Nordic Film Talks: Thomas Vinterberg

Thomas Vinterberg says he found two secrets to finding the stamina to shoot his first TV series, Families Like Ours(Familier som vores), with about 110 shooting days across five countries.

“Yoga and beer” were what helped him, he says, not entirely joking. He said morning yoga and intermittent fasting helped him deal with the physical stress of the first 70 or 80 shooting days (the entire shoot lasted more than a year, obviously with some production breaks). “And at the end I surrendered, and I replaced my yoga with a beer in the evening.”

In the latest episode of the Nordic Film Talks podcast, the veteran Danish writer and director reveals that he had wanted to create a TV series ever since his 1998 feature The Celebration (Festen), the Dogme film that became his breakout international success. “It was a family of actors and characters that we developed so thoroughly, and fell in love with. Then suddenly it was over, after 30 days (of shooting), and I wanted to spend more time with them. So already back then, I made a vow to make a television series.”

Of course he needed to wait for the right story that would be meaty enough to sustain multiple episodes. “The material for Families Like Ours was grand and substantial enough to make it into a series. In fact, it could not fit into a film. It had to unfold, and it needed the length to gain the gravitas that I wanted this show to have.”

The idea first sparked in him back in 2017, when he was in Paris working on the post-production of Kursk: The Last Mission (Kursk). “I was in this hotel room on a Sunday, and Paris was not very welcoming. I had been going to the same café around the corner for half a year, and they still treated me like a tourist. I missed my family. Out of that, sitting in a hotel room, not knowing what to do with myself, and out of the longing for my family, I had this thought experiment of what would happen if I was really separated from them. How would I react?”

He let himself imagine: “What would happen if we all had to abandon our country and everything that I was missing that day, everything we love and take for granted, if that was taken away from us?”

He continues, “Who's going to fit into your lifeboat? That's the main theme for this. We thought of this as a question that so many refugees over the years have been asked and confronted with. We thought this would be an interesting mirror to set up.”

The idea initially seemed far-fetched to some friends back in 2017. But with the COVID pandemic starting in 2020, and many nations closing their borders, the premise started to seem much more feasible.

In fact, he and co-writer Bo Hr. Hansen had to rewrite some scenes that suddenly seemed too clichéd after the COVID pandemic – “There were scenes on our desktop that we pulled out again because they were too identical to what was happening. Like people buying loads of toilet paper. We felt it became flat, because now it really happened.”

The story is set in a scarily realistic near-future, and follows one family – teenage daughter Laura, her now single mum, her dad and his new wife and baby, and Laura’s first boyfriend Elias, as they have to choose alliances when the entire nation of Denmark is completely evacuated because of rising water levels. The cast features Amaryllis August, Albert Rudbeck Lindhardt, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Paprika Steen and David Dencik.

For his first TV series, Oscar winner Vinterberg wanted to return to his usual production home, Zentropa, where Sisse Graum Jørgensen and Kasper Dissing produce the €16 million series, together with TV 2 Denmark (which launches the show on Oct 20), StudioCanal and Canal+, with co-production by Film i Väst, Zentropa Sweden and Lizette Jonjic, Sirena Film, Ginger Pictures and Saga Film with support by DFI, the EU and Nordisk Film & TV Fond. The series is off to a strong international start after a Venice world premiere (To read more: CLICK HERE), a North American premiere in Toronto, and later in October, a UK launch at the BFI London Film Festival.

Vinterberg might soon be back on the yoga and beer, because he’s planning another TV project already – working on a limited series adaptation of famed fantasy novel The Brothers Lionheart (Bröderna Lejonhjärta) by Astrid Lindgren for Media Res. He says that the original book “was a bible to us atheists back in the 70s. It meant a lot to everyone in Scandinavia. It’s this huge heritage [property] that I’ve been asked to convey to the international audience.”

In the podcast interview, Vinterberg also talks about how he originally planned for six episodes, but ended up with seven; the shorthand he shares with Paprika Steen; and the “car gear” camera styles he developed with DoP Sturla Brandth Grøvlen.