"I felt inspired by the idea of trading on thin ice, " says Thomas Vinterberg, who made a world breakthrough with The Celebration, his Dogme film. He has completed his dream project, It's All About Love, about the struggle for love in a world of the future under threat of collapse.
By Claus Christensen
May 2002
The Celebration had barely won the Jury's Special Prize in Cannes when the offers began flooding in from all over the world. Steven Spielberg called The Celebration one of the best films he had ever seen, Marlon Brando phoned to discuss the camera work, and Thomas Vinterberg was in constant demand. Promotion, interviews, awards . it was as if the celebrations would never end. Hollywood courted him and Thomas Vinterberg could pick and choose among all the scripts sent to him for perusal. But he ended up staying in Denmark and dedicating himself to a dream project, It's All About Love, a drama shot in English about two lovers struggling for love in a world on the verge of cosmic collapse.
"I was tempted by Hollywood and it would have been far easier to agree to do a finished script, a good thriller you know will work and which you'd have to be a dummy to ruin. I think I must have read and assessed hundreds of big projects but the decider was my visit to Los Angeles. I could tell I could not live there with my family. I don't belong there", says 32-year-old Vinterberg as he asks us into his peaceful, sparsely furnished office at Nimbus Film, Filmbyen.
"Artistically, continuing with my own work was the bravest, most reckless and from a career point of view most stupid and self-destructive choice I could make, but no matter what, I am glad I made that choice. After all, fostering a career is an extremely paltry thing to do; it is nothing; it is quickly out of the way. You may succeed, but so what? There is no richness associated with it."
Suspending the law of gravity
It's All About Love is not like anything else Vinterberg has made. His
previous works - the short fiction films Last Round and The Boy Who
Walked Backwards, and his features The Greatest Heroes and The
Celebration - are all set in the present and characterized by their humour,
energetic pulse, strong emotions and characters whom one critic described as
"so alive you feel you could reach out and touch them".
But in It's All About Love Vinterberg creates an ominous atmosphere of mystery and doom. Things are not what they seem to be, and the acting assumes a dream-like nature that may seem chill but is in fact a very precise depiction of the characters, who have grown distant from each other and from real life. The plot is a mixture of romance and suspense, an absurd futuristic nightmare Stanley Kubrick could have come up with. We are in 2021 and Earth is afflicted by cosmic disturbances. The law of gravity has been suspended in Uganda, it's snowing in July in New York, and people are collapsing in the street. They're having heart trouble.
"Things have been vibrating in the air and we have tried to catch them and reproduce them", Thomas Vinterberg says. "It's hard to put into words and I can't explain why the Ugandans in the film are weightless or why it is snowing in summer in New York. It is our report on the world, our picture of the way the disasters of the world seem more and more absurd. I hope it will evoke a response in other people, and on some points reality has already overtaken the film. We suddenly hear of hail falling in the Sahara ...".
A new way of life
It's All About Love is an international production costing DKK 85
million [EURO 11.5m]. The producer is Nimbus Film, which also produced the Dogme
films The Celebration and Mifune. Joaquin Phoenix and Claire
Danes play the leads: John, and the world-famous ice skating star Elena, who
live out their cosmopolitan marriage at different ends of the world, John in
Poland and Elena in New York. They have drifted apart and John goes to New York
to sign the divorce papers but in the middle of everything Elena asks him for
help. Her life is completely controlled by her manager and she has a feeling
that her life is in danger.
Thomas Vinterberg wrote the script together with his former tutor at the National Film School of Denmark, Mogens Rukov, who also helped to create The Celebration. "The major source of inspiration for me was the tumultous period, during which I travelled about promoting The Celebration. In the airspace around the world, I met people who were genuine cosmopolitans. They could be in Budapest in the morning, have lunch in London, and go to bed in Venice. I discovered a world in motion, a world in which individuals moved this way and that without belonging anywhere in particular. It was a new way of life that particularly got to me after The Celebration when I was away from my children and my partner. The experience shocked me."
Sense and sensibility
It's All About Love, like Vinterberg's other films, is about the
relationship between sense and sensibility. It is an existential film about a
world in which we have the freedom to do as we please but where the complexity
of everyday life is so great that many cling to orderly systems and regular
routines. They make their careers the meaning of their lives, for example. They
live unreal lives. Vinterberg's strategy is to put the knife to his character's
throats, forcing them to let go of common sense and begin living life.
"We have made a story in which we claim that people die from lack of love. I can certainly say that about myself. I'm done for if I don't have intimacy. And I think that's true for all of us. That's the core of this film. You are done for if you turn your back on love, and that is precisely what you do if you are constantly travelling away from what you come from - away from oneself" he says. "But I haven't tried to make a film for the mind. I have tried to make a film that will carry the audience away and take them on a journey."
Anti-Dogme
The filmic starting point for It's All About Love was to do the exact
opposite of what he did in The Celebration and the Dogme manifesto
(which Thomas Vinterberg wrote with Lars von Trier in 1995).
"I had gained a lot of energy from the courage associated with the Dogme project, and I wanted to pursue the same energy again. I wanted to throw myself in at the deep end and I felt inspired by the idea of stepping out onto completely thin ice and doing a project that would involve risk. We have created a radical project in which everything is illusory and carefully planned. For Dogme the camera had to be hand-held and the scenes had to be shot on location, so this time I went in for tripods and sets and studios. Joaquin Phoenix and Claire Danes' escape through the streets of New York was shot in the car park at Filmbyen. I spat in Dogme's face, but one of the sterling qualities of Dogme was innovation and in that way my new film is completely in keeping with the spirit of Dogme. You may say I've invented a new set of rules that has forced me to innovate".
Although It's All About Love is set in the future it is not a traditional science fiction film.
"We have tried to recreate the New York of the old Hitchcock films. We decided to go back in time in order to make a statement about the future. We deliberately left out flying automobiles, blue milk, weird cigarettes and implanted telephones. We are not interested in technological progress. We decided to go backwards partly to direct audience attention to what it's really all about: love and the genuine article. The past becomes the core of what our characters and our film are seeking and it impregnated itself in our picture of New York and the settings in which our characters move."
Desire
Thomas Vinterberg is responsive, likeable, and attentive. You immediately sense
his ability for empathy that has made him the leading Danish director of his
generation. Thomas Vinterberg seems to be somebody with a huge amount of surplus
resources, but in interviews he talks time and time again of his doubt and
uncertainty, about his fear of not fulfilling the enormous expectations made of
him since he got into the National Film School of Denmark at the age of 21.
Success hasn't diminished this fear.
"I talked to Ingmar Bergman on the phone after The Celebration. He thought it was idiotic of me not to have thrown myself into a new film immediately. 'You must always be working on a new project before the previous one is finished', he told me. And he is quite right. I am not going to spend a year and a half again wondering what is good for me. It's a sign of egomania and egocentricity and bears no fruit. You have to be driven by some kind of desire or some kind of necessity," he says as the press officer from Nimbus knocks on the door to say that the interview is over.
On his way out he just has time to recount the anecdote about Ingmar Bergman who found some recent newspapers on the floor of the toilet shed on his island, and when he inadvertently moved one of them aside he suddenly saw himself on the front page. He had won the Palme d'Or in Cannes a week before and had never even noticed!
"That's how it should be", Thomas Vinterberg says, and waves goodbye.
This article has also been published in FILM #22, May 2002.
SEE IT AS A DREAM
"I don't think I'll ever help to make a film more important to me than It's All About Love," Mogens Rukov says. He wrote the script together with Thomas Vinterberg. As a consultant and scriptwriter he has also helped to generate successes such ad The Celebration, The Idiots and Mifune.
By Mogens Rukov
Head of the script-writing dept. at the National Film School of Denmark. May
2002
See it as a dream! A love story for grown-ups, a not-a-Romeo-and-Juliet romance, a millennium film, an anti-Dogme film, an experiment, a homage to Kubrick, a yearning for order, a description of the state of the world, a chamber piece about two people who have loved each other for fourteen years but stopped doing so eighteen months ago, a story about New York, about the fascination New York exerts, and much, much later than its time of writing, a story that contains 11 September within it; not a visionary film, but merely a film whose logic in some way or another intervened in the logic of real life and thus corresponds with real life events, a piece of science fiction about the present, and as I most recently discovered, a modern King Lear without the conspiracies, Cordelia's almost wordless story, in the same way as The Celebration is linked to Hamlet .
We wrote the script over a two year period; not non-stop, but spread out over the two years. The Celebration's world fame proved to be fateful in many ways as regards the good things and the difficulties. It is pleasant being famous. A little famous. There's nobody in film who doesn't know The Celebration. It is a concept. Almost a form in itself. I am famous in three streets in many of the great cities of the world and in a few minor cities, too. It is pleasant seeing young women brighten and want to talk when they hear what you have made. Thomas is world famous. Being world famous is hard. It's good, but it is also a burden. We felt the burden while we were writing this new film.
It's All About Love took shape when we decided it was to be set in New York and Elena, the female protagonist, would be an international ice skating star.
To me, the princesses of the ice rink have something sensual about them. They deliver a refined performance in the spotlight in front of a very large audience in clothes that emphasise their sex, with dramatic movements that make the body animal-like, with limbs constantly being splayed, with a smile on their faces as if of joy, with a kittenishness throughout their sequence that just invites admiration and lionization. There is something scary about the princesses of the ice rink.
We started with a big story but little by little we made it smaller. I understand the idea that human life is a chamber piece no matter which events it takes part in. The innermost gesture of a chamber piece is that one person takes the other person's hand. In gratitude. The way Elena takes her husband's hand in the white limousine in Central Park at the moment when she realizes that although their relationship has ended, he loves her all the same.
That's what makes the film an anti-Romeo-and-Juliet story. It is not sensual obsession, not great declared or declaring love, not a love in word or gesture, not young Romeo's bravado or maiden Juliet's floral, animal-masochist metaphors. It is love that is over, love that is silent. A love that cannot find words. The most sensual line in the film is Elena's "Come here!" It is a fine thing to take each other by the hand and to say something as simple as "Come here". That is as it should be. I have come to distrust people who make declarations, just as I distrust the language in which they do so.
King Lear is also about love that is silent. Now, that was a strange discovery. I noticed when I reread the play recently. King Lear gives everything to Regan and Goneril because they know how to talk with overflowing superfluity of their love for him. Cordelia gets nothing because she says practically nothing. She merely says "Good my lord, You have begot me, bred me, loved me: I Return those duties back as are right fit, Obey you, love you, and most honour you."
It is Cordelia, not Goneril or Regan, who loves Lear, but not with words. So it is actually most consistent that the last lines of the play contain an indication of the ability of language to deceive. Edgar says "The weight of this sad time we must obey; Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say."
Of course Shakespeare is far greater than we, but the similarities are he strangest thing, as if the same notions are at play in our film and in King Lear. Very strange! I don't understand it. We have the "Man on the plane" almost as an independent, moral fable. Shakespeare has the Fool. We, like Shakespeare, set our big scene in the wilderness - mountain and heath respectively. In the film and the play nature's disorder recurs again and again. It is surely what is most on Lear's mind; not his daughters nor his kingdom, but disorder in nature. There is this doubt as to man's motives, and lack of knowledge of the motives and their inevitable inscrutability. There is even Lear's heart defect.This puzzles me. I really don't understand it. Does it mean that silence causes nature's disorder? Or that loneliness places people in a dramatic wilderness?
The most important difference is the intrigue. We have practically none. I no longer believe that people participate in conspiracies. Our deviousness or malice is not what governs us, but our lack of knowledge, our stupidity.
We have made a film that almost cannot be made. We have tried to find the minimum limit to drama. The world we live in is not full of conspiracies but full of rationality. Apparent rationality. We are used to having everything done for us. We do not take responsibility for our lives; we are sleepwalkers. So it is a great moment in the film when Elena's husband intervenes to pull Elena out of the utterly regulated star existence she is living. It is a scandalous intrusion - and it is love.
I am very proud of this film but also afraid of it. I don't think I will ever help to make a film more important to me than It's All About Love.
This article has also been published in FILM #22, May 2002
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