We had a talk with Aus Taylor and Marleaux Desire - the film directors of the creative collective ILLIMITÉWORLD - known for their innovatively experimental takes on classic cinema filmmaking.

I feel like we take a Hip Hop approach to everything, even visually. Hip Hop is like, we're just sampling stuff. We're remixing stuff. We say things like a flip. We always try to do something fresh. Even the editing has a Hip Hop rhythm to it. Everything feels like a Hip Hop approach.

Well it’s funny because, you know, we have a big collective. We’ve been here from the start. Then we got homies overseas that I feel rep Illimité all over. It’s kinda bigger than us, that’s why the online presence is the way it is – that’s there’s not that much information. That's kind of purposeful, you know, cause we kind of wanted to be ambiguous and bigger than the people involved.

Actually, we were doing creative direction at a homie’s label – Hardpink. We just did this whole rollout for an artist named Uno Hype and they actually saw that project and they wanted to work with us. It was two music videos at first – Heavy Metal and Force of Habit. I feel like Force of Habit has that Hip Hop mentality that was like no crew. It was me, Marleaux, our homie J, Phil, and M – that was it, only a five-person crew.Me and Marleaux actually owned the camera ourselves - hands on the camera, and then just chopping it ourselves. You know, that was actually one of our favourite projects with them.

NBA YoungBoy. I mean, the bro is interesting. It’d be cool to work with Pharrell, especially now that he’s at Louis V… would love to do more fashion films.

I know one aspiration we always had since before were directing big budget videos and commercials and it was like, we just want to raise the bar for not only quality but creativity - on all levels of production.

So whether there's like underground artists that you never heard of or like the biggest brand on earth, it's about raising that bar. It’s not just the same shit every time, you know?

As far as what we really want to accomplish, like goals and dreams and shit, it’s like, music videos got us into it, commercial has given us the experience we need, but we really want to do like feature films and television series and we have ideas that we've, you know, kept in the stash for years. But the ideas we’ve talked about are about back home where we’re from in Baltimore, so I feel like in order to properly develop it, we need to go back.

I know one thing I would have told my younger self when I was hustling and doing music videos – I would have told myself,

Thinking about what we use to shoot stuff for, we was splitting like, 300 - 500 dollar videos, like budget included and getting the fee out of that. Definitely know your value because at the end of the day, you know, I also feel like Illimité is, say, a voice for things that artists wouldn’t say artistically and actually like verbally too. I feel that we stand for like you know flipping the industry on its head.

We're two young dudes from Baltimore in this industry - that's unheard of. We pride ourselves in knowing the value of what we create, knowing that it's also priceless. You can't even really quantify what we do for artists or companies or even the stuff we do for us.

So really, yes, know your value and stand on it, but at the end of the day, you're making something - especially when you're really good - you're making something that's timeless and priceless. So any price you sell it for is undervalued. And that company, that artist, is going to have your work forever.

I mean there’s power in what we do – think about Paris Texas, we changed each other’s lives forever. Look at how powerful art can be. It literally changed four black men’s lives – more than that, it really created income for, well I don’t know how far the web goes – but it goes far and that's how powerful.

And I won't say what the budget was for those first two videos but it was not a lot. But that's how unquantifiable it is, how valuable it is, you know. It can really change lives. And going back to advice for my younger self, and younger artists out there, don’t reveal how much you did something for. Because then they’ll be like oh, they can do that for just 5k? And then it’s like nah, nah... if I did that for 5k, then that means you pay me 5 million.

We were doing Meta in Africa and it was, I believe, first location - in Iten. First shot of the day and, you know, we got our crew, we got Shawn Peters out there, we got Daniel Wolfe. But we getting our asses kicked though. It's hot, like 4 hours went by and we only got one shot. The shots wasn't looking like how they were supposed to, I don't know. So then we went to lunch and we kind of had a powwow, you know? Daniel, he gets on his like, Gordon Ramsay – creating a game plan, and you know it actually ended up working.

But the thing that was funny was, you know, the two of us look over to the left and there's like some locals that obviously, you know, have - I mean, this is like million-dollar production - they obviously had no money or you know, they might not have had the same concept of money as us, but they're just laughing at us like arguing about this thing. And then in that moment, I was feeling existential. I was like, Yo, this shit don't even matter. They had way less than us, we’re the ones getting paid the big bucks. But we're the laughing stocks. They’re probably like, what are these Americans doing? Yeah, that shit was funny.

Words by Pablo Dunkerly