for as long as i can remember, i’ve told stories to friends and conspired to find new ways to share these stories. as a kid, i created plays with puppets, then discovered the video camera, exchanging the makeshift stage for an actual location, i’ve used friends as actors, in order to fulfill an obsession with creating skits and short stories.

i eventually found my way into the film business and worked for many years as a production designer, most of them while living in copenhagen.

i invested a lot of energy into production designing, throwing myself into intense periods of research for the feature films that i designed. i viewed environments as characters, and just as a writer might create a back story for a character, i too created back stories for each environment.

in some ways, my approach to the work was like being a detective as well as a student of the human condition.

it shouldn’t have been surprising that i designed films that were steeped in psychology. from a professional point of view, the quiet  intense thriller seemed to be the genre that suited me best.

during this time, i started to develop as a director, feeding my curiosity with stories that i created for my own projects. while working full-time as a production designer for commercials and feature films, i directed a number of short films and music videos on the side. much to my satisfaction, i discovered that there was an audience for these projects, as films that i directed were accepted into a number of international film festivals.

directing is a lot more fun that production designing. the types of collaborations are fundamentally different and i would discover that directing is a lot easier too.

while everybody who works on a film has an obligation to serve the ambitions of the script, a production designer has to juggle more responsibilities and obligations than a director. a production designer has more masters to serve in a working environment in which there is also a lot more ambiguity. i found that few decisions for a production designer were clear-cut. choices were often somewhere between painful and less painful. once the periods of research and pre-production are over, the production designer becomes a task master and a diplomat who manages a wide variety of personalities, while doing the best that one can to stave off disaster in the face of inevitable surprises and chaos.

a director is also a manager, but, in my experience, the choices have always been easier to make, even when there are constraints. as a director, the focus is entirely on the ideas put forth by the script as well as the collaborators. even though both the director and the production designer endeavor to find the best possible expression for the narrative, for some reason, it has always been easier for me to manage this as a director.

then came the move to los angeles, and with that, after thirteen years in the business, i saw an opportunity to shift my focus away from production design and onto directing.

while my directing projects in copenhagen have mostly been works of fiction, the projects that i would work on in california would all be documentary in nature.

i made a number of small films, while it took almost a year to land that first paid gig as a director here in the united states. i was asked to direct a documentary project as part of a team that was working on IBM’s smarter planet campaign. it was a very rich experience that lasted several months.

the project came to its natural conclusion and, shortly thereafter came the move to new york.

and since then, i’ve enjoyed the process of directing and collaborating so much that i’m always looking for new ways to continue this.