PROFILE A Hijacking


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after playing in Venice’s Orizzonti, is the first solo directing effort of Tobias Lindholm who co-directed the powerful prison drama R in 2010 with Michael Noer. In A Hijacking, R star Pilou Asbaek plays the cook on a Danish freighter held for ransom by Somali pirates, while Soren Malling plays the head of the ship- ping company back in Denmark who negotiates with the pirates. The film is shot in a stark, ultra-


A


realistic style, and Lindholm says he cultivates a form of storytelling which is neither fiction nor docu- mentary. “In Danish, we have a word which is translated as ‘story seen from the outside’. The story follows the natural steps that hap- pen and the stages the characters go through. I try to keep it as sim- ple or as structured as possible. It’s called A Hijacking and it ends when the hijacking is over… we have a lot of room to play in between the beginning and end.” As in R, Lindholm strives for a


documentary-style realism in the mise-en-scene but, he says, he learned from R. “In some scenes in R, it felt like the camera knew where the story was going, and it was important not to do that in A Hijacking. I made a rule with my cinematographer [Magnus Nor- denhof Jonck] to copy a documen- tary situation where a man might get up from a table in a meeting and the camera won’t know what to do… The camera has to seek out what’s going on.”


Hijacking, which is screen- ing in Contemporary World Cinema here at TIFF


The new realism


Tobias Lindholm tells Mike Goodridge about following up his acclaimed prison drama R with the powerful modern pirates story, A Hijacking


The need for authenticity was


rigorous. The freighter scenes were shot on a ship in the Indian Ocean and the conversations over the phone with the shipping company in Denmark were recorded live between actors in both locations. The actor playing the British hos- tage negotiator is indeed a hostage negotiator who had come on board as a consultant to the production. Much of the banter between the ship’s crew is improvised (“a con- trolled improvisation,” says Lind- holm). The effect is arresting: Lindholm eliminates melodrama while maintaining the urgency and drama of the situation.


Man of his word Ironically, for all his determined directing, Lindholm considers himself a screenwriter first and foremost. “Directing is my thing on the side, like being in a rock band,” he smiles. “I am not trying to downplay it. I’m very proud of the films I’ve done and I have big ambitions for them out in the world. But I feel that my career is not directing, it’s screenwriting.” Indeed, as can be witnessed


from TIFF Special Presentation The Hunt, Lindholm is a superb screenwriter. That Cannes Com-


n 24 Screen International at Toronto September 10, 2012


devised one about Danish doctors working in Greenland. “While doing this, they offered


us a job on a Danish TV show called Sommer, about a doctor’s family,” he recalls. “We wrote the episode that closed the first sea- son. So we were flying out of film school to do that and we were hired to do the second season with some other writers. And through that, we met Camilla Hammerich, the producer of Borgen.” At the same time his TV career


Tobias Lindholm


petition title marked his second collaboration with Thomas Vinter- berg after Submarino and perhaps it is no coincidence Vinterberg has enjoyed his own creative renais- sance through his work with Lind- holm. In the meantime Lindholm wrote the first two seasons of TV series Borgen together with series creator Adam Price and Jeppe Gjervig Gram. The 34-year-old attended the


screenwriting programme at Den- mark’s National Film School from 2005-07, one semester of which, sponsored by the drama depart- ment of Danish broadcaster DR, is devoted to writing for television. As part of that, Lindholm and his classmate Jeppe Gjervig Gram were required to come up with a concept for a series and they


was blossoming, Lindholm was making waves in Denmark’s film industry. “Two days after graduat- ing, I had a phone call from the producer Morten Kaufman and he said Thomas Vinterberg wanted to do this film of the book Submarino and wanted me to write it. I couldn’t believe it.” Lindholm is not writing for the


third series of Borgen, concentrat- ing on his film career. He co-wrote Soren Kragh-Jacobsen’s The Hour Of The Lynx, which will start shooting this month with Sofie Grabol in the lead role, and is hatching ideas for further directo- rial projects. “I am a screenwriter — that’s


what I do,” he says. “I have been lucky to make a couple of films, but we finance them quite cheaply and we do them in our own way. We don’t need them to be a big success. “It’s more about developing a


language together with the cine- matographer and designer. It’s great if we can get together once in a while like a rock band and do this, but we don’t need to play stadiums and sell millions of records.” n


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