Tell us how you met and started working together...
We met at university in Liverpool, England. However we later found out that our paths had crossed years before when we both attended the same Saturday morning kids club at the Victoria Cinema in Cambridge in the early eighties. So in a sense we were first brought together by films [including Pete's Dragon, Supergirl and one of the Herbie films - possibly Goes Bananas] years before we even spoke to each other!
Tell us about the Radio 4 Film Season brief...
As huge film lovers we absolutely loved the creative on the Radio 4 Film Season as soon as we heard about it. It was a relatively fast job - we were in Nashville working when it came through, the brief was to take iconic images from famous films and put them into real life situations. So the finished film would be a series of vignettes that nod towards moments or images from films.
We spent our entire return journey compiling lists of films [sadly this is probably what we would have been doing anyway - after so long working together you run out of things to talk about so a typical time-passing conversation might be to 'Name 10 films with titles that include parts of the body', 'Jaws, Head, Funny Face, My Left Foot...' and so on. Sad but true]. Anyway, we were straight off the plane and into a meeting at Fallon, which went really well.
The creatives, Gary Anderson and Tony Miller, are also film enthusiasts so the job was really good fun. We had to take out a few of the more obscure references and put some easier ones in, but on reflection it was a good balance. As directors it was a good opportunity for us to do something a little more considered compositionally as a lot of our work to date has a more immediate, documentary feel.
How would you describe your shooting style?
A lot of the stuff we have shot leans towards a direct, immediate documentary style, handheld intimate photography, concerned with capturing moments, interactions and relationships in a way that is real. But we are also very concerned with how it looks - finding a balance between realism and aesthetic. There is a design to it but it's not as detectable as a big art-directed shoot.
Tell us about Slowing the Pace for Kronenbourg...
That job was great fun, a chance to meet a living legend. Lemmy was every bit as grizzly and uncompromising in person as we'd hoped. The best thing is that we were actually in the studio directly influencing the re-recording of Ace of Spades - which didn't always go down too well, but was, nonetheless, totally amazing. We've been really lucky with our first two commercials in that the creative was so great. The script by Ian and Matt from BBH was fantastic and we were so happy and appreciative that they went with us for it.
What are you working on at the moment and what's happening in 2011?
Two feature-length projects, another documentary and our first feature. They're both at early stages so we can't say too much, but we're really excited about them. Hopefully this year will see some of our long-form project plans come to fruition and we'll continue to work in commercials and music video.
You can read the full feature - Face to Face with... thirtytwo - on the Shots website, and in the meantime, take a look at their spot for the BBC's Radio 4 Film Season: