That's the question we end up asking, in some form, on every project. Not what is it about, not where does it live, not how much does it cost... what is it for. What do you want the person watching to feel, or think, or remember, or forget? What job is this thing doing in the world?
We ask because we've learned, slowly and a little painfully, that a beautifully made film doing the wrong job is worse than a scrappy film doing exactly the right one. And we ask because the answer usually tells us which of us should lead, and what kind of work we're actually in for.
rubenpaulruben is a
film production house that makes: 'regular' tv commercials; branded social that doesn't look branded; low-budget music videos pretending they cost a fortune; expensive music videos pretending to be the work of a drunk toddler with a VHS; (fake) documentaries, and; …whenever we can sneak it in, a short film for no good reason at all!
We are a team of six. Three founders, as our name suggests and three producers. Each of us arriving at the work through a different door. Our production team includes the functional adults Kitty, Titus and Tesse. Our directors team exists out of; A researcher-fixer with a talent for helpfully misunderstanding things into better ideas. A set-native who's already sequenced the whole film in his head before anyone's called action. A thinker-editor who goes quiet mid-lunch to solve something none of us had noticed was broken. (Click a name to find out who does what!).
What we all share is an unreasonable fondness for the detail nobody would notice, the idea that's slightly riskier than the brief asked for, and the film that still, against all odds, feels like it was made by actual humans who gave a damn.
Do you give a damn?
Meet Ruben Faber. The one you probably want on the phone. Ruben is what happens when you take a meticulous researcher, hand him a negotiating licence, and raise him to be constitutionally incapable of being unkind to anyone. He tidies up behind the rest of us. He probably mispronounces your name, but he'll read your forty-page brief on a Sunday and come back on Monday morning with the four questions nobody had thought to ask.
He also, and this is important, mishears things. Constantly. Beautifully. A client will say one thing and Ruben will hear the slightly better version, or the slightly weirder version, and sometimes the idea we all end up falling in love with is the idea that started life as Ruben nodding along to something no one actually said.
What to book him for:
Treatments that need a spine before they need a twist. Productions where the brief is scattered and someone has to find the line through it. Work with a lot of moving parts, a lot of people, a lot of budgets to be smiled through. The ones that need a grown-up at the wheel, the kind of grown-up who'll crack the room up five minutes in.
All three of us call ourselves directors, but if you cornered us and made us pick, Paul's the one we'd quietly push forward. He has the kind of film intuition that can't really be taught, the ability to walk onto a set, watch a scene unfold once, and already know which shot needs to come next. And which one after that. And which one not to shoot at all.
He lives inside the edit before anyone's rolled a single frame. On set he's three steps ahead: blocking, pacing, coverage, what the scene is actually about. A quiet kind of superpower. He doesn't announce it. He just reshapes the day around it while the rest of us are still looking for our coffee.
He is also, for the record, a deeply gentle human being. Too gentle, probably, to be the kind of director who throws chairs. Which turns out to be exactly the kind of director a lot of people want on their set.
What to book him for:
Scripted work, narrative, anything with performers. Commercials that actually need to move. Music videos where the choreography of the shots is the thing. Any project where intuition will do more for the final cut than plan.
And then there's Ruben van Duijn. The one who, on set, mid-conversation, mid-lunch, will go very quiet, place whatever happens to be in his hand into his mouth (a pen, a bit of tape, a lens cap, don't ask), narrow his eyes like an on-set Charles Bronson, and stare somewhere past the horizon. He's cooking. When he comes back, he'll have solved something the rest of us hadn't realised was broken yet.
Ruben is what a good ADD brain looks like when you point it at film. He jumps around, sees fourteen things at once, forgets where he put his phone, and then, when the material is in front of him and the edit needs to be cracked, he drops into a hyperfocus so dense you could pour it into a bucket. He's the one with the big imagination, the one who'll sketch a sequence nobody else had thought of, the one who'll say 'what if we cut the entire first half' and turns out to be right.
What to book him for:
Anything post-heavy. Anything where the story actually gets told in the edit. Concepting that needs a wild brain at the whiteboard. Projects that need someone to see a version of the film that doesn't exist yet and describe it in enough detail that the rest of us can go and build it.
