Never let it be said that Harald Zwart doesn't give back to his country. Yielding only about six hours of daylight in the winter season, Norway's capable of leveling some pretty man-sized winter blahs on its inhabitants, so the director's doing his part by raising national spirits one guffaw-inducing spot at a time. Even though he now calls Los Angeles his home, Zwart has maintained Herculean levels of output in the Scandinavian commercial world - by the time we finally got a hold of him, he was wrapping his ninth spot in four weeks.

A gifted comedic director, Zwart's best commercials capitalize on Scandinavia's edgier brand of humor. One spot for Norwegian snack food Kims has a pair of soccer fans and a gay male couple getting their groceries mixed up. Neither pair realize the mistake until they get home, where the soccer buddies unpack their vegetables in horror and the couple screams like schoolgirls. Another spot for a treat called Smash! shows a conular Smash! mascot getting the bejesus kicked out of him for refusing a second sample to a patron in a mall. The tagline? "You can't have just one."

Zwart's commercial workload is doubly impressive when you consider that it's just an element of everything he's doing overall. In addition to co-founding the film company Motion Blur (of which there are American and Norwegian offices) with business partner and wife Veslemøy Ruud Zwart, as well as recently signing with Villains for US commercial work, the Dutch-born, Norwegian-raised director is building on a career in feature films that includes One Night At McCool's and the box-office success Special Agent: Cody Banks. We caught up with him on location in Norway, where he was kind enough to dish on everything from lunch with Steven Spielberg to how Robert Zemeckis changed his life.

My Dad is Dutch, so I was born in Holland. We moved to Norway when I was young, and I started making Super 8 films when I was eight years old. After high school I went straight to the Dutch Film Academy in Amsterdam. I spent four years there, and my graduation film ended up being shown on Scandinavian television. It was an adventure-comedy about a kid who wanted to fake his own suicide but ended up actually dying. It was a sarcastic look at life. There were lots of special effects, it was sort of a Back To The Future clone. Since then, I haven't had a workless day!

Aside from Star Wars, Back To The Future was probably the film that had the most impact on me. I'm a fan of Scorsese and Spielberg and all that stuff, but I saw Back To The Future during my first year of film school and thought it had the most perfect craftsmanship.

I did nearly 20 commercials for BBH before I moved to the States, and they opened the door to Hollywood. Steven Spielberg invited me and my wife to lunch. You can imagine what it was like to meet him. People like that make it easy for people like us - they know we're in such awe when you meet them that they just normalize stuff. He's a really nice man and I respect him enormously.

Two weeks later we packed our bags and moved to the States. Later that year, in 1999, we started Motion Blur to have a local company to facilitate all the European commercials. Soon after that, we started Motion Blur Scandinavia.

We had no commercial training in film school, it was all drama. I'd done lots of shorts, but the thing that nobody taught me was the whole political issue. How to treat the clients, the agencies, what to say, the fact that sometimes its faster to do a new alternative as opposed to just discussing it, all those things.

One Night At McCool's was my first real feature in the States. Funnily enough the transition wasn't that enormous. I've found it's easier to make things in the States - they appreciate your talent. There's a reason they hire you, whereas sometimes in Scandinavia you're an alibi for funding.

It was also nice to be coached by Michael Douglas, who was the co-producer. The best directorial advice I got from him was to always trust your first instinct. If you think it's funny the first time, it's probably funny, so don't start second guessing yourself. Sometimes it's easy to doubt yourself.

I love doing commercials, I can't stop. It's so hard to turn down a great idea. My commercial work has ended up being more humorous than my dramatic work. I've done three features, and although they were sort of comedy-driven, my commercials are wackier and wilder [with a] dark, sarcastic humor. My theory is that Norway is such a little market that you can get away with more. In the States, there are so many people you can offend - it's even impossible to make a car commercial. I did a car commercial for Mini Cooper, and the whole idea was to have two people driving like crazy through town... but they weren't supposed to drive illegally! I remember thinking 'Oh my God, it's supposed to be crazy but they're going to drive at the speed limit?'

We were deep into the sequel for Cody Banks when I decided [against] it. The first was a hit, so that's the kind of movie I get offered now. There were numerous reasons I decided not to do it, but I want to do a movie for which I'm not necessarily perfect in the studio's mind. I'd love to make something like Memento, or a big adventure comedy. With adults!

Motion Blur> http://www.motionblur.no
Villains> http://www.villains.com