What was the original brief and how did your treatment develop the film?

The brief was to link sports/the Olympic Games to actuality. The goal was to find a young top sportsman whose goal was to do the next Olympics in a country where the political and financial situation wasn’t a certitude.

Was Greece always the intended location? You seem to have an innate sense of the Greek culture in the detailing of the film.

Originally we planned to shoot somewhere in eastern Europe, but the agency proposed to shoot in Greece, because of its political and financial situation. With Greece being the cradle of the Olympic games, we felt that was a good choice and we started to analyze everything around the Olympic games and Greek tradition. Discus throwing is one of the primal sports, so we thought that we had to search for a young discus thrower.

What were the main challenges of the production and how did you overcome them?

Our budget was tight and the Greek authority thought that we were going to make Greece and their Games ridiculous, so we had to fight against that prejudgement. And of course the fact that we like to shoot in a very improvisational way and the Greek market isn’t at all used to working that way. We talked with the production team a couple of times to explain how we think and work. The moment we understood each other we worked very well together and the set producer was really strong in convincing the people to work with us.

How do you two work together? Do you take turns at directing different spots or do you work on every project side-by-side. How do you decide on the roles or is there an easy, defined process of working together?

We work together in a very organic way, there are no rules and no specific tasks, we just go with the flow and see how the situation turns out. We try to operate as open as possible towards the film and the project, so if something turns up which is better than the original idea then we try to implicate that in the film.