Ivan Zacharias

At 19 Ivan Zacharias entered FAMU, highly reputed Prague film academy. His ambition was to become director of photography and to make documentary films.

In the five years he spent at FAMU, communism collapsed and the country split in two. Prague became a popular location for shooting commercials, music videos and feature films, and multinational advertising networks followed soon. Local film production companies were also established, among them the Stillking which hired Zacharias for his first commercial work.
As a student he won the Golden Drum at Portorož in 1994 for his commercial for the National Gallery in Prague. Soon he was considered as the most interesting and innovative director from Central and Eastern Europe.
His reputation in the advertising industry has only been growing. He was invited to make a short film for JC Decaux, together with such eminent filmmakers as Francis Ford Coppola, Spike Lee, and Wong Kar Wai. He directed VW Beetle relaunch commercial and the immensely successful Born Free for Land Rover Freelander (winner of EPICA and a Gold Lion at Cannes). Then there was the Stella Artois commercial, an epic set in plague stricken France, and 2 films for Levi’s with Gael Garcia Bernal, one of the hottest Hollywood stars of our time. Practically every commercial he directs is being praised.
Five years ago he directed Mulit, a parody on Bollywood music comedies. It was produced in co-operation with Absolut vodka, shot in authentic locations in India, and celebrated at many film festivals around the world.

Recently he has been working for Honda, Smirnoff Red (Matrioshka), Nike (Pretty), Stella Artois (Pilot), and Adidas (Impossible Team, World Cup 2006).
In 2003 he was on the top of the most awarded directors list by the Shots Magazine, and the Gunn Report 2006 included him among the global top 10 directors. At this moment, Ivan Zacharias is carefully selecting a screenplay for his first full-length feature film.

Sean Thonson

A graduate of Arts Center, Sean Thonson first became interested in still photography at a very young age. Continuing in the footsteps of his father, who taught graphic design and photography at Humboldt State University, Thonson hardly recalls a time when he didn’t have a camera in his hands. Taking advantage of his father’s knowledge (and his dark room), Thonson began an ongoing study of light and composition that would eventually lead him to his career in directing/cinematography.

In 1992, Thonson made a transition from still photography to film becoming one the world’s top directors in the field of high performance automotive advertising. With a prestigious client list that includes Alpha Romeo, BMW, Chevrolet, Chrysler, Ferrari, Fiat, Ford, GM, Hyundai, Honda, Lexus, Mercedes, Saab, Toyota and Volvo. Thonson has recently branched out to extend his vivid style of filmmaking to commercials driven by story and character.

Thonson is based in Southern California.

Marcus Nispel

German born Marcus Nispel started his career in advertising as an art director for Young & Rubicam in Frankfurt, Germany. He came to America on a Fulbright scholarship in 1984 at the age of 20 and made his directing debut in 1989 with a series of music videos for C&C Music Factory.

While living in New York, Nispel co-founded and operated his own production company, Portfolio Artists Network, before merging with Ridley Scott and Tony Scott’s RSA-USA to form Portfolio/Black Dog. He joined MJZ in 2000.

To date, Nispel has directed over one thousand commercials and music videos. His commercial clients include: AT&T, Audi, Canon, Chase, Coca-Cola, Dr. Pepper, Fidelity, Kodak, Levi’s, L’Oreal, Marlboro, Mercedes, Motorola, Nike, Panasonic, Pepsi, RCA, Showtime, Sprint, Sprite, Unisys, UPS, US Postal Service, VISA Gold as well as MTV, ABC, CBS and NBC.

His music videos include over fifteen #1 songs and several breakthrough videos for artists such as Puff Daddy, Bush, No Doubt, the Fugees, George Michael, Janet Jackson, Elton John, Billy Joel, Aretha Franklin, Cher, Mariah Carey, Brian McKnight,k.d. Lang, EnVogue, Tony Bennett, C&C Music Factory, Bette Midler, LL Cool J, Bryan Adams and Gloria Estefan.

Nispel has been awarded numerous international advertising accolades for his commercial work, including several Clio Awards, the Moebius Award, the Grand Prix at the BDA Awards, honors from the New York, Houston and Chicago Film Festivals and the Art Directors Club.

His work has garnered 12 MTV Music Video Award nominations resulting in four MTV Music Video Awards, including a 1993 MTV Best European Video Award for “Killer/Papa was a Rolling Stone” by George Michael. Nispel has won two Billboard awards and Music Video Filmmaker Association Awards as well as the MVPA Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001.

Marcus Nispel has been the subject of two documentaries and was featured in Time Magazine’s year-end issue “Best of 1996″ for his Fidelity Investments campaign, “A Time Has Come Today.”

In 1997, Nispel was featured as a speaker at the AICP MOMA Show. The AICP has honored him with several awards and his work is now part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art.

His work has been highlighted and screened at the New York Film Festival, the Art Director’s Club and at the Film and Broadcast Museum in Frankfurt.

In 1996 he was honored at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s “Cross Cultural Dreams” retrospective of his music videos. He was featured in a chapter of Armond White’s book on the pop revolution and was a recipient of the Black Achievement Award for the positive portrayal of African Americans in mass media.

Nispel has been featured in Vogue, Vanity Fair, Details, The New York Times, The LA Times, AdWeek, AdAge and Creativity.

In 2003 his feature film debut “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” for New Line Cinema grossed over 100,000,000 dollars, making it the most profitable movie of the year.

His first venture in directing and producing for television: a modern retelling of “Frankenstein” written by Dean Koontz and co-produced by Nispel and Martin Scorsese.

Presently, Marcus is about to begin pre production on his next feature film, “Pathfinder”, which he developed and is co-producing with producer Mike Medavoy at Phoenix Pictures. In tandem, Marcus will publish the three-part Graphic Novel of “Pathfinder”.

Matthijs Van Heijningen

Matthijs Van Heijningen (1944) has been a director for over a decade, but he has lived and breathed film his entire life. The son of a prominent Dutch movie producer, Matthjs spent his teenage years taking photographs and working on his father’s films in every capacity, learning each facet of filmmaking from building sets to lighting to editing. It’s no surprise, then, that he has a preternatural talent for telling stories on film, nor that he has become one of the most acclaimed commercial directors in Europe.

on the left

Since1999, Matthijs has won a half-dozen Cannes Lions, the most prestigious awards in advertising, as well as countless other festival honors and awards. His work on behalf of Toyota, Peugeot, Renault, Stella Artois, Pepsi, Heineken, Visa, insurance companies Delta Lloyd and Central Beheer, and his stunning spot “Chess” for the Archipelago electronic stock exchange-among many others-have all reinforced Matthijs’ commitment to developing multi-dimensional, human characters within the short-form context. “People are interested in characters’ adventures and this catches the audience’s attention for the message,” he says. His deeply-felt connection to his characters gives Matthijs’ spots a uniquely warm quality and a vividly intelligent sense of humor. “Your commercials should be personal,” he says. “If you don’t feel a personal attachment to what you make, it’s somebody else’s and it probably won’t have a soul.”

Joining MJZ in 2003, Matthijs has brought his dry, sometimes absurdist, world view to an American audience. “Nobody asks to watch a commercial,” he says. “I think you should entertain people one way or another.” Matthijs collaborates with agency creatives throughout the development process, to find unexpected depths in any concept. This commitment to telling great stories with arresting visuals, combined with his interest in the quirks of his characters, leads to a smart, comic sensibility that plays on either continent.

Finally, his process is about having fun. From the short films he made during his legal studies as a young man, to some of the biggest, most high-profile jobs in the global advertising world, this signature sensibility is visible in all the film he shoots. Ironic comedy, solid narratives and a beautiful cinematic aesthetic will always be fundamental to his work. For all his filmic dexterity, however, Matthijs does admit, when pressed, that he is an extremely clumsy man.