Seen and noted

Some background from Fredrik Bond, director on the Motorola "Hakko" spot.


My Sonny London girl Helen Kenny called me up on a dark and stormy night. I was sitting in my small Knotting Hill flat reading THE PHANTOM. “I hope you’re sitting down,” she said. She slowly told me about the weird and perverse request from Motorola...black, tar like, killer cables attacking Hakko a naked, Finnish boy in his student apartment in Paris.

My first reaction was one of terror – as a few years earlier I had a traumatic experience dealing with a rubber baby running loose in an Eastern European hospital. Secondly, I had never heard of the black, flying, killer cables. Where do they live? What do they eat? But most importantly where would I find them? Many questions...so little time.

I got on the phone with the crazy and wild people from Ogilvy in Singapore. I asked them why they didn’t go with a director who has a death wish or an Eastern European film student.

They had heard of my rubber baby experience and were adamant that I do it for them. I was the chosen one.

As the days went by, each morning I lingered longer and longer in my bathtub - staring at my hair going down the drain. How would I go about this?

After extensive research we finally found a lead at The Mill in London. The company had previous experience in wrangling my rubber baby and other wickedly mean apparatuses. For a few weeks we went into The Mill’s hazardous, circus training camp with their bold and reckless wranglers and did many, many previsuals. There was a lot of blood, sweat and tears. The big team of wranglers put their heart and soul into taming the digital cables. One or two of the wranglers even disappeared in the dark basement at The Mill´s headquarters and was never found again. Bless them all.

The only service production company in the world that dared to take up on our challenge and partner with Sonny London on this quest was Monika Kristl in Prague. Just like us, she has a team of death defying, tattooed renegades at Dawson Productions who fear nothing.

My next, big, hard challenge was to get the right crew onboard. I needed a crew of gritty brigands full of piss and vinaeger – the kind of people that can withstand a melee of vicious, psychotic cables in a closed off environment – and for 4 days no less.

After 30 seconds of thinking, I decided to approach the most adventurous people I could think of. Ben Seresin, my DP, had just come off the PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN and flew in with his own Russian fighter plane. He arrived with fat, burning cigar smoldering in his mouth. Jeremy Hindle, my art director, stepped off a suspicious cargo boat straight from the dark and wicked streets of Toronto with his big white smile and famous belly. After extensive set drawings and numerous late nights, he and local AD, Onza, finally built an amazing set that would stand up to the black flying cables and planned nuclear explosion.

They built our set in Barrandov studios, next to the set of the new Narnia movie. We had a lot of great exchanges between the two crews and sets...they had their vicious lions and we had our black German cables. We had local Czech catering, they had posh L.A. catering…different, but both equally dangerous to deal with. Ben, with still puffing on the same stoagie, put a killer light on the set. A piano was placed on set and we were ready to let the cables in!

My production manager, Lara Baldwin, had arranged the cables to come in via Germany - the only country that would let the cables out on public roads. Five large German men pulled up with their armored trucks outside Barandov studio late on the night before the shoot. It was raining heavily.

My assistant David cocked his gun and told everybody to step back into the studio, behind the protection barriers, as the doors to the trucks opened. The Germans stepped into the dark womb of the trucks. Everyone fell silent in anticipation of the deadly, voracious cables.

As I watched the cables come out, I could see that they where rolled up in bundles and, to my surprise, I realized that the cables didn’t move very much...as a matter of fact...not a bit. Where were the killer cables? Ben pulled off his flying goggles. He huffed and threw his cigar to the ground .

For 4 long, loooooong days we all stood and watched the cables painstakingly placed in thousands of positions – every imaginable variation across every square inch of the set.

Hakko, our young Finnish exchange student was as patient as could be while intimately entangled with the black wires. We stood in our khaki action gear whilst sipping tea as the oxygen went low in the studio and most of the crew fell asleep around us.

Our quick thinking animator Hitesh from The Mill, noticed I was dozing off and was kind enough to keep my eyelids propped open with a pair of pine matchsticks. Reassuringly, he whispered, "Don’t worry Fatty Freddie,...Ill fix it in post.”



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