I have to sell my idea, but they want it to be sold. I don't think I've ever done anything anyone's regretted.
— Jonas Akerlund
With my own work, I’ve always tried at least to wake people up and shake them out of their complacency. And that’s always easier if I’m working with an artist who really has something to say.
Now, with YouTube, the audience decides. You can make something that is 20 minutes long or one minute long.
I’m a commercial director; I do some very very commercial stuff in the commercial world. My music videos are always analyzed. I need to think about what the audience is going to think.
I don’t have much patience as I really like to work a lot and it is really hard to work a lot in movies because you have to have patience - every movie is a huge test of patience.
Especially in Los Angeles you get attached to these projects and then they lie around and you wait and look for that moment in time when everything just works out - every movie that gets made here in LA is a little bit of a miracle.
Polar' is based on the first and a little bit on the second book and all the characters from those novels are in there. The story is based on the graphic novel, but when it came to the execution of the film I felt I couldn’t really make a movie without any dialogue.
Even in Los Angeles, I stop the car and walk. People look at me and think I am lost or something, they stop and ask if they can help me.
Videos are all about making an impression in the moment. If you're lucky, you make a classic that people talk about for years.
The guys in U2, whom I work with a lot, have a very open political agenda.
Even when I wrap my work and come home or whatever it is I try to do, I can identify with that feeling of being a little outside, of struggling to get back into normality.
I have a pile of scripts at home that I love. Some of them are hard to get made. We have to give up stuff. It’s hard to get movies made.
I am a very spread out type of director as I just love working in all of these different worlds; I go from commercials to music videos to art projects.
As a music video director, I have about 4 billion hits on my music videos on YouTube, and I’m really proud of that.
Anybody who comes to Stockholm in the summer for the first time and walks around the city at night must think that we're weird.
Because I'm traveling so much, Stockholm has become more and more a place for me to recharge and be creative, and then I head back on the road again.
I think anyone with a voice should use it. I think a lot of people could, and should, do a lot more.
In many ways, 'Lords of Chaos' is my first real movie. I went deeper with this film than any of my other movies. I approached my other films like I did my music videos or commercials, like jobs. But 'Lords of Chaos' I wrote myself, and it’s a close, personal story.
I never get to think about myself when I do films. I started in advertising, so I always have to think about what my client and my audience things. If a film doesn’t work, it’s a big failure.
I’m pretty spoiled. I work a lot. I go from project to project.
That is one of the sides of Los Angeles that I really like as people may have their big careers but there is one side to Hollywood that is always open to taking risks - as long as it doesn’t include risking too much money.
I’d never really shot action scenes before, but I realized early on that is very much like shooting choreography and dance.
I do most of my post production in Stockholm, usually at night, so when I get out of the office at 3 or 4 in the morning, I usually walk around the city before I go home - that's my routine.
I’ve always been drawn to movies where I get a chance to look into a world that I kind of know about, but that I never really get to see what’s happening behind the doors.
