Pantera unhinged

23rd February 2022

Pantera unhinged

Title of film: Jacques, Ordinary Victories l: Opening

Director: Pantera

Production Company: Solab

We’ve always associated directing collective Pantera with heart-melting narrative short films and music videos, but now they’ve released these surreal, wonderfully whacky series for French musician Jacques. Increasingly working out of Paris, the Argentinian directors - aka Francisco Canton and Pato Martnez - talk to us about the art of idiosyncrasy and irreverence and the importance of casting the right worm

What was the initial brief for this series for Jacques new album, Ordinary Victories? Was it ever going to be anything else other than surreally funny?

There wasn’t really a brief, we wanted to work with Jacques for a long time so we started writing some ideas for him, and got to a point where we had 20 ideas for really short films, and we started to develop them with him, in his flat in Paris. We ended up going for 10.

We wanted to steer away from any sort of preconceived idea of a “music video” and seize the chance to make something a bit more irreverent, with a more irregular structure, and have Jacques be the link between all of it. We’ve also been waiting for a long time to make something in this tone, which is way more up our alley than a lot of the other things we usually do!

Please tell us about the creative process – where did the initial crazy idea come from?

Well first we jumped on a LOT of zoom calls together with Jacques to start to pick his brain and think of things together, it was very collaborative. Then we flew to Paris and sat down with Jacques for 10 days straight, and started to choose the ideas that we felt would be not only feasible within our budget but also aligned with Jacques’s very cerebral and unpredictable way of thinking. The album he made speaks about the concept of void and its importance, so it was a starting point but then we quickly moved into other sorts of ideas that didn’t necessarily respond to the album’s concept, but rather Jacques’ idiosyncrasy.

Any major challenges with the production?

Much less than what we expected! We were very lucky to have our producers at Solab kind of blindly go into this. We had no treatment, just a text file with a lot of ideas, and a sense that we kind of knew where this was going. We were sure that we wanted to shoot it in the way we’re most used to, which is on a skeleton crew and an ability to react and change plans on the run. Everyone who took part in the process enjoyed it as much as we did. The only REAL challenge was to cast the right worm for the worm video 🙂

Are you now based in Paris?

Not really but we’re there a lot and plan to do it more in the near future!