After enduring the endless accounts of angst-ridden penury that mark the early careers of many auteurs it's refreshing to hear the assured confidence that propelled 30-year-old Czech-born director Martin Krejci behind the camera. "I just did what I enjoyed and because I had the opportunity I never thought about it [as a career], it was just a natural process," he says over the phone from Prague. "I auditioned for Czech movies when I was 11 years old and it's there I saw that you can play with all those tools so I bought myself a Super 8 camera. I was lucky because I always knew that directing was my goal."

After a five-year directing course at the world-renowned Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU) in Prague, Krejci did have a self-confessed lapse of vocational faith, "struggling and not knowing what I wanted to do." Then an IKEA spot for the Polish market (made while signed to Dawson Productions) caught the eye of Stink EP Daniel Bergmann. After receiving "an offer I couldn't refuse", he signed with them three years ago, and is now also repped by Smuggler in the US.

From the outset Krejci's classical training has translated into a technically impressive, genre-encompassing reel of captivating visual storytelling. It ranges from the devastatingly effective Amnesty International domestic violence PSA "Fight Club" (his first through Stink) to the silent movie period piece "La Bouteille" for Stella Artois. He's also flexed his model-making and animation skills in Ford "Next Generation", an in-vitro, in-camera mood piece, and adidas "Adi Dassler", his most recent stop motion tour-de-force.

[You know] the plot for the new Michel Gondry film Be Kind Rewind where they remake films? That's exactly what I did as a child: Ghostbusters 6, 7 and 8. Films like Ghostbusters and Batteries Not Included were the only Western films that were screened here in cinemas. They were my favorites. Then later on, when I got some brains, I started to go deeper into film and into the new Hollywood - Coppola, Friedkin and all that.

I don't think filmmaking is the most important activity in the world. I really enjoy it; it's the only thing I feel I have a real passion and sense for, but I'm trying to keep some distance. I believe you need that to be good at it; it's about communication and I don't want to become unintelligible.

The Czech film industry doesn't exist anymore. It's just some stupid commercial stuff, because it doesn't earn money. In the '60s, during the "Prague Spring" [the political liberalization of Czechoslovakia], there was a real hippie influence, even here. Because the film industry was state-owned and films didn't have to make money, a generation of filmmakers like Milos Forman and Džil Mensel really managed to make films freely but with all the [infrastructure] they would have in the States. Unfortunately it's something that the young generation of filmmakers is really struggling with. They're always put up against this star generation of the '60s. But that can't be repeated because times are so different.

When I was at FAMU it was conservative, but in a good way. After you learn the craft, then you can experiment, but it's important to know how you can express things. Of course you have to know what you want to express, but you have to be capable of working with all the tools that filmmaking can give you.

I'm not trying to establish a certain style. What I like is when a script comes in and I like the idea and I see the potential of building some emotions. Then we decide the style we want to do it in and my goal is to have the simplest, cleanest approach.

Online filmmaking [for Stella and adidas] wasn't different for me. I found later on the advantage of it - the time. You're not as limited as you are with TV or cinema. I was lucky because we did big campaigns and the influence of the web space was just a change of media, [the work] wasn't affected by it much. From my viewpoint it's just storytelling.

For adidas, I thought "Let's make it a little bit 'fairytale' but not cheap like Harry Potter. Let's make it cute in a nice way." And I liked that perspective on normal storytelling from a sports brand. What attracted me to the project was the ambition to make something like animation without using the typical tools of animation. Normally you have animation for making things simpler and easier and with a certain artistic point of view. We decided to turn that upside-down and make something hyper-realistic, but using this animation technique and shooting everything for real. We spent months on it; 32 days just matching each frame of the filmed footage of an actor in the studio to the stop-motion animation. It was like a Buddhist exercise, and I'm not really patient.

I have a lot of people who work with me and I'm tough with them sometimes which I regret later on, so I always want to be able to look them in the face and have the feeling that it was worth it. I'm trying to pick things that I really like and that I want to invest my energy, and that of other people, into.

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