Keeping his creative impulses in Czech has never been easy for Ivan Zacharias, and as such the 29-year-old director has been ranging the world with authentic cinematic production values on his mind.

Aside from England, Zacharias has filmed commercials in South Africa, Namibia, Hong Kong, Japan, Mexico and the US (including Hawaii). Although he began his career as a documentary DP, Zacharias has been directing spots since 1994. Commercials for clients ranging from Land Rover, Coke, Whiskas, Mitsubishi, Audi, United Airlines, the British Army, Volvo, eTour, Givenchy, JCDecaux and VW are just some of the roughly 45 commercials he estimates he's directed in his seven years as a spot director with London's Stink.

"Generally it takes me around two months because I do all the post and everything. Many directors pass on it, but I absolutely don't understand because the biggest fun is in post-production: sound and editing. In the editing room is where you actually make the film," says Zacharias, who consistently works with the same editor, Filip Malasek and DP, Jan Velicky.

Zacharias just finished two Coca-Cola spots through McCann-Erickson, New York, one shot in New York, the other in Mexico City with La Fábrica Films. One features a group of young hipsters making their way home from a concert via subway, the stifling heat knocking all but one young man unconscious. As the train moves through the urban landscape, the young man considers his friends and, as perspiration curls down his face, lifts a Coke from his sleeping friend's possession. The other spot shows a boy in a sunny city park dominated by outside chess stations; the boy approaches a wizened old chess master who condescendingly agrees to play the youth; he loses to the neo-Bobby Fischer and declines a rematch as the kid swallows his cola. Zacharias says his starting point on the project was voice-over tracks rather than boards.

"That's why I liked it, because the idea was to use the voice of the main actor through the film, which I always like in movies. I've always wanted to work like this, it's very personal," he says. "You're immediately closer to the character. I like storytelling, not just shooting stupid images and putting them together."

Working with the child talent in one spot was a challenge for the director, who feared the performance could slip into an overly sweet vein rather than the naturalistic feel he sought for the spot. He says the other spot, featuring the homeward bound concert goers was closer to his own youthful excursions and it was therefore easier to fabricate this naturalistic feel.

"If you have artificial things [i.e., trendy effects] in commercials, they might be cool at the moment. But if you see those commercials again in five years, you realize [they're] bad. If you have a nice commercial that says something about how we behave it works forever," he says. "So I want to make films that will last longer than half a year, rather than ones in which the style is trendy and then it's gone."

As well as capturing the authenticity he sought, it was also helpful that the agency granted Zacharias and friends license to finish the Coke campaign. "They understood the way I work. They called because they liked some of my previous work and wanted similar stuff, so they let me finish it because otherwise I wouldn't do it. They know if I can't finish it, I'm not interested," he says matter-of-factly.

Like much of his best work, these spots were shot on location rather than in studio. Perhaps his roots in documentary filmmaking are showing, but Zacharias finds the unpredictability of "live" locations offers authenticity not to be duplicated by the best art departments. Land Rover Freelander's "Born Free" for WCRS, London, was shot on location in the savannah of Namibia to create the feeling of a wild beast being released from captivity into its natural habitat (in this case, the SUV stands in for the wildlife). On top of the locale, Zacharias processed the film to achieve a coloring specific to the reality-film sentiment of the spot.

"We used a special process in the labs," he says. "We shot it on 16mm because we wanted to get that kind of imagery, the kind of strange look like maybe the film was exposed the wrong way in the field."

Despite such painstaking attention to detail, Zacharias is unsure he considers commercial making an artistic endeavor. As such, he turns down the bulk of the 200+ scripts he receives each year in favor of projects into which he willingly immerses himself. As of the last check, Zacharias was putting together eight trailers for Prague's Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (starring a slightly demented and perverted projectionist) and letting his fancies drift back towards documentary projects.

"Basically, the most enjoyable work for me is to be a DP on a documentary. You have to decide what to shoot, when to turn on the camera, when to zoom in," he says. "So basically, that's what I like because it's kind of improvisation and you constantly have to be ready. You can't have a good director of a documentary and a bad DP. A good DP can shoot much more interesting stuff than a bad director can think up."

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