Trevor Hogg chats with Tobias Lindholm about the craft of screenwriting and his quest to write a sea adventure which led him to produce the Danish film Kapringen otherwise known as A Hijacking. Be aware there are spoilers...
Critical to producing a movie is the film crew with a key member being cinematographer Magnus Nordenhof Jønck (Northwest). “I have no idea of what he is talking about when it comes to his job,” admits Tobias Lindholm. “I can watch it at the monitor and say what I feel about it. Everybody is chipping in and we improvise a lot. They’re controlled improvisations but the actors take a lot of responsibility. When you’re looking at A Hijacking we have two main characters [Pilou Asbæk and Søren Malling] who are both good actors, educated and have done a lot of work. Then there a lot of guys who had never been in front of a camera. To make that work I needed the actors to take control of the situation. We’re like a rock band, me, my cinematographer, actors, editor, sound guy and producers; we’re making the film together.” The experience of being a screenwriter has had a creative impact on the man behind the camera. “My focus isn’t on big beautiful effects or what I can do with this and that technically on a set. My focus is on making the scene work every time. That comes from screenwriting. You can’t make a bad script really good as a film. You need a good screenplay and I’m always there to secure that the story is told instead of getting lost in something that could look good with some effects.” The time spent directing has influenced Lindholm, especially, when composing his own projects. “During A Hijacking we knew from the beginning that we needed a real ship. I knew what kind of reality I was writing to. A screenplay written for the circumstances is better than taking a screenplay and fitting it to the circumstances.”
“I had been looking to tell a story on a ship,” reveals Tobias Lindholm. “It’s a perfect arena to have eight to ten people up against the elements out there somewhere. Anything can happen and you’re far away from rescue. I always wanted to tell that story but I never came up with a good idea about it. It was always ended up being a supernatural big fish coming up and eating everybody. I didn’t want to do that. When I heard about the [Somali pirate] hijackings I knew it was a way of getting to tell a story on a ship. In 2007 and 2008 when two Danish ships were hijacked I followed those cases closely and started to write immediately.” Lindholm notes, “I have found that reality is always much more fascinating than fantasy or imagination.” The need for honest drama has led the native of Denmark to tell crisis stories which in the case of A Hijacking was assisted from an unexpected source, the sailors themselves. “We found out that the crew members who needed to work for us and were extras on the film had been hostages in real life. They knew a lot of details about being hijacked by Somali pirates. They gave me a lot of these details and I changed the script immediately. For example, keeping the other crew members down below wasn’t in the script. It came from them.” The discovery emphasized the seriousness of the subject matter. “The hard part was making the sailors comfortable with being filmed and telling the story they had lived through.”
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“I was writing Borgen [DR1, 2010 to present], the TV show, while we were shooting R in the daytime,” recalls Tobias Lindholm who cast Pilou Asbæk (The Whistleblower) as Mikkel Hartmann, the cook of the hijacked ship and Søren Malling (A Royal Affair) as Peter C. Ludvigsen, the CEO of the Copehagen shipping company. “At night time I would sit down and write episodes. Pilou got the part just after we finished shooting R. We started out together in many ways. Søren I became friends on the TV show and I called both of them before I had even written a word and asked them if they wanted to do these parts because I like them. It’s so many years making a film so you definitely want to share your life with people you like if you can choose. We like soccer, drink beers and love talking about film so it made sense to share our lives together. Both of them are brilliant actors. Søren has done a lot of comedy so the only rule I made for him was in A Hijacking he was not allowed to be funny at all. He did a great job. We gave him a great gift. Gary [Skjoldmose Porter] who plays Connor Julian, the Englishman who comes in and advises him, he’s a real hostage negotiator. We had an expect in the room knowing everything about this so Søren was more free to act as a person instead of needing to control the situation and that made the tension in the room bigger.” Removing the comedy element was also a way to level the acting playfield. “Søren has been around for so long and done so much; I needed to try to make him as nervous as everybody else on the set. We could do that by forcing him to do something he hadn’t done before.”
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Filling the roles for the Somali pirates was a difficult process. “We found them in the streets of Mobassa, Kenya where we rented the ship,” remarks Tobias Lindholm. “We had meetings with tribal leaders to get their permission to cast some of the young guys; they allowed us to do it. We found these guys and they were brilliant. I don’t speak Somali so the crazy thing was I didn’t know what they were talking about on-set. I told them to talk about being hungry or needing to have a shower or a cigarette when they were walking around talking in Somali and they did. The only Somali guy we brought down was Omar [Abdihakin Asgar], the negotiator on the pirate side. I saw Abdihakin in the streets of Copenhagen and he was the fairest Somali guy I’ve ever seen; I felt it was a perfect way to separate him for the other guys. Abdihakin turned out to be an amazing actor; he had never acted before.” What the novice performer lacked in experience he made up by watching movies over and over again including the behind the scenes documentaries. “When I started to work with him, he would suddenly say something like, ‘That’s exactly what Michael Mann told Al Pacino in Heat[1995].’ Abdihakin had educated himself.” As for the part of Omar who does not see himself as a criminal, Lindholm states, “In the research we did I couldn’t find the truth about this character because some of them are actually hostages on the boat as well. There are histories of these negotiators/translators having their families held at gunpoint on the shore and they’re told, ‘We’re going to kill your family if you don’t bring us several million dollars.’ On the other hand we have a lot of other guys who are financing and working on three or four ships at the same time.” The filmmaker did not want the back story for Omar to overshadow the hijacking plot. “I tried to keep it open until the end where he interferes with the guy who shot the captain [Keith Pearson] and then we know he’s more than just a hostage.”
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“In the beginning I thought I would do a story about the hostages but the thing is you quickly find out that it is boring being a hostage,” states Tobias Lindholm. “You’re scared all the time and you don’t do anything. If I did anything I needed to create them making a rescue plan, a cliché like that, and that hadn’t happen out there. I needed something that could be an engine in the story. When I found the negotiation part of this whole process I knew that was where the engine was. Going back and forth between Denmark and the Indian Ocean made it possible for us to make time go and for us to make the audience know more than the characters and that can often be a great gift. It’s suspenseful.” Lindholm reveals, “I never wrote the hijacking scene; the first one I wrote was Søren listening to it. I saw a documentary which had a CEO getting a phone call and something terrible is happening. Everything changes. I found that situation fascinating. I felt like if we want to make the CEO a main character we needed to discover this with him instead of with the sailors. Had we known that the ship had been hijacked and then came back to the CEO we would have been in front of him and he would be a spectator to the situation. I needed to place him right in the front of it. Then it was a desperate situation knowing that it was three hours ago.”
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A moment of relief is occurred is when the hostages and the audience are allowed back onto the deck of the ship. “I wanted to humanize everybody,” states Tobias Lindholm. “A minute a go they were hostages and pirates and just for awhile they’re men trying to catch a fish, enjoying and celebrating that. It was to give everybody a feeling of joy and that everything is going to be fine.” Tragedy strikes soon afterwards. “It was to be as honest as possible. When you put guns into the hands of 16 years old guy and make them shoot cans all day something will happen at a point. I had killed Pilou in R and I promised him not to [this time] so it needed to be the captain. For me it was important to make sure that Pilou could never come back as the same man. We needed something that could change him forever. Pilou holding onto that ring and that costing the life of the captain made everything worse than it had ever been for our character. It was necessary. I’m a huge fan of what you call false endings. The logic of tragedy is that you need to believe it is going to work out. Romeo and Juliet are almost getting each other. It’s much more terrible than never getting each other.” In the opening scenes Lars Vestergaard (Dar Salim) runs into trouble negotiating with Japanese businessmen and seeks out the help of his boss who is able to bring the deal to a favourable conclusion. “I do believe that the relationship between Vestergaard and the CEO is much more important in the film than you realize when you’re watching it. One of the things is that their positions will change in the end and Vestergaard will solve the CEO’s problem. In many ways we’re implying that maybe the CEO can’t continue his position after this.”
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VSC presents A Hijacking which opens in Toronto at the tiff Bell Lightbox and in Ottawa at The Mayfair on August 16, 2013.
“We paid almost the same amount as anyone else would do for the period,” states Tobias Lindholm who headed to Kenya to hire a ship. “We found a company that had three or five ships lying in Mombasa and we went down and chose the Rozen. We had been on two ships and I had chosen another one. We went to see the third one and it was the Rozen; it turned out that she was built in Denmark so all the small signs on the ship were in Danish.” The on-location principle photography out on the Indian Ocean placed the production in an ironic dangerous situation – the risk of being hijacked. “We brought on armed guards to make sure it wouldn’t happen. The night before we were to sail out I needed to drink a lot of rum to fall asleep. I was almost going to the producers saying, ‘I cannot do this.’ I was afraid of the situation. There had just been two attempted hijackings where we were going. We were alert and had the armed guards but I was afraid it would cost someone their life. There would be fire fights because I wanted to make a film about hijacking and that didn’t make any sense to me. I made a deal with my producers that I was going to stay with the monitor and think about nothing else. They would look at the horizon and make sure that everything else would be fine.”
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“When I talked to my producers about it I was afraid that there was too much English for the Danish market and we decided not to think about that,” stated Tobias Lindholm. “We would go with the realistic way and I had never thought of it as an international film but with the life it got I understand one of the things why was because of the English. It was an unintended good idea.” The Somali dialogue is not subtitled. “We decided that the audience could only know what the CEO and sailor knew so we could sit there being confused and not knowing anything. That makes the guys scarier when they yell in Somali because we have no idea of what they’re talking about. It sounds like murder threats all the time and that made it a more threatening, claustrophobic and alien situation for the sailors [and the audience].” Adding the tension is the camera work which adopts the point of view of the hostages. “We did the prison film before this one and we felt that we had learned something about telling stories in small rooms. I felt we could be even better at it and we tried to do that with A Hijacking. One of the ways to do it was keep the audience locked up with us for a long time before going out.”
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Another critical element was to keep the sounds in the movie authentic. “That came from a concept of making it real so we did make it real,” stated Tobias Lindholm. “I talked to my sound designer Morten Green [Everything Will Be Fine] and we decided to make the phone calls live which means all the mistakes and echoes were one take. They were never edited. We never changed it and did it in a studio. When we are on the ship we’re calling Søren [Peter] in Denmark. Peter’s only direction was he needed to hang up quickly. There are echoes that identify a real phone call. I do believe they get to the audience. I’m making sure that you can hear every word said. It’s the emotions that count in those situations. That’s often the big misunderstanding with sound is that it needs to be pretty.”
“I need to shoot as much material as possible,” states Tobias Lindholm who made use of digital footage. “We brought home 220 hours from Africa. We couldn’t afford that with film. It’s easier for us to work with in that way. Everything is much more flexible and I’m not one who has a romantic relationship with real film rolls. We had takes that were one hour and twenty minutes without cutting. We were staying there in room seeing what happens and that wouldn’t be possible with film.” Lindholm is pleased with the international acclaim for A Hijacking. “It’s easier to start to write a new film with that feeling rather than being hated by everybody. I’m proud of being part of The Hunt [2012]. Thomas Vinterberg did a great job. I’m proud of all of the guys on A Hijacking. I’m pleased that we made a small film for almost no money and it has been travelling the world for a year now.”
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As for whether there has been a Danish film revolution taking place, Tobias Lindholm remarks, “We’re hoping that wave is not going to break any day soon. A new generation of Danish filmmakers were made with the Dogme 95 [an avant-garde filmmaking movement founded by Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg]. Something like that getting so much attention coming out of Denmark gave us the idea of being able to make films and to focus on being better.” When it comes to watching Captain Phillips (2013), which is a Hollywood depiction of a Somali pirate hijacking that stars Tom Hanks (Forrest Gump) and is directed by Paul Greengrass [The Bourne Supremacy], Lindholm states, “I’m a huge Greengrass fan and am looking forward to seeing it. I saw the second trailer the other day and it looked better than the first one.” The screenwriting continues for the writer-director. “We’re writing Thomas’ next Danish film now. We have a couple of projects and one specific we have been doing some drafts on. I’m also writing my own next project which I’m doing with the same crew I did R and A Hijacking. We’re going to shoot that next summer. Soon we’ll be able to reveal what it is about but I’m not allowed to yet because we’re in some political mess with the people we need to allow us inside for research in their field of work.”
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Reflecting upon his time spent writing television episodes, Tobias Lindholm remarks, “For the first year of being out of film school and writing 20 hours of drama that was edited and aired gave me a lot of routine early on. It’s necessary for young filmmakers to make films. If you don’t make films you’re not a filmmaker. That got me going. The engine was running. It inspired me to keep a high level of production. Not in quality but in quantity and hopefully the quality would get there. There’s nothing worse than a writer being afraid of writing. That can be destroying and TV helped me not to have time to think about that. It gave me the tools of forcing myself to write as a professional. I got to know a lot of editors and film workers, especially, a lot of actors so I knew what kind of quality I could be looking for in each actor and that has helped me tremendously on the work I did on A Hijacking.”
Many thanks to Tobias Lindholm for taking the time for this interview.
Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer who currently resides in Canada.