With his first television series, Danish director Thomas Vinterberg tackles themes of climate change and immigration with the story of a family forced to flee their home. He opens up about writing and directing Familier som vores (Families Like Ours), how it began as a thought experiment and his interest in the fragility of humanity.
In 1998, Danish director Thomas Vinterberg made Festen (The Celebration), a black comedy feature film telling the story of a family gathering to celebrate a 60th birthday – an event that leads to the devastating revelation of a dark secret.
Had it been made today, it might well have ended up as a television series.
“We had created this family, we were in this beautiful place,” Vinterberg tells DQ. “I loved the characters, I loved shooting it, and all of a sudden we had to stop. I was like, ‘I could carry on with these people. I have many more stories to tell.’ Ever since then, I’ve been wanting to do a TV series.”
Vinterberg went on to become one of Denmark’s most celebrated filmmakers, most notably helming Bafta- and Oscar-winning 2020 film Another Round. His credits also include Submarino, The Hunt, Far from the Madding Crowd and The Commune.
But he has now achieved his ambition of making a TV drama with Familier som vores (Families Like Ours) – a dystopian series produced in multiple countries that tells a story with global themes including climate change and the refugee crisis.
“The whole idea was for me to stay at home with my family and shoot a ‘Danish’ series,” he says. “That part did not work out.”
Set in the not-too-distant future, the series imagines a world where rising water levels mean Denmark will soon become inhabitable, forcing the government to order the entire country to be evacuated. Those who can afford to leave do so, while others await support from a state relocation programme as families, friends and loved ones are separated.
At the centre is Laura, a high-school student in love for the first time and on the brink of graduation. When news of the evacuation breaks, Laura and her family’s lives are changed forever and she is forced to choose between the people she loves the most.
Directing all seven episodes of his first series, “it was like a marathon,” Vinterberg says, speaking to DQ ahead of the show’s world premiere at the Venice Film Festival last month. The show has its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival tomorrow.
“Normally we make 100 or 110 minutes or something, and this is 350 minutes. It just went on and on and on. But it was quite interesting actually to keep shooting. The shooting days just continued and you come to a point where all nervousness and the usual shooting panic disappears and you just shoot. That’s a very interesting, creative place to be. There’s more courage, less looking back, more spontaneity. It was physically very draining but quite interesting.”
Perhaps Families Like Ours could have been a film too, but as with Festen he recognised that this story was one that should not be contained by a movie running time. This time, however, in a world where the lines between film and television have blurred beyond recognition and creatives regularly move between the two mediums, he was able to turn the project into a multi-episode series with a cast that includes Vinterberg regulars and some new faces too.
Amarilla August and Albert Rudbeck Lindhardt star as Laura and Elias, who fall in love. Nikolaj Lie Kaas and Paprika Steen play Laura’s divorced parents, successful architect Jacob and stressed-out science journalist Fanny; Helene Reingaard Neumann plays Jacob’s new wife Amalie; Esben Smed is Amalie’s brother, government official Nikolaj; and Magnus Millang is Nikolaj’s husband Henrik. In addition, Asta Kamma August and Max Kaysen play Cristel and her son Lucas, who are offered a way out of Denmark when Lucas is offered a football scholarship with Liverpool FC.
Though the catalyst for the story might seem to be rooted in science fact, Vinterberg says Families Like Ours strayed into science fiction after the idea first emerged from a “thought experiment.”
“We’ve done a lot of research about what would happen [in this situation], but research about the future is difficult because there are no facts and everything is debatable,” the director says. “But this, as with any other idea, is something that just comes to you. I was in a hotel room in Paris missing my family on a Sunday, and I was thinking a lot about my kids and their worrying about the world and the planet.
“Then this idea came to me – what would happen to my country, to our families, if we were to leave our country and everything we love? And if everyone was split apart, what would happen to us westerners as refugees? What would happen if everything was flipped around, basically? Then a very dark tale came out of that. What has happened is that it has become a tale about resilience and about hope and about drama, which I’m happy about. That’s what moves me, when people are brave.”
The series confronts many big themes, and certain scenes are suitably dramatic, with crowds of people clambering alongside each other through various evacuation points. Yet Families Like Ours is also unmistakably an intimate, domestic drama as Laura and her family face up to the consequences of the political situation, from considering the cost of a suddenly worthless home to being unable to withdraw savings from a bank account.
“It is a multiple-character story, but I guess you could call Laura the protagonist anyway,” Vintergberg notes. “It’s her journey we follow from the get-go to the very end. Laura and her boyfriend Elias are also the ones representing tomorrow and the hope and our look into the future. That’s why they became so important to me. There’s a naivety there, and behaviour that I thought was super important for this plot.”
With Zentropa producing the show for Denmark’s TV2 and Canal+ in France, Vinterberg partnered with Bo Hr Hansen (Bullshit, Darkness: Those Who Kill) to write the scripts, having also written films he directed such as Another Round, The Commune, The Hunt and Submarino.
“I’ve been writing most of my life because that’s what takes more time than shooting, so if you look at my calendar, I guess I’m primarily a writer,” he says. “But to the world, I come out as more as a director.”
On occasion, he also works as a director for hire, as he did with 2015 Thomas Hardy adaptation Far from the Madding Crowd, which was written by David Nicholls. “So I guess I’m both [a writer and a director] and I enjoy both. I couldn’t live with without any of it,” he continues. “The hysteria and intensity and chaos of shooting, it’s also something I’ve become addicted to. But of course, the older I get, the more I like the calm of sitting down in front of my computer and writing and imagine fantastic stuff.”
Writing Families Like Ours with Hansen, “it was long,” he says. The pair had previously written together on Vinterberg’s graduate film “hundreds of years ago,” and only stopped writing on this occasion when the production schedule forced them to down pens and laptops. “It was just before the script was finished, but we had to start shooting.”
Vinterberg compares their writing process on the series to being part of a cycling team, where one would write “in front” and the other would rewrite and edit “at the back.” “Then the further we got into the process, the more I was writing in the front,” he says. “Bo is a very humble character, so he gave me more and more space towards the end to make it mine. I’ve really enjoyed working with him.”
When it came to blending family drama with the wider themes and issues in the series, Vinterberg and Hansen were first concerned with “the roots of the tree,” plotting out the scenes and character arcs. “Writing the scenes, the words and the dialogue is just the fruits, and often I change that with the actors anyway,” Vinterberg explains. “So figuring out what the scenes are about and what order they come in, particularly in a multi-part story like this, is what took the many months.”
He also wanted to make sure the series didn’t become “depressing,” but more dramatic. “We wanted this to be, and it has become, a drama, and hopefully it’s thrilling and engaging because it is a quite tough topic. It’s pretty dark, and we had to write our way out of that.
“It’s very interesting to write about people’s coping strategies. How much can they cope with? If you’re taken away from your country, how well can you settle somewhere else? How can you restart? Will love prevail, or won’t it? When there’s a crisis, there’s also a regression in people and they become less empathetic. So obviously it’s also about aggression and fights over money and stuff like that, but basically it was about how well people can cope. That was interesting.”
With an ensemble of characters each facing different challenges, there are numerous ways in which viewers will be able to watch Families Like Ours and imagine what they might do in the characters’ shoes, not least on a very simple level wondering if they could leave their home and start again in a new country.
“Everyone will react in different ways. But still, it’s my experience that the more I dig into something very specific as opposed to the generic, the more it travels. I’m crossing my fingers that we’ve done that this time,” Vinterberg says of the series, which is distributed internationally by StudioCanal. “Another Round travelled and was very Danish in all its rituals and behaviour, but I also did a film called The Commune, which was very Danish and travelled less. That’s going to be very interesting to see.”
Families Like Ours is already set to air around the world thanks to support from Norway’s NRK, TV4 in Sweden and Germany’s ARD Degeto. And the production was an international affair, with filming taking place in Denmark, Sweden, France, Romania and the Czech Republic.
“Local television here [in Denmark], StudioCanal and all the investors have been very generous about this idea, so it has got the scale now that it needed,” Vinterberg notes. “But having said that, being the kind of director I am, the human being and the fragility of the human being, or at least the purity of the portrait of a human being, will always be my main interest.
“Some scenes are made with as much grandness and authority as we could muster, and other scenes are made handheld, in emotional contact with the actors, because that’s what the truth of that scene was. The DOP created a gearing system, so we had drive, which was handheld, and we had neutral, which was more stable. But we had different gears and different technical setups for those gears. That was a nice way to work because it was structured, though it was a mix.”
On set, making Families Like Ours provided the director with a fresh challenge due to the fact he was working with two younger actors (August and Lindhardt) who were in leading roles for the first time. That meant he chose to do a lot of rehearsals with them for their many scenes, some involving sex and violence, as well as helping them to get to know their new fictional families.
“So that was a lot of weeks of training, basically,” he says. “With the more trained actors, I had one or two weeks with them, trying some stuff, finding the characters, discussing the characters. I’m trying not to rehearse scenes too much because then they lose a little bit of curiosity. It’s more like improvising, finding character and stuff like that.
“Sometimes it’s very fruitful. Some actors don’t get much out of it. With directing, you just have to keep looking for the fruit, and it’s surprising where you find it.”
Working to a television schedule, which can often be fast-paced and demanding, Vinterberg tried to stay open to fresh ideas as filming moved from one location to the next. But most important was that the actors knew their characters so well, they could fully embody them when they stepped in front of the cameras.
“Some actors get insecure about me being open, like the youngsters,” he says. “They’d like to know exactly what to do. But if there’s a basic recipe, the more you practice, the more stable a foundation you can create through rehearsals, conversations, disagreements, rewrites, all of that, the more they know the character, the more they know their lines and the more they can leave it and feel free.
“So my idea is to build as solid a fundament as possible, and then when the camera flicks on, they can let go and it can become irrational and surprising and all of that. It’s a bit like with a speech, I suppose. If you know your speech well enough, you can let it fly and then it becomes something else and more. That’s what it requires.”
Families Like Ours is due to debut on TV2 and TV2 Play on October 20, and Vinterberg is now planning more movies and TV shows. So are there any lessons he’s learned from making his first series? “It’s best to do your yoga in the morning. It’s better than having your beer at night,” he says. “You have to keep surviving the shooting days – and they’ll keep coming. But other than that, I approached this as a film; as a long, grand movie. So it was not very different.”
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