hazy, insouciant attitude to this most dreamy of dream jobs – making the films’ title sequences. “We’ve done four or five together, I think,” muses Frankel. “My first one was Die Another Day, then Casino Royale, then Skyfall then Spectre, so four actually. Danny has done it for 20-something years.” Kleinman modestly chips in: “Yeah, I’ve done seven or eight.”

King of the wild promo frontier

Though Kleinman insists the title sequences are a collaborative effort, Frankel, despite reading the feature script, brainstorming ideas and adding a certain amount of production support, such as on the special effects shoot, takes no credit. “Danny does it all. There are no creative directors, no art director. It’s all from his imagination and it’s amazing to watch.”

Kleinman started his career as an illustrator, but supplemented his income by helping his friend, director Steve Barron, make music videos, eventually joining Barron’s production company Limelight and going on to become an early pioneer in special effects for promos, as well as ultimately directing more than 100 videos for the likes of Fleetwood Mac, Prince and Madonna.

But he also appeared in front of the camera. You can spot him in the promo for 1982 track Goody Two Shoes by New Wave hero Adam Ant. He’d become close friends with Mr Ant (aka Stuart Goddard) when they were both at art school in the late 70s and they were in several bands together. Kleinman sang, played bass and shared songwriting duties. “I would have liked it if my music career had taken off, but the bottom line is I wrote some interesting songs, but Adam was a better songwriter and musician, so it was good that he went off in a musical direction and I went into the visual side of things.”

Frankel, in contrast, has no background or interest in such things. “ I’ve never done a music video in my life. Nor do I intend to,” he states, going on to give an impassioned rant about huge music corporations underspending, “brutalising the crew to work insane hours for no money”. He also acknowledges he doesn’t have the requisite skillset and approach. “I’m sure I could learn over time but frankly, at 52 years of age, I don’t want to!”

Beating metal, eating puffin

I ask them how their working relationship has evolved over time. They agree they’ve stayed fairly consistent but Frankel says that what has changed is his ability to second-guess a lot of what Kleinman wants. Now, when prepping a job he’ll ask half as many questions as he used to.

One particular shared value is a strong work ethic. Neither particularly liked school, but they love work, and over their long history together there’s rarely been a time when they haven’t had at least one job in pre-production or shooting. “We could have been working flat out for eight months without a break, then when it goes quiet for a week or two we start getting a little bit itchy,” says Frankel.

If there is any rest time, Frankel might play a spot of tennis, while Kleinman attends to his garden or his new hobby: “I’ve taken up metalwork. I’ve got a forge – just for my own amusement. I get rid of stress by beating the shit out of some metal.” He explains how a director’s job is predominantly vocal: “All a director does, basically, is just talk to people. You’re just communicating ideas. So doing something physical is good.”

One gets the feeling, however, that they aren’t in any rush to take time off. And their dedication is not all about creating great work – the collaborative journey and the camaraderie is also of the utmost importance to them. I ask if they have a favourite in their back catalogue. “One remembers jobs for different reasons,” answers Kleinman. “I don’t always take things on because I think they’re going to be the best ad in the world. I’m not the sort that every single thing I do has to win a Palme d’Or. I do things for different reasons, it might be an interesting idea that I’ve never done before, or perhaps I’ll have done two special effects things in a row and I want to do something about dialogue. It could even be something as prosaic as a nice location.”

He recalls a great week they had filming in Iceland. “I like production people in Iceland. They’re very nice, they give you a good time, you go out to a restaurant and eat puffin… stuff you don’t normally do. Enjoying a job is often about the process. On set, I like things to be pleasant and calm and nice, because I want to enjoy the fucking process.”

“We’re both pragmatists. We’ve been in the business a long time and both know everything is sortable. Neither of us panic. It wouldn’t suit me to have a headless-chicken-type producer.”
Danny Kleinman

Good heart and a good spirit

You can clearly see why they’re so popular to work with. “We generally strike up relationships with people we work with,” says Frankel. “We have a fantastic array of crew, cameramen, production people etc, who will always want to work on a ‘Danny job’. They know they’ll get treated well and it’ll be run properly by grown ups. There’s not going to be any screaming or gnashing of teeth, it’s going to be an enjoyable time.”

Frankel affirms that his favourite project was Guinness noitulovE, and not because it
turned out to be the most awarded of 2005 but because it was so fascinating to work
on: “It was such a simple idea, but it was hugely tricky to realise, so the process of watching it develop was so interesting and enjoyable. We had great creative and a great agency [AMV BBDO London] and it brought Guinness back into doing good advertising.”

Being the more voluble of the two, Frankel concludes with a summation of their working life, while Kleinman nods along in agreement. “I think a big part of our relationship is that we both feel the same things. We’re not making stuff to win awards, we’re trying to give a good service, with a good heart and a good spirit. We get on well, we spend a lot of time together – probably more time than we spend with our families – and we share a very similar sense of humour. We’ll be sitting on a plane in club class, and we really should be thanking our lucky stars to be there, but instead we’ll just pick holes in it all and talk about how rubbish everything is – because that makes us laugh.”

They may succumb to the odd grumble, but, no matter how much they may claim to be grumpy middle-aged men, they both share a good-hearted conviviality and, in their different ways, an ability to experience a good deal of glee. I leave the interview with a warm fuzzy feeling, imagining what an immense barrel of laughs it must be to work with the pair of them.