What are your personal youth memories and recollections of Simon Spies and Mogens Glistrup and what fascinated you about those two larger than life personalities?
Christoffer Boe: I come from a very normal home with great parents. As a kid I had heard about them as being strange awkward geniuses, basically the kind of guys no one should play with in a courtyard! Their names felt like a cookie jar with chocolate fudge. They were naughty, they had sex, they avoided paying taxes, they were on the borderline of being illegal. I wanted to know more about these two bad guys.
But no human lives stay the same and the lives of these two prominent figures evolved. It soon became obvious to me when doing research about them that their very beginning was the most interesting. They were two fighters going against the stream. Later on in their lives they became something different that I didn’t care for very much. Somehow, they lost the plot.
Therefore I decided to focus on who they were when they were still invigorated in the fight against the system.
Although Spies and Glistrup were iconic figures in Denmark, their friendship was not very well-known to the general audience. Why did you choose to focus on this particular aspect?
At the very beginning I just wanted to make a film with those two guys in it but while doing research, I found out more about their friendship and it suddenly became a buddy movie.
It took a lot of rewriting condensing two lives down to one movie of 90 minutes. The interesting part was how they both became who they were through this friendship. Glistrup helped Spies construct his firm, while Glistrup learnt from Spies how to do PR and winning over the public with smart remarks.
Spies captured the hearts and imagination of Danes but you also show a darker side of him, the cynical sex addict who ‘bought’ from a mother a 15 year-old girl for a dishwasher and a dryer…On the contrary Glistrup was perhaps the most hated man in Denmark for his far right ideas, but he comes out as human, almost sympathetic character…
CB: Spies gave the greatest party ever lived in Denmark, but there was a darker side in him and battles that he lost. At the beginning, he would strive for freedom, ideas, but somehow he just became bored. At the beginning of the film you see Spies who has sex with young women, but he engages with them, he is interested in them so it’s ‘acceptable’ in a way. But at the end there is no engaging, he just uses these young women and it becomes almost a violation of them. I liked to explore how in the course of a life, actions can be repeated, but if you can’t repeat the emotion behind the action, the action becomes a sin.
With Glistrup, one of our greatest challenges was to portray perhaps the most hated guy in Denmark and take him seriously, not as an idiot. When he began his crusade against the government, there was something that resonated with the public, but during the course of his life, after having been in prison, he changed. The crusade against the government changed into a crusade against Muslims. But the interesting thing in a biopic is to show people who change.
Both characters were revolutionary in the 60s-70s, but they could have lived happily in today’s world. Spies could have attended Berlusconi’s bunga bunga parties and shared promotional travel tips with Ryanair’s boss Michael O’Leary, while Glistrup would have found many political allies in Europe’s numerous populist and anti-establishment parties…
CB: Their main concerns were sex, drugs and taxes and this never goes out of fashion!
Your long time screen accomplice Nicolas Bro is a wonderful Mogens Glistrup, but Pilou Asbaek’s transformation into Simon Spies is quite startling…
CB: I knew Pilou as a great talent but my concern was to have him (aged 30) play a guy who goes into his fifties. We had extended workshops. People in Denmark don’t know so well the young Spies with short hair and no beard. We slowly moved into the image of Spies that everyone knows. We had different wigs, beards, Pilou gained weight and we put on silicon as well. It became a slow transformation that allowed for Pilou to grow into the Spies that people know.
This film is a total break from your previous works: you go from the arthouse to the mainstream and for the first time into comedy and it really seems to come naturally to you
CB: I love comedy! The first thing I did before my first movie Reconstruction was an avant-garde comedy series for television. Unfortunately people didn’t know if they had to laugh or cry!!
No but I really enjoyed myself doing this movie. The main attraction was that I could turn down some of the artistic elements of the movie because the strangeness of the characters sort of fulfilled my need for twists. Usually I have twists and artistic movements in my movies to make sure they are fresh, new and strange. But with these eccentrics, I didn’t have to do anything special.
Lots of people loved them, and perhaps even more people hated them. But they were easily understandable, and everyone here knew what they stood for. So I wanted to make a film that wasn’t cryptic but entertaining, and hopefully with a twist that gives the film its own identity.
What’s next?
CB: I’m working on a gangster movie that takes place in New York. I’m finishing off the script with Simon Pasternak [co-writer of Sex, Drugs & Taxation]. It will be in the English language.