Johnny Green

The obsessive research that precedes a Johnny Green shoot is the calm before a creative hurricane, says Stephen Whelan

With over 12 years experience as a production designer to some of the industry’s biggest and brightest, among them his close friend Malcolm Venville, he’s come a long way from his early days of academic failure.

“I basically got expelled from every school I went to, so my dad had to become my teacher,” Green says of his childhood growing up in Manchester. “It got to the point where I failed my O-levels and my mum started steering me towards art to get me away from academia. But I got expelled from art school too.”

Green found his way onto the straight and narrow at Camden Arts Centre where he took an art foundation course. From there he moved over to Middlesex Polytechnic where, in his words, “I sat next to Jonathan Glazer and we both got into making things and designing bits and pieces.” Green’s path led him to specialise in theatre design, and he made his way to Slade School of Fine Art, where he graduated with a Masters degree.

Pieces of paper are all well and good, but what Green really seems to have taken from his theatrical background is a sense of staging and an instinctive understanding of how to create distinctive environments with broad visual gestures. Loosely speaking, his 2005 short film project, Nyemka’s Dream, is about the captain of the Mongolian ice speedway team. On another level, it’s about Green finding his voice as a director and developing a sensory language of his own. “After much prodding I committed to the idea of directing, but I couldn’t think of anything to make a film about,” he recalls. “I spent ages racking my brain trying to figure out a subject and I started thinking about speedway because my brother was the captain of a speedway team in Manchester. I remembered me and my dad and my brother watching ice speedway on TV when I was a kid, so I started researching. Somehow I ended up in Siberia making a film.”

Off the back of Nyemka’s Dream, Green landed a job for Audi. When I first spoke to him in October 2006 the finished spot had just gone to air and Green seemed relieved, exhausted and grateful in equal measure. “With Audi I was really lucky,” he reminisces. “They were an exception, because they were upfront about not understanding what I was doing or what the finished film would look like, but they trusted me all the way, because of the way I described the images. There was no interference during the shoot.”

Green acknowledges that a near-open brief can be a burden as well as a blessing. “In a way, working like that puts more pressure on you. You end up thinking, maybe I am crazy. Maybe this is going to look ridiculous.”

Green’s hypercritical emphasis on craft is clear in the attention he pays to every detail. From the smallest particle of dust to the widest landscape shot, from the barely audible to the overwhelmingly loud, Green’s painstaking efforts are visible in every frame. Watch one of his films at half speed and the number of images literally doubles. His work really is that detailed.

“As a director I love the idea of planning everything meticulously in my mind’s eye and having a clear idea of what it’s going to look like at the end,” Green explains. “That way I’m prepared when everything changes, which it inevitably does. But that’s the enjoyable bit; when everyone’s looking in one direction and the thing you didn’t expect is happening behind you. It’s the same with great stills photographers. You perch yourself in a corner and wait. But with commercials there’s not the time to do that on every shoot.”

A year on from Audi, Green’s definitely calmer. Perhaps the experience of the last 12 months has hardened him a little? “There’s still a certain vulnerability that I try to get at with my work,” he muses. “I hope people who see the Audi and adidas spots get a sense of emotion from the people that are in the films. As much as they’re about scenery and landscape and light they’re also about character and personality.”

Green says he loves the idea of helping people to look at things, be it situations or objects or images, in ways they normally wouldn’t. “A lot of my ideas come from listening to kids talking and their sort of naïve outlook on life. I find that filters into other areas of my life. Like sounds. Often during telephone calls I’m more interested in hearing what’s going on around the person calling me than in what they’re saying. And I love it when people call up and don’t know they’ve called and you get a chance to listen to a piece of their life from a comfortable distance.”

Green admits that the thought of directing in a more conventional style scares him. “The idea of being on set and having an actor and getting them to move from point a to point b in a certain way freaks me out. The rigidity scares me. It’s not my way of working. But maybe I’m going to have to do that at some point.” He pauses for a second while a look of fear crosses his face, before adding: “I wonder how I would really be in that situation, because you take away the wonder of the mistake and absolutely not knowing what’s going to happen at any given moment.”

Thumbing through a stack of scrapbooks he’s created for various projects, Green explains how he prepares for each job. “I love researching, immersing myself obsessively in these different little worlds. I really enjoy making scrapbooks of everything I can possibly think of that might be relevant to a job. It starts with images which form into sequences which give birth to ideas.”

The assorted black leather books are crammed with sketches, storyboards and scribbled notes, like little shards of insight into his inner workings. And there’s something charmingly innocent residing within. His scrapbook for the adidas project contains a sketch by Green of Carl Hayman from the All Blacks.

He becomes animated when explaining how he got Hayman to sign the illustration during the adidas shoot, all the while grinning like a schoolboy showing off a prized possession. Suddenly he seems to withdraw again and in that moment his work makes complete sense. What Green’s mastered is a way of conveying those rare moments of emotional and sensory clarity that exist within a mess of fuzzy, grey abstraction and disorienting uncertainty. And then the clarity passes and it’s back to the puzzling world of existence.