Thomas Vinterberg ready with his new movie.

 

By Anders Lange, the Danish newspaper "Jyllandsposten" December the 28th 2002

 

Thomas Vinterberg could have earned millions in Hollywood. Instead the Danish director is ready after a 4 year break with a dangerous movie that has cost almost 90 million kroner, and that can risk his career. A risk he is willing to take even though he still wakes up at night and thinks “Should I have done it differently.”
Something has happened to Vinterberg since the last time.
The jeans looks worn out in a used way not because of fashion. The jacket does not exactly look fashionable either. Its only function is to keep him warm in the cold winter weather. And there is more cold weather on its way, not only literally speaking, but we will return to that because it is not what has changed, it is Thomas Vinterberg’s body language.
His shoulders has moved up and a bit backwards. He has turned 32 and has apparently started spreading his wings. Like a young golden eagle that in a seriously way has captured its preserves.
“ We meet again” he says when he in a confident way shows his guest into Nordic Film’s office, that for the occasion has been decorated with coffee cups, grapes and way to many posters for the movie “It’s all about love.” Some of them even have to lie on the table with the pictures of Claire Danes, Joaquin Phoenix shining in the reflection from Halmtorvet. When he sits down it is with a smile. Not a smile so nervously, curiously and with the need for confirmation like on the dry summerday in 1996 when he showed his debut movie “ De største helte” at the European Filmschool in Ebeltoft. And it is not the confusing smile from 1998 when he was sitting in a window frame at the fashionable Carlton Hotel in Cannes, the night his movie “Festen” gave Dogme international fame.
And Vinterbergs’s smile is absolutely not a “oil on troubled waters” smile, as when he tried to get Joaquin Phoenix to give and interview during a chaotic press conference in Trollhättan in Sweden. The movie star did not want to talk, only make fun of it all, and Vinterberg had to try to smooth out.
The thing was that Phoenix hate the press and he has his reasons. The American media’s sense for reality drama, published Joaquin Phoenix’s terrified 911 emergency call from the day his brother River Phoenix died on the street because of an overdose of narcotics. The call was used over and over again, so Thomas Vinterberg could understand Phoenix’s behaviour at the press conference very well, the press could not.
The press and Joaquin Phoenix – survived.
And then came the waiting period.
Vinterberg was suppose to go to Cannes in may 2002.

 

Rejected.

 

It was not only in the air.
It was written with golden palm letters on his curriculum vitae “ Festen” had received the Jury’s specialprice in 1998.
The year after Vinterberg was president for the short movie jury in Cannes.
Vinterberg had turned Steven Spielberg down to make film art in Europe instead.

 

Everybody were ready for the blitz from the cameras, the bikinis and the prices in Cannes, and then came the year, the month the day, the red carpet  ………………… “It’s all about love” was rejected.

 

The Danish film press were in chock, we had all booked our tickets and our editors had promised us the big headlines and the -already paid for- expensive hotels and then…………

 

No thanks !!
 

Thomas Vinterberg started to make changes with his movie.   
The premiere was postponed and postponed .
“Its’ all about love” began to get a bad reputation.

 

Maybe Vinterberg was not that brilliant after all. He has only had success.
Born into a shared house intellectual exaggeration. The father Søren Vinterberg a writer on Politken. The mother Ingerlise Vinterberg, a teacher in relaxation. The guests that came in the house had brains like Tor Nørretrander’s.
The breakthrough with his final exam movie from the film school “ Sidste omgang” was expected, the consolidation with the movie “Drengen der gik baglæns” a matter of course and the first steps into adulthood. “ De største helte” was a careful but secure way in the right direction until “Festen” gave him the last kick up the success ladder.
In 1999 he first started to think, that next time it might go the wrong way.
And it might !

 
Differently

 

“It’s all about love” is in no way an easy movie. Some film critics will see it as being more brooding than renewal.
Others will in solidarity with the Danish director watch it many times to make the depth clear. Others will see it as a masterpiece.
But they will probably all agree about the courage that is behind “ It’s all about love.”
“It’s all about love” has jumped over the glamour-fence to the Hollywood stars Danes and Phoenix.
But instead the mood has been picked up by the Polish master director Kieslowski’s mediative thoughtfulness.
The characters float, sometimes literally without any ground connection in a world in the future where everybody lives in transit. Some have forgotten how to live, other fall down dead on the streets. A world where success has to maintained beyond the success  concept’s actual value. If the family’s money-earning skating star cannot handle it, a clone will be made.

 
Proud

 

The excitement curve flows together with the actor Sean Penn on first class in a world that is on the way to winter  because of  the lack of real love. The movie will have premiere on January the 10th. Right now Thomas Vinterberg is sitting across us. For the first time with a movie that is difficult. And for the first time with an grownup, firm and clarified look, it is like he this time does not give a shit what all of us will think.

 

“To be honest, I am proud as well” he says and refer to the huge decision after the Steven Spielberg meeting and other film companies contract offers on the sizes of 10 million dollars. “In that period I read 110 manuscripts . But Hollywood has made it so you never know the exact offer before there is a contract. Spielberg invited me to a meeting. We had lunch together and he explained that he did not invite me to this meeting to make me do a project with him, but because he liked “Festen” and that he hoped that he would get some of my youthfulness. But a while after he sent over a producer with a project that I rejected “ says Vinterberg.
“I had a choice and I chose the most courageously. I pushed my career aside  and chose something else that I found substantial and that in a pure artistic way was more fragile, difficult and personal. It is less commercial. It does not take the audience in the hand. But it is a project that means a lot to me. And the few people that so far have seen it, say that they have never seen anything like it. They don’t know how to handle it. I am back on thin ice” Vinterberg says and smiles.

 

“When we made the Vows of Chastity  and I made “Festen” as a Dogme movie I was also on thin ice. We thought it would be a movie that would last 3 weeks in a small cinema” says Vinterberg and takes a grape from the overdimensionised fruit basket, that blocks for the view to the winter busyness on Halmtorvet outside the window.

 

“When “Festen” came to Cannes people were very disoriented. What were the Vows of Chastity about. And how could I make a movie about incest ? But then people started to clap. You wrote about it and a shelf was made that the movie could lie on. I hope that will happen to this movie as well. But there might never come a shelf for it, and it might not be before 8 years “ says Vinterberg. 

Doubtful.

 

He is not doubtful anymore. But he has been during the process.
“I have been tempted to do some engineer work on a thriller and I can wake up at night and think I wish I had done that. But there was something else that was more important – but I still wake up, that is how I am. Always doubting” he says. And the crises came as well. “We were in chock when we were told that Cannes had rejected the movie with a note saying that they had expected a movie more like “ Festen.” I forgot to warn them that I had made a drastic turn in another direction. But it ended up being an advantage. Because the movie was not done when the Cannes-jury was watching it. We started to split it into atoms and edited a entire new movie with entire new music. That face was very hard both artistically and emotionally, because the talented film editor that had made the first editing was replaced. It was painful. A hard, unpleasant and long working process. You have to search for the expressions you are satisfied with and we looked for something that we had not yet found” Vinterberg says and appeal to the journalist to protect the people whose work was rejected.
“But we got into contact with  Zbigniew Preisner, Kieslowski’s old composer and from that moment we got somebody to look at the project with new eyes. There was suddenly a new energy around the movie again. Just like how wonderful it had been to shoot the movie. The weeks where we flew between Copenhagen, Sweden, Venice, Africa and New York was a real adventure. And the side of Joaquin Phoenix you journalists experienced in Trollhättan, is very different from the person I worked with” the director assure.

 

Life in transit.

 

That Vinterberg describes the shootings and travelling  with the crew as pure happiness, does not really harmonies with the killing portrait of the travelling life, as he and his co-writer Mogens Rukov try to reflect in “It’s all about love.”
The movie was conceived in Cannes, probably when we met at the Carlton Hotel. You were there, but I was not. I was totally gone. I got celebrated and when that happens you start floating and you get aware of yourself and disappear out of your own life. You loose the ability to smell and taste, and this movie claims that it will kill you. The movie is not a portrait about being famous. It is also a portrait of the people on the street who is so God damn busy” the director says and points at the window frame. “It is about people who are in constant transit. People who are so busy filling out their lives with working projects because they are afraid to stop and take a look at what their life truly contains. It is clearly a reflection about my own life. I am on a train that makes a movie, and it lasts 3 years. Afterwards I cannot remember what happened. It is a sad recognition every time.”
“From when I was 16 I was filled with anxiety not to become anything in life. It was not the desire to become a movie director bur more the fear of not becoming anything that made me going. I don’t know where it came from. But I still see it when I talk with young people nowadays. If they just could enjoy their impossibilities instead of fearing them” Vinterberg says and takes a little break.

 

Careerism

 

“My friend Sean Penn, no he is not my friend, that sounds so…… My acquaintance Sean Penn said to me, that he rejects projects that is marked by careerism. Careerism, can you say that ? And I suddenly thought on how many hours I have been tied up by advancing instead of being busy with what I am doing and let the advancing come by it self.
If you wholehearted and accomplished go into your projects, then the success will come naturally”

 

Do you think that will happen for everyone ? You were born with a ….

 

“with a golden spoon up my ass? Yes it is easy to say when you have success.”

 

There are working places where you cannot expect to be discovered if you do not make attention towards your efforts. 

 

“But should we really be using our time on that ? That is the kind of thing that will fill your head when you get home. I know that the boaster sometimes win, I get furious when that happens. But I put my own career at stake. Maybe because I found it so uninteresting and wearing. My agents had filled me with everything that should be so good for my career. They told me it would be wonderful for me to make an Al Pacino movie, even though the manuscript was idiotic. People would cheer and it would work, but we should be able to want more than that” Thomas Vinterberg says.
“Sometimes I jump in, but it has become a mantra for me. People has to focus on their work and not what they will be able to gain because of it. Success is nothing else than a real fear provocative thing. Like Thomas Bo Larsen (an actor and a good friend of Vinterberg who has a small part in IAAL red. ) once so sweetly said “ It is more fun to fight to get success than to fight to keep it.”

 

 Typical Danish

 

Is it not just typical Danish, that you like Ole Bornedal, put your feet down when Hollywood finally stands ready to offer you everything ?

 

“ Yes it is, but it is not that bad. You actually feel that there is higher to the ceiling in Denmark at the moment, artistically and spiritually . There are some people who are not afraid. That is why I have also decided that the next year I will be working in the filmtown Avedøre. A place full of film lunatics, hard competition and good friendship” Vinterberg says.       

 

 Quantum jump

 

“Here is “Festen” and all the way over here is “It’s all about love.” That is my biggest quantum jump. I did it to experience the same feeling as I experienced with the Dogme movies, but this time we had to try something else. Everybody is talking about the uniformity of Danish movies but now we are going in all directions. I hope there will be room for that in the branch and film politic because that is what Danish movies can do. The movies that are on the way will need more support than all the success movies we have seen so far” he says and gesticulates with the arms.
“Some movies are for one audience, others for another. And only a few amount of movies are for everybody. We have to accept that. All those thoughts about it has to be a commercial success, a film festival and a critics movie or what people on the street thinks about it, we have to give shit about that. You might say that it is very affected to say that but it necessary if you want to make a movie that is an honest expression of what I want to tell at this moment.”

 

Can you keep your integrity towards the investors that have spent almost 90 million kroner on your movie ?

 

“ What should I think about them ? Do you feel sympathy with Brask Thomsen if he looses money on the stock market ? It is a lottery that they are a part of. I have done everything that it is in my power, worked my ass of for 3 years so my teeth almost fell out. The investors have read the manuscript  and they know who I am. They know that it is like a lottery they are participating in. And I have learned that we have to work the other way around. What we do has to make us going and then we have to think that it will make other going as well.  I can’t do it differently.

10 questions to Thomas Vinterberg

By Nina Bjerre Andersen

Can you remember your first kiss ?

 

“Hmmm so we are talking a kiss with a girl because of love ? That must be Signe from the balloon park.”

 

Who was your first girlfriend ?

 

That was Signe. I was 12 years old and I was very young when it came to my sexual debut, let us just say that straight way. I was living in a shared house so …..”

 

What love song is your favourite ?

 

“Last Christmas I gave you my heart…… what is the name of it, is it just “Last Christmas” ? By Wham “

 

 And what love movie ?

“Dr. Zhivago”

 

Are you ugly in the morning.

 

"Yes and unfortunately I still am at lunch time. I put a bit gel in the hair so it won’t look like I am wearing a guardsman cap, I can only fight it by going to bed early.”

 

When was the last time you cried in the cinema ?

 “ I am not sure if I have ever done that,  really cried with real tears that is…..No I cannot remember – is that not an answer ?”

 

What do you always bring a long on your travels ?

 

“I won’t say my passport since I am always forgetting it. But my knife, a leatherman.”

 

How do you spoil yourself ?

 

"With bodily health. Karate, massage, steam bath, going to the swimming bath. That kind of things.”

 

What is the best advice you have ever received ?

 

"Never try to catch the bus by running. Mogens Rukov my teacher from the film school and co-writer gave me that. You have to find your own speed. I think that still must be the best advise."

 

What is your motto ?

 

"Do something stupid  at least once a week. "