Into the Library with Alexander Kalchev

One of the first things we did was this for Tropicana. It was this sort of street promotion brief, really a junior creative type of brief. They wanted to give orange juice away to mark the clocks changing for daylight savings time. It was all about getting energy for your day by drinking orange juice - something not particularly inspiring. We obviously challenged that brief. 

I remember us sitting very late in the office. We were thinking about how we can express this idea of natural energy. Something clicked. We remembered these like kids' experiments that you do in school where if you take an orange, there's acid inside and if you take a zinc and copper and connect them, you have this little bit of electricity. We thought, what if we powered our advertising with oranges? 

We didn't want to do the stunt-y type of thing. What you see is real, but it took us about a year to find a company that was crazy enough to do it. In the end we produced with UNIT9 in the UK. They had started branching out into film and they brought in the director Johnny Hardstaff. He's a genius. 

It took us a bit of back and forth to try and understand how we do this. In the end we made a billboard that was powered entirely by the energy of around 3,000 oranges.

When we plugged the last orange in, it came on for about five seconds and then turned itself off. It was really bad. One year of work for five seconds of power? It turns out that there was so much electricity that it had blown a fuse. We just had to fix a few things that we hadn't estimated and it came back on and it was great, after this mini heart attack. It taught me that mini heart attacks are part of the game.

You have an idea that you believe in. Then you go to the client and explain that you're not going to do street promotion, you're going to do a billboard powered by oranges. And this is going to be a great story that you want to share on socials. Then making that come to life, understanding how hard it is to do non-traditional work, understanding how you need to roll with the punches. And also liking that part of the job. Exploring, experimenting, looking for people that are crazy enough to build this thing with you. And then having what is essentially a special build become this warm, beautiful piece of film. It was a formative moment for us, early on. We had only been around for about a couple of years as creatives.

I really liked that process of trying to do things that we don't know how to do. It sort of informs everything even until today. What we've tried to do here [at DDB Paris] is this experimental freedom-from-failure type of approach where you don't really know half of the time what you're doing. But that's OK. And that only comes if you have a culture that allows creatives to grow and to feel comfortable with pitching ideas that are a little bit strange. 

Fast forward a couple of years. I'd done some weird stuff. I had a little bit of a reputation within the agency for doing stuff that no one else can make happen because I like it. These great young creatives came into my office. They wanted to do this stunt for Honda on a beach, to write this beautiful message on the sand at the starting line of a race that says 'leave your fears behind.' We had two weeks, not much of a budget. I didn't know anything about beach racing but it sounded like a really cool idea. So I started looking at some footage of this race. And I realised you could never create this for real because it's 1,500 motorcycles. I was looking at news footage and it looked incredibly inspiring. The intensity. Completely ecologically unfriendly but let's put that to the side. But it's very epic. And if you wanted to do it for real, you'd have to spend millions and never get the authorisation. 

I said we should do something bigger than this. I'd love to do a film which talks about the mentality, what these guys go through as they're racing. I'd been looking to direct something for a while. And I felt that this was an interesting opportunity because I felt like all the great directors that I'd be looking at would be out of reach. And this felt like something that we could really experiment with. So I ended up writing and directing this. We ended up doing the stunt, but during the stunt we shot a lot of footage.

It became quite popular within the community. It went on to win Silver in Film in Cannes. John Hegarty was the president of the jury at that time, so that was cool. 

It was once again something that came out of this quite unexpected place. The need to make, mixed with the lack of resources, mixed with this deep passion for the brand and just going all the way. It was a really intense experience. I always say we are very professional, but sometimes you have to have this amateur love for the craft. Being professional means that you don't sometimes do a certain amount of crazy things. There's a limit to which you're willing to go. Sometimes I feel like we limit ourselves. In this case, we were freezing our asses off - it was minus five on the beach. It was a fucking nightmare to shoot this in a docu-style. But it was also one of the best memories I have because we were making something.

We had to figure out where we placed the cameras. We had about 10 GoPros. I think only three survived. We had to scour the beach to find them afterwards. We spend a lot of time in our abstract little world, where we have ideas. But then the beauty of it is when you go out there and you're making, facing the elements. You realise that bringing something to life out in the world is a challenge. And it creates these amazing memories.

Over the years, I've worked a lot with Ubisoft. We've done a lot of work, but I had to choose just a few films to share with you. This is the first one. Talking about darkness, nuance and complexity, I think there's very few people out there that can match Martin de Thurah when it comes to the blend of emotions and expressions. I think this is one of his finest hours. We had an incredibly fruitful collaboration on this piece. It's called 'The Baptism' and it's for the launch of 'Far Cry 5', a game that takes place in Montana.

Kudos to an amazing client, an amazing relationship. The story of the game was really like this stranglehold that happens when an extremely charismatic leader comes in and you know creates his own little cult. How far people are willing to go. 

The beauty of this is that Martin managed to capture nuance in the guy, telling the backstory without being literal and showing darkness but also showing how charismatic these guys are. You could do a Netflix series out of this thing. I don't know if it will be as powerful as just these two minutes of adrenaline but...

This is the another one that we did for Ubisoft and again, talking about going beyond the message of the game but staying within the world. This was directed by Alberto Mielgo who did 'Love, Death + Robots'. He has a very specific style and he's a very interesting guy to work with.

It was a dystopian, colourful sort of neon London of the near future. What we liked about working with Alberto was beyond the fact that he's an incredible animator, and beyond his aesthetics was the anxiety-inducing, frenetic pace of the world in the way that he thinks he shows it. 

Dystopia can be very colourful. We are used to seeing these black-and-white 1984 type of images. But I liked the vibe that he brought to the story. It was a lot of working with the studio to ensure that there's a visual consistency with what they're doing, taking it up a notch, and then bringing the Martin Niemöller poem in for a little bit of depth. 

About eight years ago, we started working on Hennessy. They approached us and wanted to break away from the category clichés. This is a film that we did with Nicolas Winding Refn. Completely different, very experimental.

Our idea was how we can illustrate taste in a more visual way. We wanted to go for this very sensorial approach. We took these seven tasting notes of the Cognac. And then we went batshit crazy with them. 

When you work with great directors like Nick Refn, for example, what I've discovered is that the more you accept that you collaborate with them and make them feel it's also part of their body of work and not just a commercial that they're directing, the better. We recently finished another one for Hennessy with Damien Chazelle and I feel like it's the best commercial that he's done, because it's the closest to his sensibility. And when you work with great directors and let them express themselves, you have something very different.

This film is interesting, because it taps into '60s Kenneth Anger stuff, it goes into these places that luxury brands don't go. Luxury brands tend to stay quite vanilla when it comes to the way that they talk. Whereas with Hennessy, we allowed ourselves to go a little bit crazier 

That kicked off a collaboration with great talent, artists and directors. We decided to continue developing this. And so we did this one film with Ridley Scott.

It was one year of working with Ridley. Pretty much every week we had calls with him. He's done 1,000 commercials but I think that this is one of his favourite ones, at least if you talk to him that's what he says.

It was like "let's imagine seven worlds, take each note and make it into a world." The intention was that you'd want to watch a story that happens in each one of these worlds. But it was also about going against the grain, not being too literal. There's no people drinking, there's no cool people doing cool stuff. It was all about just going wild and doing something that triggers your imagination. And this is something that is a little bit less expected.

This is a project we did for Amnesty International. It's a very simple twist on a script, which is essentially, most charities nowadays show you how the world is a bad place and nothing's working. No one wants to be part of something that's losing, everyone wants to be part of something that's winning. And when you look at what Amnesty is doing, there are a lot of victories. We thought, what if we celebrated that pure sensation of winning? Much like being happy when your favourite team wins. What if we translated that unadulterated feeling of happiness that comes with proper victories such as those?

A lot of the work that we see nowadays is a little bit sterile in terms of accepting the darkness of the world and the nuance that comes with pain and joy. Finding the mix of emotions, that's where you find truly great work.

Something else we did for Ubisoft. This is lighter because I've shown you a lot of dark stuff. We did this for 'Assassin's Creed'. It's called 'My Life as an NPC' and it starts with this insight that there's all these guys and they spin around all day doing fuck-all in the games and they have absolutely no free will.

We've always loved these sort of meta approaches where you take a game and show what the world looks like before the players come in. Especially when it comes to games, the audience is so sophisticated that you need to give them something a little bit different.

Game trailers today are just incredible demonstrations of technology. Whereas we've always tried to add either a human insight or a twist because otherwise game companies can do those things very well. Where agencies are very helpful when they work with game designers - if there's trust - is you can bring the story or the meaning or the message of the game to a wider audience without necessarily resorting to just showcasing the game. 

This is for VW. A very, very different vibe. Obviously, as a DDB person, I have a deep love for Volkswagen. It's still the most incredible brand out there. And this is something we did a few years back to celebrate the power of nothing.

Very simple. I've always said the VW is about elegance. And it's about finding the most beautiful way to tell a very human insight. 

This is the follow up. We did two. And this was shot by [directing duo] Si & Ad. It talks about other people on the road. I loved working with them – on a side note - I think we're the first ones to manage to get Jean-Paul Sartre in a commercial. 

At one point I was really into directing. Maybe one day I'll get back into it. But I directed this for Maille. It's called ‘Memories’ and it's really this ode to spending time together. It's basically a mustard commercial, but, I think, a beautiful one.

It was about a four-day shoot. I had about 11,000 props to create the sets. We built this huge set in the studio. Everything was built for real. It was a great little experiment. 

Here's something that I love. A project for Uber back in the day. We just wanted to bring back the magic. I remember when Uber came out, it was such a magical experience. And we wanted to do something that people want to experience, so we thought what's better than riding in a toy car?

It was incredible, but again the devil was in the detail. It was in the craft. Handmaking every one of those and crafting every little detail. We didn't have much time but it was a beautiful, fun project.

         

We relaunched Glenmorangie. Over the last four years, we've been working with them. A very traditional whisky company that has a lot of crazy in it. And it's a very good liquid. The whisky world is all about understanding it and talking about it, having all these very complicated opinions - so we went for a very different approach. The starting point was a quote by the master distiller saying there's nothing to know, it's just delicious and you can just enjoy it. 

It was shot by Miles Aldridge. We decided to break all the codes, and really do something that feels fun and playful. I'm always really attracted to things which are a little bit less declarative, less literal and are just sort of provoking a feeling in you. I think it's hopefully doing that.

We did about seven visuals and they're all different. There was a lot of thinking around unexpected whisky-drinking occasions. You can't be too serious about it. You can't be too precious about stuff. You need to have some fun with it. If we had done something that feels very precious, it wouldn't work. It needs to feel childish.

It was successful enough for it to be continued and we did the second one. And I love it because people in the whisky world love it or hate it. I'm very happy with that.