“It’s a Creative Decision”: Why Easy Mondays and Saskia d’Altena Are Heading to London
Sometimes films are seen, and sometimes they’re felt. Saskia d’Altena, EP with Easy Mondays, is chasing film as a feeling – a search which has led her and the bespoke production studio to London.
For the past few years, the UK-born Saskia has been immersed in the production scene in New York. From behind the scenes, she’s helped pull together work for household name brands like McDonald’s, Timberland and MLB, from snappy social-focused fare to ambitious branded content. That included an ad featuring Slick Rick and Flau’jae for Puma’s celebration of Hip Hop’s 50th anniversary and, as with almost all of her work, contending with tight timelines and producing visuals that feel bigger than their budget. Now, having moved stateside almost a decade ago and built her career in the hustle and grind of NYC, Saskia is heading home. It’s a move which supports expansion for Easy Mondays, and unlocks opportunities for new talent and new clients. But as much as it’s motivated by the head, Saskia’s journey to London is also driven by her heart.
“It’s a creative decision as much as anything else,” she tells LBB. “As a team we love the creative in the UK, we have always loved the work that’s coming out of there both from agencies and brands. We want to push for our directors to be a part of that, and develop them from a creative standpoint first and foremost.”
Spend an hour speaking with Saskia, and you’ll get the sense of a profound drive to make work that matters, that’s felt – both between Easy Mondays’ commercial films and her own plans for creating original content. On balance, she feels there’s more fertile ground in which to explore that ambition in the UK than the US. “There are more commercials coming out of the UK which challenge audiences, politics, and society”, she says. “Of course I’m drawn to that. I want to make people feel something.”
There’s an “identity crisis” coursing through the veins of culture in the US, as Saskia describes it. For brands seeking to craft work that stands out, that’s a problem. “People are trying to make work with universal appeal in a country that’s desperately divided,” she explains.
For anyone living in the post-Brexit UK, it might come as news to hear your country described as a comparative beacon of political and social cohesion. But Saskia contends that there’s a lingering universality to culture in Britain, something which creates enough space for work to be challenging whilst not alienating. “The beauty of having platforms like the BBC, ITV, and Channel 4 is that there’s a critical mass of people who are watching the same things,” she says. “An example that comes to mind is ‘Small Axe’, an amazing series of films by Steve McQueen about the West Indian community in London. My Grandparents are unfortunately some of the biggest Brexiters I know, but they watched that because it’s on the BBC and we talked about it when I was last home. That’s the kind of shared cultural reference point that’s much rarer in the US”.
As a result, there are opportunities for work that isn’t afraid to be part of culture’s frayed edges. One example that jumps to Saskia’s mind is ‘Defy the Noise’, a visceral ad for beats which nods directly to the racist abuse faced by Bukayo Saka and other England players in the wake of penalty shootout defeat in the European Championships final.
“Don’t get me wrong, I understand that what we’re talking about is the 1% of advertising where you get to tell those stories”, she concedes. And that’s a driving force behind another of Saskia’s priorities ahead of the London move: A renewed focus on original content.
Nothing Beats an Original
“I’ll be honest”, says Saskia as she reflects on her motivations behind prioritising original content through Easy Mondays. “It started from a conversation around morale – and more specifically my morale”.
The cut and thrust of production life is relentless. Early mornings chasing sunrises bleed into exhausting late nights, with sheer passion and a love for the craft justifying the lifestyle. But, when the creative returns are diminished, that becomes a much less appealing proposition.
‘Original content’, then, is part of Saskia and Easy Mondays’ answer to a question of creative pride, and giving directors the space to make what they want to make, and tell the stories that maybe don’t have a place in commercials. And, again, it feeds into the studio’s wider goals around helping directors to grow and develop, giving them a chance to produce work that an agency might not think they’re capable of because it doesn’t exist on their reel. “This is something I’ve spoken with Asori [Soto, EP and founder of Easy Mondays] about a lot”, she continues.
On which note, Saskia is already walking the walk. “I’d been working with Rocio Crudo on a commercial about a year ago, and she came to me with this mad idea for a film about an alien walking around a city,” she says. “I helped put a script together based on her idea, with no dialogue or audio, and we directed it together in Miami. It was so energising to see the creative juices flowing in someone I really respected, and to feel the same way myself.”
Those are the kind of projects which help filmmakers grow, preserving the low-budget trickery that’s sometimes lost in the commercial world. The resulting work, and the fact that it is so energising, provides the requisite fuel to keep going in a challenging industry. “So many of us are creatively starved,” reflects Saskia, “and you know what? Audiences are, too.”
And in the UK, she’s found the creative appetite to which she and Easy Mondays are striving to cater.
Easy Like Monday Morning
When your work has the potential to be such a source of pride, it invariably runs deep within you. “I’ve always had a sense of insecurity that came along with producing,” says Saskia. “It stems back to how I went to school for writing and directing, but I dropped out. I fell into producing because it was easy for me to help people and connect talent with work. But it also became an easy place for me to hide.”
That idea of ‘hiding’ is a pernicious one – but there’s a cold logic behind Saskia’s explanation. “I ultimately knew that, if a job really blew up or fell apart, it wasn’t going to be my fundamental idea which took criticism” she notes. “I’m not creatively vulnerable, and you can get too comfortable in that invulnerability. You can hold back from taking a chance on yourself and your ideas. You get scared.”
This also explains her own move into directing. “It was time to take a bet on myself”, she says. “Often, I was weighing in on treatments and even on-set, and it feels like it’s time I basically put my money where my mouth is and be more accountable for the work”.
It’s a move which embraces pride, but rejects fame. “There’s definitely a point when you’re early in a production career where you want to be on the big, cutting-edge music videos, and you’re looking to get that clout. But freeing yourself from that is probably the best thing you can do.”
Instead, it’s a pure reminder that film can mean something. Not in a preachy way, as a means to an end of delivering a message – but an end in its own right. “The first 30 seconds of our upcoming original content is spent watching someone trying to get up off the floor,” says Saskia. “It’s not an easy watch – whatever the opposite of pandering is, that’s it. But we don't care - it’s our original content and we’re free to do what we want.”
At its best, film production is kinetic, chaotic, and rewarding. Those are the films which are felt, because they were made with feeling. Maybe Saskia is right, and we are all creatively starved. But in London, she and Easy Mondays are ready to feast.
