24 THE CIFF GAZETTE
MIKKEL NØRGAARD
» Nikolaj Arcel and I grew up on the golden age of American cinema from the 1970s, with films like Three Days of the Condor and All the President’s Men, where they managed to draw up believable characters without telling us anything about their private lives. «
This balance gives the viewers empathy for the characters. So it’s a radical choice to take some of the private layers out. Nikolaj Arcel and I grew up on the golden age of American cinema from the 1970s, with films like Three days of the Condor and All the President’s Men, where they managed to draw up believable characters without telling us anything about their private lives. We started to wonder if we could succeed in that way, and wonder what the universe in The Keeper of Lost Causes might be like if we went in that direction.
Did you also set the film’s tone as a reaction against traditional Scandi-noir style?
Yes, partly. One of the first questions that arose was why we wanted to make the film at all. It’s part of a genre where many films, both good and bad, have come out – so what did we have to contribute? It was important to find our own approach. At the same time, we’re at a point where TV series are doing better than feature films in terms of story and character development. Why should anyone spend nearly 100 DKK and the cost of a babysitter to see our movie? We had to give people very good reasons to do that. At the same time we had a reaction against the cold, blue style we know so well, and also against scenes filmed with a handheld camera. One day I attended an exhibition by photographer Gregory Crewdson at the National Library, The Black Diamond. I like to draw inspiration from outside the film world. It was absolutely fantastic. Crewdson spends between one week and a fortnight on one picture. There are lamps with artificial light everywhere and his pictures have great warmth in them, although something dark is always lurking beneath the surface.
How did you move forward from that point?
We then made this mood board with a series of images that could inspire us: clusters of images that would guide us in the direction of the tone of each location. It’s still on the wall up here with more than 100 photos, and in general it points towards everything having to be very organic. Glass and steel was banned. The fabrics and the surfaces of our film were chosen to give the spectator a warmer feel by using a more layered texture. Bricks, trees, golden things, leather and so on. Whereas you might say that Tobias Lindholm and Michael Noer have a documentary style in R and Northwest with a kind of “reality rules” aesthetic, we were not interested in reality at all.
You have a big drawing of the container or “cage” from The Keeper of Lost Causes. Why was it drawn before you made the film and turned into an A3 poster?
We found it was very useful in terms of creating a common language for the crew: the costume designer, the make-up artist and other people working on the film. It’s the first time I’ve worked with the kind of concept artist you usually see in the world of computer games. We tried to give him input and asked him to come up with a suggestion for the cage. It was a matter of getting to know exactly how it would look in the film. The drawing was supposed to be a frame from the film, which had not been made yet. Today you can see that this picture is not very different from the movie. This was an unusual tool for me to use. We could have made these films for 25 million DKK, but they would have been very different and probably not as interesting. The genre calls for something extraordinary, because it’s always been there and each time period has had its own take on it. One of its most important strengths is that you can step into something other than reality.
Who are you inspired by in the crime film genre?
The best in my opinion is David Fincher with Se7en, but Blade Runner is also a model in the sense that it has a story that everyone can relate to even if it takes place somewhere in the future. One of the things that cinema is still able to do — unlike TV series — is that you get to sit in the dark and be absorbed into another world for a few hours. Whether it’s documentary, a western or anything else, I like to get out of my own reality and into a completely different universe, and to be able to compare my own reality with that world.
How did you choose the costumes for the main characters?
If you give Nikolaj Lie Kaas a suit that fits him he looks like a million dollars. This meant he had to have an excessively large suit to make him look more lost. We chose a short leather jacket and some slightly baggy army-style pants for Assad. Something in his clothing tells us he’s capable of doing more than the average cop. There’s something military about him. He beats a man to death with an iron pipe in The Keeper of Lost Causes, and on that occasion we let him hit the bad guy a few extra times so that the audience would understand who he is. He believes in good, but he also believes that evil must be fought with evil. The right costumes help to show what the characters are like inside.
It sounds like the costumes are very important!
Another thing is that I’d rather not have the characters change costumes in my films. It means you can swap scenes more easily, but most of all it’s because I like the time when men had to wear suits. Suits created icons in films. I don’t need to see a protagonist wearing shorts or sportswear because that would point the audience in different directions, which I’m not interested in. I’m interested in the image of the figure. When a character finally changes his clothes, it must be within the same style—unless you have something very important to say about his character. When I was directing a few episodes of Borgen I limited each character’s clothes to one set in each episode, with the exception of Sidse Babett Knudsen as the Prime Minister. She had one set at work and another for leisure. It’s OK if you want to say something