Tell me about Crocodiles in Venice.

Crocodiles in Venice? A disaster movie that’s really happening.

Yes, what was that process like?

Well, I’ve always had a passion for sharks and crocodiles. And my ideal dream combat is a crystal clear swimming pool with one large fucking shark and one large fucking crocodile. And then see what happens. Underwater cameras, all that stuff. That could become a very nice Madonna video clip. With her in the middle of the pool. Or maybe Barbara Streisand would be better.

But when I was living in Venice, and I just fantasized about what would happen with all these fucking tourists if you just release like six large, fierce, hungry crocodiles at four in the morning when everything is silence, several spots in Venice or just around the San Marco area… amazing. So based on that idea I made this trailer for this movie that still has to be made, or actually is already made by making the trailer, of these crocodiles in Venice.

And what kind of projects are you working on these days?

I have a small camera now, so I go around with a small camera in my pocket most of the time. I came back from doing well-polished work to doing much rougher stuff. And I always think that sound design is very important. I always work with very good musicians or sound designers because I think if you make a video, you could even shoot it with your cell phone if there is a reason to shoot it with that kind of quality but the sound has to be top-notch to emphasize the things you show visually. I don’t care that much anymore about the slickness of an image, I care about what it communicates and I care about how it marries with the sound, how the visuals and the sound meet to become a solid piece.

What else interests you about video and narrative?

I like the fact that you create something that takes so many different elements, there are so many different aspects to make a video, and in the end it has to become a solid piece, something that exists on its own. It’s like a collage. You can shoot some footage here, you can shoot some footage in the North Pole, you can record an interview here, you can record some music in a studio in Germany and when you put it all together and it becomes a self-sufficient universe.

Are you thinking of making feature films?

I’ve worked on some longer pieces. I was in Morocco four years ago and I made a 20-minute documentary about… well, it was a portrait for Colors Magazine and I was asked to make a promotional video. They gave me carte blanche and I proposed to them… because Colors is a magazine about the rest of the world, so I proposed to them to put a big pile of Colors Magazines in my backpack, or eventually I asked them to send them to Morocco because it was too fucking heavy, (laughing) and I proposed them to present this magazine about the rest of the world to a community of people who live so isolated that they don’t know what the hell is going on in the rest of the world. So I presented them the rest of the world in the shape of this magazine. I knew them from two years before because I was there in the Rif Mountains walking with my friends, the sun went down, and we got lost, and we found this guy living in the mountains there and he offered us a tea. Elaiesi is his name; he looked like Frank Zappa. And this tea because two weeks. We stayed with him for two weeks in his cow shit house eating figs that we took from the trees there, drinking the super-sugary mint tea that Moroccans always drink, smoking pipes of kif to push ourselves through the day because it was fucking full of flies and mosquitoes. But there was a golden hour everyday, and that’s also the golden hour to shoot video: an hour before the sun goes down. Because the light is just perfect. You have direct light on your subjects, no shadows, no deformations of the face because of shadow, and the light is so saturated, it’s beautiful. The documentary was shot basically in the golden hour over about nine days.

And the final product?

Basically a portrait of this family that lived there in the middle of nowhere, the first part. Second part: a David Lynch kind of arrival of a pile of magazines that is eventually found by the kid, the oldest kid of the family, and brought up by mule to the house. And then I film what they do, how they use the magazine. They don’t only read it. They also rip it apart and make fire with it. They use it to take away the seeds from the marijuana on one side and put the leaves on the other side. They use it to wipe their asses, they use it to clean, to smash flies… it’s just like on the side that there are also images that you can look at.

What’s next? What do you have going on for the future?

I’m working on a commercial, which is another carte blanche project, of a girl who does everything with her shoes. It’s basically a testimonial. She speaks about her shoes and she explains what she does with her shoes. And I’m in the final phase now. I’m actually doing some sound design later on. It’s for a shoe brand, Atlanta.

And I very much enjoy it because I think I’ve found the right way to approach video projects, which is what I explained before. You have an idea, you have a storyline, a structure, you think about the different types of images you need, and you just start shooting. It’s not necessary that you plan everything in one day. You visit some friends in Rome, you shoot a little bit there. You go on vacation in Sicily, you shoot a little bit there. You sit in the bathroom and you think, “Hey, that looks funny,” so you shoot a little bit there. You go around with a friend in Venice and put ping pong balls up your eye… and like this you construct your story. And this I think is the magic of video making, film making, that you use different elements to be bound together to tell what you want to tell. It can be completely disconnected from what you say in the end.

Ries Straver

Downloads

Websites