Episode 2: Danish Twist

Here more stories in your language by visiting ispiers.com.au Welcome to Noir here, this podcast with me, Yuan Gorbrelson. In each program we showcase some of the best Nordic Noir writers and we meet the people behind the popular TV shows to have spread this popular crime fiction genre around the world. Today we travel to Denmark, home to the Killing and the Bridge, two of the most successful Nordic Noir television programs on the planet. We meet writer Jeppe Jairi Gram, who take us into the heart of successful Nordic Noir script writing. We meet Anna Moritweid, associate professor in media studies from Oehub's University, to examine the origins of the Nordic Noir style. But first Sarah Bladal, the queen of Danish crime fiction, winner of numerous awards and four times voted Denmark's best crime writer. Here is an excerpt from her book The Forgotten Girls. Gone is coming, gone is coming, the words pounded in her ears as the rocks and branches of the forest floor tore her feet and shins. Her head was whirling and fear made her heart constrict. She was headed for the only light she could see. Like an opening in the dark, the gleam of white pulled her deeper into the woods. And scared, she stumbled through the trees gasping for air. A fear of the dark was like a chokehold around her neck. It had been that way ever since she was ordered as a young child to turn off the light and go to sleep. Or gone would come and take her. Gone, gone, gone. She was lifted rhythmically and she was too slow to prevent a branch from flicking across her cheek. Holding her breath, she stopped and stood as if frozen, completely surrounded by the saturated darkness from the trees that towered around her. Her legs were shaking from exhaustion, frightened by the sound of her own crying. Her eyes fixed on the lighter head. It blinded her when she looked straight at it. Pusara Bladal, a fascination with crime stories, began at a very early age. My whole love for crime novel, that when I was a child, because my mum, she was reading, you know, at my bedside, she was reading mysteries. Huge crime fame. So she was reading, I get a Christie, for example, Mr. Is and not that very heart-boiled crime novels, but she loved it and I loved this and to her. My mum was an actress and she was very good at, you know, reading out loud. So it was just so nice when she was sitting there and reading a cozy, I get a Christie mystery. I was maybe around five years old. You get scared? No, I don't know. Maybe it was her voice that makes me very calm and I was curious and it was one of the things that we had together. Who is it? Who is the murder? How do we solve it? So I can blame her all the way. But did you know from such a young age that you wanted to be a writer? No, I didn't and I never ever had the thought that I want to be a writer. I love being a reader. The whole thing was to read the story, to get into the story and be soaked up in the story. So I've never ever seen myself as a writer because I had really enjoyed so much when everybody else, all the really good writers put stories together and I'm just the reader. So I've never ever seen that coming. It was a big surprise to myself when I realized that I have a story in my head. How did I come to you? How did you and when did you realize this is a story? I want to write this story. I have been working as a journalist for many, many years and I was working on a television show at that time. So busy. You know all about the deadlines and coming up and people were yelling and shouting and stressing. And I won a lottery where I won a trip to Norway to skiing and I've never ever been on ski before. So I went up to Norway. It's a little bit outside the season so there wasn't very many people there. But up there, so cold and so beautiful and so quiet. And just after I've been in a very stressful situation with deadlines and TV shows, I start thinking about what if that happened? What if you find a person a journalist actually murdered behind one of the big hotels in Copenhagen? And I was so curious about what could have happened but it was just my way out of stress. It was just my way to tell myself a story. I didn't see it like I am building up a plot here or I am finding characters here. I was just starting a story for myself in my head. And when I got back to work and still super stressful, I continued when everybody else was yelling and shouting. And this is an advice. Don't close your eyes when you tell yourself a story because then everybody else can see that you are not listening anymore. But for a really long time, I did not know it was my first time level. I was just having fun in my head. Thank you. You experience your background as a journalist affects the language that you use in your books. My writing, I guess, is much more into the way we talk. The way we put it together, maybe not very fancy, maybe not very complicated. And that's the thing that goes to my background because I have this lecture when I was a child. I still have, but not as bad as I had it when I was a child. So me, I see things in pictures. I see it like it's a movie scene or a film scene going on in my head. And that is what I'm trying to describe. And I actually think that that is why so many of my readers feel that they can follow me around in my stories because I'm much more a picture kind of author. I read somewhere in your writing process. You have something you call a killing wall. What is the killing wall? That doesn't sound very charming. I have my killing wall. But yeah, and if I do, I really have it because it's so interesting. Again, that is because of the pictures and the ideas. When I see people and they don't know that they can end up as a victim or killer in my book. And it's just really the right face, the right person or the right profile. And then I, yeah, if I find it on the internet, then I print it and put it up and also research things, places I've been, places I'm, you know, that is important for me when I'm doing my research. It all comes up on the killer wall. But very interesting is when I, when I'm dealing with a character in my book. I think that the character is working, but still not totally 100% good. Then, then I go search for pictures or I go out and see people and I actually have been taking pictures with my phone just for myself. And then when I see it and I know yes, there she is or there he is, then it makes it so much more, it comes so much more to live in my head. How important is it for your books that they reflect what's going on in Danish society? I do not think about I want to dig into the Danish society and say my opinion about this or that. But it very often comes up that something that happens get me curious. The story of the forgotten girls was an article I read in one of the big newspapers and it was such an interesting article about what happened for the mental institutions way back because we had a shift in Denmark where they moved from one way to treat mental illness into another way. When I started reading about it, I thought it might be back in the 50s or something like that, but it was not. It was actually in the 80s where I was a young woman. I knew up there was a mental hospital very close to in the forest and it makes me thinking of what happened when I had horses when I was a child I was riding in the forest. And I met a lot of these people and say hi, hi, I know they were different. I know that they were at a place that hospital and they were under care, special care. But so many things makes me curious when I confronted in a private way. You know, it's not like I'm finding a topic in the newspaper or huge debate. Then I feel I need to raise my voice and come up with my opinion about it. It's much more things that makes me curious. We heard Sarah Playdel. [Music] Jeppe Jarvik Gramm got his big break as a writer when he received a BAFTA, the UK's highest film award for the popular TV show Borjan, a show about the Mackevellian world of Danish politics. After the success of Borjan, Jeppe Gramm was offered the role of head writer for the TV show Follow the Money, which premiered in 2016. It follows a fraud investigation of a renewable energy company. How does Denmark, a small country with a population of 5.7 million, manage to create crime TV drama that has conquered the world? What's the secret? [Music] According to Jeppe Gramm, it has a lot to do with the or the Danish public broadcaster. It has been developed through the last 20 years, I would guess, in Danish radio, we are a public broadcaster with a lot of public broadcasting responsibilities. But sometime in the late 90s, they decided that what they were doing were basically like film theatre. It was very old school, not very modern. At the same time, the darkman movement happened in the feature film in Denmark. So the former head of drama realized that something had to be done and that there was so much creative potential out there in the film industry that PR could use. And the other leg of that equation was that they sent some key people to Hollywood to see how they did series. They had some people in the NYPD Blue and they came back and basically made a Danish model. But in essence, a lot of the things that they brought with them was very, it became from over there from the States. And it formulated some darkness back then, the head of grammar. And one of them was the darkman of one vision. When you do a long-running TV series with a long story arc and long story lines, you have to have one voice through it all. It has to be felt like it's one unified story. And the only way to do that is by giving the responsibility to one creative person or maybe a very well-working creative collective. But you need one vision and that vision they gave to the writer. And that was quite new back then. But how does that then write a work in the later phase with a director who has another vision or has a vision as well? In the beginning, I think a lot of the directors were basically hired guns. They probably had to realize their own visions through the years things have changed because now it's the system, everybody understands the system and how it works and understands the reason for the fact that the writer's room that basically controls the storytelling and the creative process. But nowadays, I mean, for show like "Borgan" or "Show Like", "Follow the Money". We wanted the absolute best directors we could get in Denmark. So we wanted the A-list. And when you phone up the A-list and want them to work on your show, of course, you have to share some creative responsibility with them. It's obvious for me, a malated generation of TV writers. For me, it's obvious that I will get their better work if they feel that they share the vision. I have some episode writers or some co-writers that I work very closely with. So inside the writers room, they are my close associates. But outside of the writers room, Mike closest associate is by far, he's my producer. He's basically the CEO of the TV series and I'm the head of creative. And we work together. I mean, my responsibility is everything creative and his responsibility is everything around that. But there will not be any creative decision that I don't sign off on. It must be a dream for a writer. It is. Yeah, it's truly a huge responsibility. With freedom, there's a great responsibility. So I mean, there's nobody to blame if it goes down. I mean, if you're in Hollywood and doing a TV show and it's bad in the end, then most of the time you can blame a lot of executives for protecting all the bad decisions. And you can't do that here. Yeah, Pe, can you tell me in this genre of crime fictional crime drama television from Denmark, where does follow the money come? Is it like continuation of the genre of crime thrillers, do you think? In a sense, it came out of Borgon. Even though the shows are so different, I mean, with Borgon, we managed to make boring, complicated politics drama into something that you could send prime time and that people would enjoy a large audience, would enjoy from that experience, taking something very complex and saying, this might be complex, but it's also so very important, such an important part of society that we need to be able to find the drama and that and we and there will be drama. And when the financial crisis happened, I was writing on Borgon. I realized how big a subject that was and how important the connections, the financial connections in the world between, for instance, I mean, a bank temples over in Manhattan and the repercussions are felt in rural Denmark. And those connections, yeah, really shocked me. And I realized how important that subject was and that although it's so very complex, it had to be told. Those stories had to be told. I was still doing Borgon, so I expected a lot of other writers to to dig into a finance as a subject matter for TV series. But and I heard a lot of a lot of shows being pitched, but none were made. So when I finished the Borgon, I basically just thought, well, this is it now. Now I have to give it a go. I have to try. Tell me about the beginning though, or follow the money. How did you even think about the concept? Why was it important to tell that story, yep? I really wanted a story about how money connects us all after the financial crisis. So many people said that everything that happened was just because of some evil bankers or something. And I thought it was too simplistic. I mean, of course, there's a lot of bankers that should have been jailed for what they were doing for being so it's ethical and cynical and even breaking the law. But for me, it was much more about all of us. It was about the greed in all of us and that the fact that in instance in Denmark, I mean, the value of houses was rising so fast up until that crisis. And nobody asked a question about it. Everybody just assumed that because they owned a house, they were entitled to suddenly becoming millionaires in the industry online. And they didn't even have to work for it. People earned more money having a house than they did in a full year of work. Obviously, that doesn't make any sense. But people didn't ask any questions about it. Not until the world turned over that people started saying something we should have done something that couldn't have been right. Then it was too late. And I was so fascinated by this. So I knew I wanted to do a drama that dealt with greed and dealt with the money. It was basically, it didn't have to be a crime story, but I just realized that it was a way to get into that world. We heard "Yep big crime". Anna Mard Wade is a associate professor at the Department of Information and Media Studies at the University of Orhibs in Denmark. Her specialty is, you guessed it, Núric Nguá. In books and articles, Anna has examined the definition and the aesthetics of Núric Nguá. And it all began at the book club at the University of London. My idea is that we have a long tradition in the Nordic countries, particularly within philosophy and art history, in which melancholy has been another, you can say, trademark a word that has been linked to several artists. So like "Cebelius" and "Vartmunk" and "Bergmann" and "Late" and "Las von Trier". So it's music, it's theater, it's film and also philosophy. And melancholy has been a very strong, I would say, both inspiration and also stylistic element in the work of some of these artists. And again, it's not a very, really a definition. It's not like there are some specific stylistic elements that make it the Nordic melancholy. And it's been a tradition and what interests me is that these melancholy has been related to characters and to places and landscapes and nature and climate. And I can see some of these ideas are also playing a role in the more recent Nordic Nordic art crimes here. So that's my idea. The killing is a wonderful example. How the climate is a very significant part of the visual aesthetics and these gloomy settings that they're talking about. But also the characters, how the character Sophia Grobel in her role as Sarah Lund, she has this inner kind of conflict, the melancholy in the way she is expecting, and that has been part of the character. So it's both a character and the setting and the light, the light is extreme in the killing. You know, Anita's inspired later series, "More General", and it's a very significant part of the Nordic New Art concept in itself. Is there something typical in the production of these shows that stands apart? I think they've been very, very good developing strong ideas, and you know, part of this is also the double storytelling, or the tradition that we have in the Nordic countries when it comes to public service drama, because all of these, many of these series are public service drama. So they have this strong mandate of telling important stories to to the audience. So the double plot is that it shouldn't be only a regular story, it should also be about something that is important in the society. Perhaps critical, perhaps trying to illuminate something that has been hidden or difficult, or whatever, for instance, about refugees, about social conflict. So this is a very strong mandate and tradition in the Scandinavian broadcasters, TV drama series. Would you say there is a difference between when it comes to crime drama, how the difference is in the different Scandinavian countries, Danish people, or Danish production is in a certain way, Swedish in a certain way, or is it all kind of mixed together? What's your opinion? A difficult question, because things are also changing. What we use to see is that in the Swedish context they use to adapt popular crime fiction. So the millennium, the Gotland series, the Chiehlbacher, Wallander, all these series, they are based on crime series, crime fiction and crime fiction that's been sold internationally. So that was the business model. The news that the crime series has a market potential and then they adopted this series for TV. In Denmark, that has been different because we had DR who was a strong player and really wanted to develop content themselves. So they developed new drama series. So like the Killing Borg and all these are new series. But more recently, the last five, three years we can see this is changing partly because in Denmark, DR is also no commissioning drama series produced by other companies in Sweden and Norway. They are both working on adaptation that they're also working, developing their own drama series. So I want to say that the difference between the countries is that clear in a longer. And Norway, they've been until very recently, a little bit behind because they haven't had them the money and the competence to invest in the series. But lately they had produced some very very good series that is also, that are traveling internationally. So it seems like the more mixed conditions right now. And Marit, you've been following this, you've been standing this for many years. Do you think we are in the beginning or have we seen, do you get a sense that we actually seen the height of this my colleague is talking about the golden age of the Danish TV drama is is over. And that's that could be the case. I can see that there's a lot of this has inspired the industry or a lot of initiatives that I wouldn't think will end tomorrow, not at all. For instance, now they are starting out new master programs for script writers in Finland in Norway. There are new collaboration across the countries of new Danish companies and are working with the French and the German companies and new co-productions. So I think there's so many output of this trend that we we have just seen the beginning of. It's also for the artists, the Danish and the Scandinavian actors. They are now taking roles in Game of Thrones and it's the same for the directors for the script writers. So I think it's the knowledge and the ideas are traveling and we can see that in Wales in Scotland, the hinterland for that's one example, they're picking up on the ideas and they are now trying to develop their own Nordic New Art crime series. When I went to mid-come last year, that's a big market where they buy and sell the content for TV. When they pitched the new trends in TV drama, they used this Nordic New Art as a way of framing all the new trends that they talked about Spanish New Art and Brazilian New Art and Turkish New Art. So I think it has been such a strong idea within the industry and the culture that any it has inspired new initiatives and new collaborations and I think that's just the beginning. Perhaps the British, the British want to talk that much about the Danish TV drama in the longer that could be the case. But that's okay. We heard Professor Anne Morit vaid. In the next episode of Nordic New Art we visit Norway. The richest country in Scandinavia has also some of the best crime writers. Gunnar Stolesen has been described as the Norwegian answer to Raymond Chandler and we meet Jairman Eriksen, the man behind one of the most talked about crime shows in Norway, Manon. We also meet the crime writer behind the synonym Sam El Björk and we find out why Norway produce such dark terrifying Nordic New Art stores. Thanks for listening to our Nordic New Art series. The reading from Sarah Blader's book The Forgotten Girls was done by Lily Spicer. Production is by me Johan Gård Brelson and Technical Production by Vlad Ladma. If you like what you heard tell your friends. Subscribe via your favorite podcast app and review us on iTunes. It help others find us. Goodbye. SBS.com.au.