Danish directors Tobias Lindholm and Michael Noer tell Edward Lawrenson how they got inside the Danish prison system to make Tiger competitor R
One of the happy accidents behind the making of R, a gripping, gritty contemporary prison drama from Danish directors Tobias Lindholm and Michael Noer, occurred in a bar in Copenhagen. It was here that Lindholm met Roland Møller. Inspired by writing letters to a childhood friend who was in jail for drugs offences, Lindholm decided to write a prison movie while still at film school. “I knew in my stomach it was something I hadn't seen in Danish cinema up till then,” he explains.
Then Møller, a friend of a friend, found out about the project and approached him. Møller had served time and, Lindholm explains, “he wanted to tell me some stories about his experience in prison. So I asked him if he could help me write a script and that's how it started.” A further stroke of luck provided another impetus to development. “I found out that the oldest prison in Denmark, Horsens state prison, was closing down and, to my surprise, this was where Roland had served time.” Lindholm called his producer at the time to look into getting access to Horsens: a company had planned to turn the building into an amusement park, but the venture failed after the withdrawal of some Icelandic backers, which gave the green light to the film. “At that time, we didn't have the plot of the story: I just knew I could make a very realistic portrait of prison life if I could get inside the prison, and inside my friend Roland's head.”
Lindholm's next step was to contact Michael Noer as a co-director. Noer's background is in documentary: experience he could bring to the project to match Lindholm's fictional craftsmanship. Authenticity was key to the project. “The most important thing when we started doing the script was to make it as honest as possible,” Lindholm says. “When we got to the prison, we decided to research among the guards and prisoners who'd been in that prison so that every story we'd tell would somehow be connected to that prison.”
Following Rune (Pilou Asbæk), a young man locked up for an unspecified crime, the movie revolves around his fluctuating fortunes within the prison hierarchy, and his attempt to curry favour with the 'boss' of his cell block by smuggling drugs between his floor and that occupied by the Arabic-speaking prisoners below. “The way he moves these drugs is exactly what happened for real,” says Lindholm.
This insistence on authenticity extends to the cast. Asbæk is the only professional actor – his contact among the Muslim prisoners is played by Omar Shargawi, who directed 2008 Tiger entry Go With Peace Jamal. Most of the rest of the cast had some prior connection to Horsens prison. Møller, for instance, was brought on board as a consultant and played the Mason, a career criminal who bullies Rune when the young man first arrives in jail. And Kim Winther, who plays the guard Kim, was himself a guard at the old Horsens prison.
So given this level of research, what did the prison authorities think of the film? “They haven't seen it yet,” says Lindholm, “but I'm looking forward to it. Of course there are a lot of things in the film that could get our sources and informants in trouble, but the good part about making fiction is you can always just blame the writer!”
More on R here.