Wiedemann “film students have to become entrepreneurial"

You’ve published a 10-point pamphlet about the future of film schools. Why did you feel this urge when the Danish Film School is ranked among to top film schools in Europe? 
Vinca Wiedemann: I’ve now been head of the school two and a half years and I felt ready to summarise my vision for the school. Secondly, we are at a time of change and this change will only accelerate in the future. So we do need to define a long term strategy. 

Could you detail your main points?
VW: Basically our idea is to stick even more to tradition, our basic principles, and at the same time, we have to be much more focused to give students the right tools to make today and tomorrow’s films. 

One key aspect is entrepreneurship. In the future, our school has to teach students how to be entrepreneurial and create their own structures and roles. We know that the role of directors, producers, cinematographers etc are inevitably set to change. Students will have to define those new roles and implement them. Then of course team work as well as synergy remain fundamental. These are the hallmarks of our school. 

Isn’t the concept of constraints to foster creativity also a founding principle of the school, first introduced by Theodore Christensen, then reinforced by Henning Camre and Mogens Rukov in the 1980s?
VW: Absolutely. We all agree on the principle that art needs constraints, and our school continues to create exercises where students explore isolated elements of filmmaking to fuel their creativity. But before, constraints also came from filmmaking conditions as film stock was very expensive. Today, the challenge is to set when anybody can shoot for hours, when even the frame is disappearing. Many film schools today try to restrict the hours of shooting and type of material that students shoot. I disagree with this. I believe that students should be empowered and allowed to define their own constraints. 

Going back to entrepreneurship, is this also about being aware of the market. Are students taught to watch out for an audience, any audience?
VW: One key element of our success is that we teach film as storytelling, and the basic principle is that you have to tell it to someone. 

Lars von Trier for instance is an avant-garde storyteller. When he develops an idea, he walks around in his office, talks to people, so he tests his ideas by observing people’s reactions. 

You can work with the concept of audience in many ways. The audience is not only commercially-related. It can be simply the person in front of you. 

At the film school you’ve strengthened the screenwriting education by extending the two-year training programme in scriptwriting to a four-year programme like the other programmes in Fiction, Documentary and animation…
VW: Absolutely. This change was implemented in 2015. From day one, directors, producers, scriptwriters work together. This model is also what defines the Danish film industry. The director is still responsible for carrying the artistic vision through, but he works together with the writer and producer. This is today’s definition of an auteur. 

We are in a golden age of storytelling with the boom in TV drama and the former film graduate Susanne Bier just won an Emmy award. This must be inspiring for young talents…
VW: At the school we’ve always said that there is no real difference between film and TV. They have merged, so even though you make a TV drama such as House of Cards, you can have big star directors with a vision, beautiful cinematography and strong mood. Today the only main difference is the format, you can unfold a story in much more detail in a TV drama. 

Do you tell your students to think of different media and to be more versatile? VW: It’s not something you tell. It’s something they should simply try and experiment. You can teach one format, but it may be dead tomorrow. So it’s about learning what different formats can do. 

I think few things will remain the same in the future-one of them is scenes. Film will still be built on scenes, out of situations. This is a basic dramaturgical principle. If you’re good at making scenes, you will be able to use your craft for different media. If you know how to create characters and plot, you know the basics of filmmaking. 

Should teachers be academics or professionals passing their knowledge to younger generations?
VW: At the film school, most of our regular teachers are continuing their career as active professionals, experts in their field. This is very unique. We believe these specializations are crucial to reach high quality across all film departments. For instance, we have Morten Søborg as head of our Cinematography department. He worked on many Susanne Bier movies such as In a Better World. He has an outstanding experience. The same goes with Dagur Kári, Head of Feature Film Directing. He worked part time when he was in development, then in post on Virgin Mountain. He might do the same for his next project.

On a Nordic level, how do you think film education could be improved? VW: Teachers should work together to develop their curriculum and pedagogical tools. That’s where we can learn from each other. We have a big Nordic project involving all Nordic film schools, set up last autumn within the framework of Nordicil [association of Nordic film schools]. The Norwegian film school created ‘Training the trainers’. We’ve taken up this idea and created a peer-based programme for film school teachers called ‘The artist as (film school) Teacher’-. We hope to develop this project on a European level.

Then of course we have Nordic Talents that is a unique example of synergy and bridging the gap between film school and the industry on the Nordic region. We’re grateful to Nordisk Film & TV Fond that supervises the event.