Bastoy received €600.000 from Eurimages, more than Max Manus. How does that feel?
We are extremely content having received such an amount of money from Eurimages. It gives us the basis for making the kind of film we want. Finally we can dive into real pre-production and start to work on the marketing plan together with our Norwegian distributor, Euforia, and our Paris-based international sales agent les Films du Losange. We will start shooting in February and will have the main shooting period from mid September, with a five week studio part in Poland. We plan to release the film in Norway in the fall 2010.
Who wrote the script and how would you describe the story?
The script is written by Dennis Magnusson (Sweden), based on a story by Mette Marit Bølstad and Lars Saabye Christensen. This is a story about how repression, injustice and abuse can result in anger and revolt. It is set in Norwegian winter, early 20th century. On the Island Bastøy, in the fjord of Oslo, a group of young outcast boys live under a sadistic regime. Instead of being educated, the boys aged 11 to 18, are used as cheap manual labour. One day, Erling arrives to the Island, with a different agenda. In self defence, he has beaten to death a military police officer and will be transferred to an adult prison next spring, leading to his certain death. Time is running out for him and he must accomplish the impossible: escape from Bastøy - Devils Island.
How did you put the financing together and how did you get Sweden (St Paul), Poland (Opus Film) and France (Mact Production) on board?
I have worked on the financing for more than a year. The film's total budget is NOK 43.3m. The Norwegian Film Institute showed their interest a long time ago, giving us development money. However, we knew that we would be dependent on international financing so we made a promo in January 2008, which opened doors, both nationally and internationally.
Antoine Clermont de Tonnerre (Mact Production) already knew Marius Holst. We introduced the project to Opus Film in Berlin three years ago. St Paul and 4½ have previously collaborated on their project Trust Me by Johan Kling, so they were an obvious Scandinavian partner for us and the fact that we received support from The Swedish, Polish and French film Institutes is a real inspiration for our work too.
Is King of Devil's Island the biggest project ever for your company and where is 4½ today?
Yes, the film is definitely our biggest project ever. The company was started ten years ago by two directors and two producers (Marius Holst, Pål Sletaune, Håkon Øverås and Turid Øversveen). Then Aagot Skjeldal joined shortly after and myself four years ago. I brought the film Reprise into the company and am now CEO of 4½, parallel to producing. Our goal is to produce minimum two feature films a year and one project with a new young talent. We also run our own commercial department, and are looking into TV-Drama. Part of our strategy is also to keep developing further relationships with co production partners, both Nordic, European and in the US. We have done several co-productions with Zentropa/Per Fly/Lars von Trier and with Nimbus Film in Denmark, and in Sweden with Filmlance and now St. Paul.
What are your views on the current state of film production in Norway?
It is okay, although it's still difficult to raise money for good projects and too much time and work is still used on reorganising the official film support system. However, we make films and the audience seems to like most of them! That is good, and we even manage to go abroad and sell our films. Not bad for a small nation like Norway...