Anders Thomas Jensen: “I’ve never done anything like this”
Ewan: Obviously it’s a very different festival right now, how are you finding the festival being online?
Jensen: Especially with this movie, it’s annoying because the screens I’ve seen are very different. It’s a movie where you really would want to see it in a theatre. Also, for the audiences to be able to see it because it is a movie where people react very differently. Actually a lot of people almost got into fights because people were laughing - disagreeing on where to laugh and where to not in this movie, which is always fun. It’s a movie for the cinema, but, hey, this is how it is now, can’t do much about it.
What is it about that chemistry between Mads Mikkelsen and yourself that makes you work together so often?
I think it’s because he gets what I want to do. We’ve known each other for twenty-five years. Almost the first film Mads did was a short I wrote and also because he’s been in loads of films I’ve written - so this is the fifth where I have directed. We are friends, but he’s, for my part, it’s a no brainer. He’s one of the best actors around right now. I love that he has this - not that we used it this time, this movie is a bit special for Mads and me - he has this huge, comical talent that nobody else seems to exploit. That’s the main thing, but he can do anything. I mean, I gave him the choice, I said “Hey man, are you up for doing the straight, boring man - the straight lead” and he said “Yeah, let’s do it” and I mean, two weeks into shooting he started fooling around, because it is so tough to do this when the other guys just - you’re serving and they’re smashing it through, so he started to fool around but we kept it straight to the end.
He serves that role really well, he plays that straight man very well. Is it hard to balance those tones of comedy with - there’s a very serious message in Riders of Justice, is it hard to keep the balance?
Yeah, I mean in this movie it’s a bit extreme. I’ve never done anything like this and I’ve never seen movies that - the whole point of this movie, the thing I set out to do - was balance a clear-cut, straight social realism drama with black comedy of my own, and to see if that would fly. It is hard, it’s achieved through the writing process and when we were shooting. You have Mads and Andrea (Heick Gadeberg) who are totally, well, almost realistic, and - well she is anyway. You could put her in any of these shows that are on BBC or Danish television Sunday night, all of these dramas. But you have these two characters here, and on the other hand you have these two computer geeks that are beyond anything. Then in the middle you have Otto (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) where his role - he is the glue that makes the movie work. I sort of knew that, I told him that, if we fail with you the movie would fall apart. It would fall apart. He has emotional scenes with the daughter over here and he has crazy scenes too. He’s the voice of reason but he’s also able to go and glue the two sides together. We worked so much on the shoot on this and surprisingly, you always think you’ve done everything when you’re a director and when you’re in the editing room you find that - I had two really good editors who - I think we cut so many fun lines from his character (Kaas) in order to achieve that balance. Every time we took off 10% of the fun stuff out of him, it made his character more relatable, and more real, everything became more emotional. We had to *snipping noise*.
It’s quite difficult now with COVID, I’d imagine, to actually put films together. Did that affect Riders of Justice at all?
No because we stopped shooting on March 6th. We were in Sweden shooting where it was like, the first case of COVID was the house next door and we thought “this is nothing” so we kept shooting and more and more came of it, we went to Spain and shot the last scenes and then we flew from Zurich where Mads and I were - I’m not sure how we didn’t get it because all of Northern Italy was just coughing in our faces but we never got it. And then we shut down, yeah, they shut down three days after we finished the principal photography. COVID was just there, so it hasn’t affected this movie. I edited and, you know, we put it out in cinemas in the summer, and then we closed down again, but I can see other projects, and I can see my wife as an actor, and the stuff she has been on, it’s very affected.
What do you think is the next step for directors, artists and actors going forward to work against COVID and to continue making films?
I think COVID, I mean, honestly COVID will be gone - COVID hasn’t changed anything. It’s a temporary thing. Honestly, it hasn’t changed anything. It’s made some things happen faster, you know, that’s what these diseases do. It pushes time. Amazon would have become a centrillion dollar company, now it just happened in three months. Netflix would have gotten thirty million more subscribers, it just happened in two weeks. That’s what it does. Hopefully, in two years, I don’t know the timeframe. I think two years and everybody will be back, not washing their hands, doing what they used to do. But, hey, I’ve been wrong before. There’s all these mutations right? I have no clue what the film industry should do then, I don’t even want to think about it. I mean, that’s, that’s a weird scenario.
How do you go about bridging that gap between getting that atmosphere and streaming? I don’t think you can really.
It’s two different things, right? Streaming is individual, I mean, the whole atmosphere arrives when you put people together, streaming is what it is but it’s not a festival in that sense. It’s not a “come together, we’ll all get inspired and get drunk and whatever you do”. It is a bit sad.
Is it a relief to get the film out, considering the circumstances?
Yeah. We would have waited, everything’s opening now, two weeks in Russia. There are places where they don’t let a little pandemic take the mood away. They just keep going. So it is opening, and it’s - it’ll open. The general idea is that these next scenes will come around and by fall, society will be back to normal, right? That’s not - in terms of releasing a movie, that’s not very far away. The problem will be that - I just saw the list of movies that will release. I’m so happy because I’m a movie buff myself, there’s so many movies that I’m going to see. It’s brilliant. There’s like a hundred plus movies that are going to hit the cinemas - if they can’t I don’t know what they’ll do. So many movies, I’ve counted at least thirty-five that I really have to see. Cinemas are going to have a golden age from like, August. It’s going to be slaughter also, right? A film like Riders of Justice will probably like, not survive a lot, if they don’t keep it and release it.
Riders of Justice, I think in the U.K., will survive on those cinemas. That may be the better way to go about it, that unique experience that Riders of Justice can have is in a smaller cinema with a group of people, rather than a chain.
You’re absolutely right. I’m sure there’s life and room for everything, but it looks rough.
With Riders of Justice I think one of the key points is the emotional relationship between Mikkelsen’s character and the daughter. Was there anything that inspired you to write that or was that completely original?
I have a daughter who is exactly the same age, of course, there are some influences. I don’t know if you have kids yourself, but when you do get kids, and you will, like every other male, work too much and have a bad conscience that you’re not there enough. You’ll sort of have these thoughts that - I mean, how the hell would I ever manage if my wife left me? You see it through people who get divorced, and then suddenly there’s a man who gets to know a fifteen-year-old daughter that you have no - especially if you are, I’m a bit myself - like a nerd. Like Mikkelsen’s character Markus, he’s like, in a very male environment, violence guns and all that. He doesn’t know what to do. That’s sort of myself, just changing the films with guns and so on. Yeah, that’s the inspiration for that.
Have you got any upcoming projects that you’re working through?
There are some possible ones but nothing I could say without having to kill you.