Here is an interview I did quite some time ago with the awesomely resourceful Melbourne directors collective Krozm. You can also find it in the most recent edition of POP Magazine. Click below the cut and while away the next 10 minutes of your life. It’s a longun!

THE KROZM INTERVIEW

If you’ve ever seen a music video for the Midnight Juggernauts, Van She or Cut Copy, chances are, these guys made it. Who are these guys? Krozm. In just a few short years, Krozm have come a long way since their ‘junk-fi’, garage-sale-esque debut videos for local Melbourne ’scenesters’ Damn Arms. They’ve recently unleashed a kick-ass new video for Jet (look out for this one – think Chewbacca meets Beverly Hills cop on a BMX), and are even turning their magical hands to a surf-film for Modern Collective.

I’m catching up with the masterminds behind this trailblazing collective doing massive things- Lachlan Dickie, Chris Hill and Ewan Macloed.

Tim: ‘Hi Guys.’

Krozm: ‘Hi Tim.’

T: ‘Where on earth – or a higher planetary constellation – did you come up with the name Krozm?’

Ewan: ‘Haha. The name is a bastardisation of an old greeko legend about six ancient gods who gave birth to parts of the world as they slept. It was their dreams which shaped the landscape and Krozm woke up in a cold sweat discovering the earth was creased with mountains, valleys and rivers…

T: ‘Interesting. You guys know you’re history! OK, given this is POP Magazine I’ve got to get this one out of the system, do you guys surf, skate or any of that type of thing?’

Ewan: Yeah Chris was an avid trouble maker and skater in his youth. I used to ride a boogie board and love the southerly swells which hit around Byron Bay making for fast sucky shoreys and close outs. These days we are both avid body surfers which I think is often quite an overlooked radical pastime.

Chris: I grew up in a small beach side town and spent a lot of time as a teenager surfing and skating. I gave them both up when I moved to the city and haven’t really done either for a long time. Although last year some friends and I thought it would be a good idea to go skating after a bunch of beers one night. Suffice to say I ended up with a fractured arm after trying a 180 kickflip.

There’s an obvious lesson in that.

Lachlan: If by saying “that type of thing” you mean bareback Beluga riding, then the answer is yes. (Editors Note: I had to look up what this was, according to wikipedia it’s either a whale or a submarine – either way it would require some Indiana Jones boulder-size balls to attempt it!)

T: ‘Alright. Let’s get to the really interesting stuff that all the kids want to know. You’ve just wrapped up on the forthcoming surf film, Modern Collective. It’s directed by Kai Neville and produced by pioneering industry legend Taylor Steele. How the hell did you guys get involved with this and what was it like working with these two?’

Chris: Kai contacted us on the basis of seeing some of our music videos. Since I grew up with surfing and had seen Taylor Steele’s early works such as Momentum and Momentum 2, I thought it might be something fun to be involved with. Also we all wanted try our hands at something slightly different to a music video.

Lachlan: It was quite easy going working with Kai and the guys on set, we did our best to put them in some fairly awkward situations on camera though!

T: ‘I’ve done my research and tracked down the trailer for this film (it’s been floating around on the internet for a while). The major thing I noticed is it seems to have a ‘high-concept’ and some pretty banging music to boot. Since we have the liberty of discussing a concept in a surf film, please enlighten us on what we’re in for?’

Chris: The intro is based on an ancient Viking ceremony, which was used to summon the energy of the universe into the life force of warriors just before an impeding battle.

Lachlan: We’re trying to compliment the surfing in the film which is breaking new ground for the sport. As the title suggests they are a collective of a new breed of surfer, so we took this concept to a biblical level and presented them as a new breed of human surfacing from the void beneath.

Ewan: The film is going to be something really special. Some of the Footage Kai has shown us looks gorgeous and nostalgic but also completely fresh. I’ve never seen surfing like this before. These guys are so fluid, (they were) throwing the tail around constantly and with consummate ease. The aesthetic of the film is going to be interesting, new and ultra modern, something the surf industry has never seen before.

T: ‘Let’s talk culture! It’s fair to say our readers have a sound grasp of what goes into making a surf, skate or snowboard film – they’ve been watching and probably making their own since they can remember. Tell us a little bit about the business of making music videos for a living. How do you bring your ideas to life – do artists come knocking on your door or do you go and hunt down poor unsuspecting bands and unleash the Krozm-ness on them?’

Ewan: Hmm, it’s a funny business the music video one. We tend to go through phases where it seems heaps of bands all want us to write ideas for clips. Sometimes they get where we are coming from and sometimes totally not. I remember we pitched on a clip for Muph and Plutonic and they asked for something controversial so we pitched the idea of remaking Fletch but with a homeless transvestite who was also revealed to be an ancient sea alien and started to infect other homeless bums and hobos with a green slime which would change their sex. They didn’t go for it at all. It would have been something epic.

Chris: Presently it’s mostly bands or record labels approaching us via seeing work we have already done. Though in the beginning it was more us approaching friends who were in bands and asking if we could make something for them. Back then we had to convince people of our skills by doing magic tricks and acrobatic stunts.

Record labels will send out a brief to specific directors they are considering working with and outline some loose ideas of what they and the band want to achieve visually for a particular song. We usually use these ideas to guide our brainstorming but often it ends up that we push any provided references into a completely different idea. Which we then try to sell to the band as best we can. Luckily most of the bands that we have worked with have either had blind faith in our ideas or have shared in a similar vision. We seem to achieve our best results when we are given total creative freedom.

T: ‘So that’s what happens, you’re all a pretty mysterious bunch, you musical types. Speaking of mysterious, there are some pretty mystical characters running around in your videos. We’ve seen singing rocks with glued on boggle eyes, androgynous cube-headed beings, and plenty of craft infused unitards! How do you come up with the ideas for this stuff? Do they just flow freely from your subconscious due to a youth misspent watching a whole bunch of strange sci-fi films? I’m imagining some pretty crazy brainstorming sessions here, with novelty size marker pens and giant Etch-A-Sketch’s.’

Ewan: We had a Krozm white board in our office for brainstorming sessions. It’s usually covered in hand drawn pictures of Orcas and Narwhals. A lot of character ideas come from bits and pieces of culture, which we just randomly put together in a new context and then (we just) place a story around them until they start to make a weird kind of sense.

Lachlan: Yeah, there are some rare life forms in our videos. I guess a strange mix of pop culture from our past is partially responsible for their birth. Every generation seems to grow up having been more visually overloaded than the last (us included), so I guess part of our thought process is a weird subconscious mutation of this input. When things like Mulligrubs and Mad Max stew together in your brain after a few years strange things can hatch!

Speaking of brainstorming sessions, there’s a large archive of those on a shelf somewhere, some hilarious diagrams and field observation drawings from alternate dimensions.

Chris: We all have or have had massive B-grade VHS film collections from the 70’s and 80’s and a lot of inspiration is drawn from watching both good and extremely bad films. My personal collection recently reached around 700, which caused a bit of problem with storage in my apartment so I had to sell them off. It was a sad day indeed.

Other than that yeah our brainstorming sessions usually involve a lot of complex and weird drawings that are used to explain our ideas to each other. Often we have to really simplify our video treatments, as I am pretty sure if we sent in some of our unbridled ideas to bands they would think we were completely crazy.

T: ‘Fashion, Aesthetics, Production. Three words that are often thrown around when discussing any kind of filmic pursuit. What are your attitudes to maintaining a natural style that stands out from all the other bazillion videos being pumped out across the universe? And how do you stay abreast of what’s cool and fashionable whilst maintaining your artistic purity?’

Ewan: We naturally tend to do as much in camera stuff as possible. You can often get a very interesting look attempting to create a whole world from cellophane or plasticine or mashed potatoe or whatever. We’ve been fortunate to work with bands which are open to distinctive visual styles rather than simply trying to make them just look ‘cool’

Chris: Yeah I guess our personal taste and artistic vision tends to lean towards stuff that can be created in real life rather than stuff that can be created using CG. At the same time we all have very specific taste when it comes to cinematography and filmic devices. So sometimes we are presenting a low-fi ‘junk aesthetic’ in a deliberately highly stylized way in order to blur the lines between reality and fantasy. This is something we have always been conscious of.

I think we are also all firm believers in using any technology to our advantage. So for us in the same way that we are often trying out new things aesthetically we are also always equally eager to try out new things technically too.

Lachlan: It’s really satisfying to capture our concepts on hi-end film gear usually reserved for Michael Bay or 50 Cent. It’s also because we are stern believers in our concepts and treat them as if we were shooting a feature film.

Aesthetics come and go, especially in music video, so we try to eradicate fashion from the equation as much as possible when initially writing ideas, even if a band or label comes to us with a visual direction they are set on. There is usually something more interesting that can be made than simply following the call of the latest visual trends.

T: ‘Let’s talk about your greatest influences? I read somewhere that they are as diverse as John Carpenter films to vintage Sesame Street. I’m interested to hear what you’ve been watching lately?’

Chris: I think like a lot of people we are obviously influenced by stuff from our own childhood, which of course includes things like 80’s sci-fi and sesame street. This era of film and tv quite heavily relied on in camera effects techniques which are often lost in todays films. I actually think there is a direct relationship between the effects in Carpenter’s movies and techniques used in sesame street. For example the effects in ‘The Thing’ involves a lot of animatronic and hand held puppetry which today in the same genre of film would simply be done using CG. In the same way the use of puppets, costumes and stop motion / hand drawn animation that was a staple of Sesame street is no longer used in childrens TV shows. The last time I saw some childrens TV it was some dodgy 3D show that was just unimaginative and unbearable.

I go through obsessive binges with films where I have to watch everything by a certain director or a certain actor no matter how bad the film is. Recently I’ve been on a Clint Eastwood binge with a slight tingle of Wim Wenders on the horizon.

I’d also recommend ‘Superjail’ for light comic relief.

Lachlan: That’s a big question, but people like Salvador Dali, David Cronenberg and bands such as Talking Heads and YMO have been strong influence for me. I have a lot of inspirations though, not from any one particular medium, everything from Japanese graphic design of the 1970’s to Studio Ghibli and Robert Abel.

Early sesame street seemed to be a centrepoint for cutting edge children’s television at the time, there were lots of really interesting collaborations for parts of the show.

Sadly, I can’t say the same for children’s television now though, everytime I see something like Hi-5 or whatever its like they are inducing some weird meth-rave dance spasm on the kids of today.

Ewan: Yeah definitely Carpenter. I watched ‘The Thing’ recently on a 14hour Air Asia flight and it saved my life. Hmm, great influences for me often come from literature and art. I’m a big fan of William S Burroughs, Shakespere and the poet Coleridge. These guys can create vivid intense worlds from a few words. I love films but often I watch for pure leisure rather than trying to learn any kind of craft. Lately Ive been downloading new episodes of the Simpsons – ultra classic! Some Seinfeld and rewatching the Trailer Park Boys series. Oh, also the new Jarmush Film ‘The Limits of Control’ totally awesome film blissed me out – great colours, strange cryptic repetitious story and fantastic characters.

T: ‘This latest video you’ve done for Jet is a pretty majorly slick piece of work. You got to work with Steve Costanza (chief make-up genius on Napoleon Dynamite) and you even roped in child-actor Lukas Haas as an ice-cream eating hobo! You were picked up by Mighty 8, a directors collective in LA on the back of this shoot (who’ve directed on Death Cab for Cutie, Beck, Depeche Mode, Feist & The Hold Steady), and now you’re off to Europe… Is this is a coming of age for Krozm?’

Ewan: We definitely hope so. To be honest it’s been a long hard road coming from Australia and being so far away from the epicenters of music and film culture. Over the last few years we have really matured as both directors and producers and are now ready to work on both a new conceptual and professional level. I think we really need to spread our wings.

Chris: I definitely feel like we have been through some sort of self-inflicted initiation ritual. Although I am not sure if we have had the chance to completely stretch our creative muscles yet.

It seems like people in Europe and the US (are) responding to our work much more than in Australia.

The market and audience are just a whole lot bigger over there, slightly less conservative and they have an ingrained cultural investment in art, film and music. Even a garbage man in Paris can be an avid reader of 19th century poetry and admire the work of Picasso.

T: ‘I like the sound of flexing your creative muscles. Does this mean a Krozm feature film may be riding in somewhere on the horizon?’

Ewan: Totally. I dream of one day directing a big dirty futurist sci-fi piece based on an old crazy screenplay. LA is a wonderful city we are lucky to have some amazing people to work with. For now though we really want to connect with some European and British bands and really refine our art as music video directors. It feels like we are never satisfied with our videos and strive to make something new on each one.

Chris: There are plenty of feature film ideas swimming around the Krozm tank. LA is like a well oiled film dispensing machine and we have made some good friends and connections there. It seems that the trick is not to get caught up in the automation of the machine where independent control is thrown out the window. For the time being I think we are happy creating music videos and other smaller projects but the time will come when we will be prepared to sink all of our time and energy into a dream feature length project.

Lachlan: I hope so also, there is an awful lot we still want to do in the music video world for now though. I think we all have yearnings for the pace of a feature film shoot rather than a 1 or 2 day whirlwind production, but we also have the luxury of being able to move on to new ideas quickly which is nice.

There may or may not be an upcoming project with an animatronic dolphin.

T: ‘Oh, one more thing. Do you have any of those Gold Unitards left over from that epic Grates video – surely you won’t have room in your suitcases… any chance I could adopt one?’

We certainly do but they’re a bit smelly and greasy!

T: ‘Haha. Thanks guys. It’s been great fun!’

Ewan, Chris, Lachlan: Thanks!