Chateau Marmont - Mercer Hotel - Sunset Beach

Sometime in 1998, I was hired as the creative lead for Christina Greeven (Cuomo)’s magazine, Manhattan File. She had negotiated with André Balazs for us to produce a supplement on his hotels (Chateau Marmont, Mercer Hotel, and Sunset Beach). André was interested in having Michael Mundy be the photographer as Michael had quite a reputation at the time for shooting just about everything for André’s rival Ian Schrager. Christina and André were being quite sneaky as they convinced Michael to shoot at his editorial rate although this was pretty much an advertorial. I knew nothing about interior photography as I had been working exclusively within the fashion world for high-end brands and editorial shoots. We met at the Mercer in SoHo and hit it off immediately although Michael was quite alarmed at first when I asked for a decaf espresso (I was on one of those kicks were I had just given up coffee). André then joined us with his creative advisor Tibor Kalman (the legendary graphic designer known for Colors magazine) and they began telling us what they wanted us to do (some kind of hour by hour visual narration of a day in the life at the hotel). I was still young, naïve, and arrogant and understood that since I was the creative director that as much as it was nice to get their input, I would do what we wanted. Right after André and Tibor left us, I told Michael that we did not need to listen to them and we began thinking of what to actually do. We quickly learned that we were both big fans of Wong Kar-wai and decided to use only Asian models and approach the shoot as if it were a part of Chungking Express or Fallen Angels. We just clicked and built our absurd visual narrative fueled with fully caffeinated espressos, packs of cigarettes, and some occasional joints, each pushing each other to take it further. We then edited everything by cutting up contacts sheets and put together this book that I hand-bound with print outs from my color printer. The whole project was a wonderful experience, we were super psyched about how everything turned out. This began our 20+ years of collaborations and friendship as well as quickly ended my time at the magazine, prompting me to launch my own.  —Jan-Willem Dikkers