Puck Litaay: A Few Of My Favourite Things

Director Puck Litaay is no stranger to building colourful, slightly off-kilter worlds.

Based in Amsterdam, Litaay moves between commercials and fiction, with projects including Spijkerbroekelite and films for brands including Philips, Chouffe, Ace & Tate and Mobiel.

For his Favourite Things, he lets us into the very colourful cocoon he calls home, complete with ceiling cinema, toilet art gallery and one extremely fluffy creative supervisor.

The Purple Chair

My house usually doubles as my workspace, and when I’m deep in a project I like to cocoon and disappear for a while.

This chair lets me do exactly that, as it’s basically a giant pillow that envelops you.

I love colour and interior design, so finding it vintage felt like a real win, and I love how the purple really jumps out at you.

It’s where I draw storyboards on my iPad, work on my laptop or read a book, with a great view onto the street where I can see people pass by and we sometimes have accidental, and awkward, eye contact when they’re nosily peeking in.

It’s also my cat’s favourite chair, so there’s always a lint roller next to it.

The chair can be put into several different positions, from upright to flat, which is important for my next item:

The Projector

I like projecting films onto the ceiling.

This is mostly because there’s so much stuff on the walls that there’s no empty wall to project on.

I’m fairly selective about what goes up there: films that entertain me, but can also inspire me or teach me something.

Real Housewives is a guilty pleasure, but that stays on the laptop.

I’ve recently started watching Jacques Demy’s films on the ceiling, and discovered Peau d’Âne (Donkey Skin) and Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) as new, but old, favourites.

The latter has the most stunning use of colour, which I can’t wait to take into a future project.

The film is also full of equally colourful, hand-painted wallpapers that I don’t think would have spoken to me as much if I’d watched them on a small screen.

It also confirmed to me that I’m missing wallpaper in my house.

Setting up the projector is quite the ritual, but that’s part of what tunes me into the experience.

I have quite a short attention span, but just like the chair, this creates a cocoon where I can watch and get inspired with no distractions!

The Fluffy Cat

Otje is my cat.

She’s a fluffy muted calico I’ve had for a little over a year.

Working from home a lot, I really missed having a cat around, having grown up with them throughout my life.

You wouldn’t think it looking at her now, but she’s a rescue who lived on the streets of Bahrain before being saved by a wonderful organisation called Rescats.

I love how independent cats are, and in both work and personal life, I consider myself quite cat-like: the way they observe, how clear they are about what they want and how they communicate it.

She’s a bit of a princess, always around asking for cuddles, on her own terms.

I’m quite jealous of her when I hit a creative block and see her sleeping on the sofa without a care in the world, but that’s also a reminder that, if time allows, I should step away for a bit to get the creative flow going!

The Toilet Photo Wall

In the toilet I’ve built a photo wall consisting of artworks, postcards and photographs that I’ve found around and find inspiring, as well as some personal images.

The goal is that this expands to ultimately cover all the walls in things I just love looking at.

Among my favourites is this iso-printed series of photographed vintage doll clothes, which is where this wall started.

I got it as a birthday present from a friend, and I love how the series is both haunting and cute and colourful, which is a crossroads where I like to work too.

Another is this riso A3 poster from my very first fiction short, Spijkerbroekelite (Denim Dynasty).

This, and all the titles in the film, were designed by the super-talented Henrik Kongsvoll, who created a full custom typeface for the film poster and film itself.

The Print

This is probably a bit obscure for an international audience, but this is a print of children’s book characters called Jip & Janneke, written by Annie M.G. Schmidt and illustrated by the wonderfully talented Fiep Westendorp.

The characters are drawn as silhouettes, a style that goes back to the 1950s due to the printing limitations when they first appeared in a Dutch newspaper, before becoming books that many Dutch children still grow up with today.

I find the collaboration of Annie M.G. Schmidt and Fiep Westendorp very inspiring, because the stories and illustrations are both whimsical and, sometimes, surprisingly dark at the same time.

I used to be obsessed with the illustrations and the audio cassette when I was a child, and I believe it has heavily influenced my taste and the stories I want to tell.

I enjoy working with dark humour and the subversive: taking a subject that’s dark and treating it lightly, or vice versa.

My cat Otje’s name also comes from a story by the same author.