“Make it as violent as you can,” was the advice executive producer Nicolas Winding Refn (the creator of PUSHER and director of DRIVE) gave Icelandic director Óskar Thór Axelsson when Axelsson was finishing the screenplay for the film. It was advice Axelsson took to heart.
Based on the novel BLACK CURSE by Stefán Máni, the film is set in the late 1990s - a transitional moment in the Icelandic underworld. In the “old” days, drug smuggling and gangsterism had been small-scale. Cops and criminals co-existed in what amounted to an unofficial truce. Violence was minimal. After all, Iceland is a small country. However, as Iceland became ever more integrated into Europe, new smuggling routes emerged. “All of a sudden, we had drastic change,” Axelsson recalls. Whereas a dealer in the early 1990s might be caught with 100 grams, by the end of the decade cops were catching dealers with several kilos in their possession.
The characters are fictional, but are based on real-life prototypes. (“Inspired by some shit that actually happened,” the filmmakers tell us early on.) Máni researched his novel exhaustively. Axelsson likewise tried to learn as much as he could about the Icelandic underworld. He studied Máni´s notes and met cops (who played him tape recordings of dealers´ phones they´d bugged). He even spoke with one or two real-life gangsters. “They were just into the filmmaking part of it,” the director recalls of their enthusiasm for the movie. They told Axelsson and his producer all sorts of secrets about their smuggling routes and tricks for fooling the police. “We just looked at each other and thought, OK, we´ll just keep this info to ourselves!”
Axelsson was determined to make sure his actors were as colourful and compelling as the characters described in the book. Novelist Máni gave him free license to adapt the book in whatever way he wanted. “Whenever I changed something, you´d imagine the author being protective but he was always thrilled about it!”
The director claims his storytelling style is closer to that of Goodfellas than of Refn´s PUSHER films. BLACK'S GAME is stylized and very frenetic, not a gritty realist drama. “I wanted to have it fast-paced and exciting,” Axelsson says. “We used all sorts of things - stills, split screen. I felt from the beginning, reading this book, that the story calls for it and that the film should have this kind of energy ... I always felt that, with this movie, you could just throw every crazy idea in it.”
A lawyer´s son, Axelsson grew up in Iceland but studied film in New York, where he spent eight years. He admits that he has always been a movie nut ... he was only 11 when he started making his first gangster movies on video.
The Icelandic premiere is set for early March. The writer-director is currently writing a film called THE TRAVELLER, which he describes as a Charlie Kaufman-style drama. He is also contemplating working on a ghost story, I REMEMBER YOU, another project with Icelandic production company Zik Zak and veteran LA-based Icelandic producer Joni Sighvatsson.