Ben Strebel is on a roll. The winner of our music video category last year has just created one of our all time favourite films – a wedding brawl for Javeon – and is busy shooting commercials too across Europe. We talk with the new director about his meteoric rise over the past 18 months.
What are the key lessons you’ve learnt about film making since winning last year’s music video category at the Young Directors Award?
The idea with Clock Opera’s ‘Once And For All’ video was to go against the grain. I wanted to challenge people’s pre-conceptions of music video narratives and give voice to those who so frequently go unheard – in this case an older generation. After winning the YDA I started to think that perhaps I was starting to find a style and language that felt natural to me. Winning the award gave me confidence and also made me realise that there are still a lot of believers in real human subjects as opposed to empty fleeting moments.
What kick started your career do you think? Was it due to being signed?
I’ve been very lucky to find a lovely home here in the UK (Somesuch&Co.) as well as abroad (Wanda, Paris) and together they are all massively supportive in bringing my career to fruition. The Missing People commercial and Clock Opera, following on from my Crystal Fighters video undeniably got me some traction. Now it’s all about working hard and moving forward, and there are some very exciting things happening.
And now you’ve released this stunner for Javeon’s track Lovesong. Yes it is about love, but raw jilted screwed-up love. How did you come up with the narrative, was it your reaction to the lyrics or did you work closely with Javeon?
The song definitely elicits a strong response. The lyric is a surprising one given the silky quality of the vocal. Here’s a guy who is being pulled into a situation but is resisting it. He has the power.
Having had these initial responses I worked closely with the label to work out what the parameters of the video would be – how far they were willing to push the concept. I love bouncing ideas around with labels and artists, often in articulating ideas you can better reject or work up things.
The real kick off moment was when the guys at PMR sent me the proposed artwork for the single. It’s this really raw image of a girl’s face, her eyelashes caked in mascara, at that precipitous moment on verge of crying. That was enough to trigger the idea of a wedding gone wrong, all the love and closeness spinning out of control and erupting into a fight; after all where there is love there are the inverse emotions also.
I wanted to keep the story open and metaphorical, not too directly narrative, with all kinds of backstories that I decided to hint at and let the viewer guess for him/herself. I thought it was pretty fitting to be shooting in one of the most deprived boroughs in England; Newham. There’s a real grit to the area, and a tight knit local community which we found in abundance at the local working men’s club where we shot the promo.
I love the tradition of British realism in film, and its narrative intensity, but I’ve wanted to try something slightly more abstract for a while and hopefully that’s what I’ve achieved here.
We really like the All Saints Film too – are the disciplines very different from making music videos and online films?
What I love about making documentaries is the inevitable unknowns that comes with them. Most music videos and commercials I’ve done have been meticulously scripted and storyboarded, so when we come to shoot them we know exactly what we’re doing. Shooting in Nashville and Austin over the course of ten days with a vague idea of the story was a great exercise in that I ended up writing and re-writing the idea several times. With an ever-changing brief from the client and constantly on the go, we faced different obstacles every day and had to adapt and react all the time.
It also felt liberating finding ourselves delving into discussions with people during interviews that ended up going in completely different directions to what I initially expected, and therefore eventually offering an entirely different angle to the film.
