FEATURE
Vinterberg on the set of The Hunt
Back in The Hunt
Some 14 years after Festen, Thomas Vinterberg is back in Competition at Cannes with his latest drama, The Hunt. It’s been a long road back, he tells Mike Goodridge
I
n 1998, Thomas Vinterberg scored the coup of landing in Cannes Competition with his second feature, his third if you count his graduation
fi lm Last Round. The title which did it, Festen (or The Celebration in English), went on to become a sensation, sharing the jury prize, kickstarting the minimalist Dogme movement of which Vinter- berg was an architect, scoring distribution deals in every territory and placing the director fi rmly on the global fi lm-making map. It won him scores of awards, spawned a successful stage play and made him the object of furious attention from Hollywood. It was, he says, a distracting time. “I got very confused by the Festen experience,”
he explains. “Artistically it took away my focus for quite some time. I was like some football player after a big goal and the camera was pointing my way for far too long. It took me a while to get the camera pointed away from me and get me looking at the world again to fi nd stories.” His follow-ups to Festen — It’s All About Love
(2003), Dear Wendy (2005), A Man Comes Home (2007) — were not well-received, and it was only with Submarino in 2010 that critics took another look. The dark portrait of troubled young brothers played in competition in Berlin and felt like a return to basics for the fi lm-maker. The return to Cannes Competition with The
Hunt this year proves the Vinterberg renaissance is indeed a reality. Working with Danish star Mads Mikkelsen for the fi rst time, and re-teaming with writer Tobias Lindholm with whom he suc- cessfully collaborated on Submarino, Vinterberg has clearly found a new confi dence. “I am trying to come back to the vulnerability
■ 40 Screen International at Cannes May 20, 2012
’There’s a cliché that kids don’t lie, and in this film we claim
that they do’ Thomas Vinterberg
in human beings and trying to fi nd the human fragility,” he says. “That has always been my project. Even in the meanest bastards you can fi nd something vulnerable and that’s what I am always looking for, and I am back doing that. I am constantly trying to fi nd the purity that was in my graduation fi lm, where I was honestly trying to regard some people in a certain situation. I still think it’s my best fi lm.” The Hunt, however, is set to be his best fi lm in the eyes of many critics and audiences. (TrustNor- disk has already done a number of key sales, including to France and the UK.) If Festen was a provocative tale of family and abuse, The Hunt takes the audience into uncomfortable grey areas in contemporary western society and raises more questions than it answers. Set in a small rural town where a false accusa- t ion by a chi ld against Mikkelsen’s character sets off a chain of terrifying events, The Hunt addresses issues of identity, reputation and extreme political cor- rectness. “It
is ver y
important for me to empha- sise that
this
man is innocent,” says Vinterberg. “I would even put it on the poster. I don’t want to play around with whether he is guilty or not.
People will think it anyway, wondering if I’m playing tricks with them. They did that with Fes- ten as well. But plots like that aren’t my ballgame. It’s like a trick you pull out of a hat. We are trying to do something else here.” The fi lm also defi es conventional storytelling in
that, for all the drama and sense of injustice in the story, there are no villains. “Everybody is inno- cent in this story,” he says. “Everybody is trying to do their best. It’s a sort of misconception of the world that makes his life go wrong.” That misconception of the world in the film
comes from sensitive issues around children: how we over-protect them and how we choose to believe that everything they say is true. “There is a cliché that kids don’t lie,” says
Mads Mikkelsen stars in The Hunt »
Vinterberg, “and in this fi lm we claim that they do lie. They do invent stories or lie to make grown- ups happy. In that sense they become the demons of the fi lm. It’s about kids destroying a man’s life.” For all the small-town setting and Danishness of The Hunt, the themes it evokes are universal. The notion that a man’s character can so quickly become stained is a common one in today’s culture of social media, online rumour mills and tabloid hysteria. “You can tell stories about other people or about yourself that very quickly become the identity of the person. This fi lm is all about iden- tity — how do you look to the world, and how do you cre- ate your own iden- tity. These people give this man this mark and create this identity around him, and he wi l l never be able to escape it. I find that really inter- est ing and real ly
frightening.” s
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