Film Interview: "R" co-directors Tobias Lindholm and Michael Noer

Danish filmmakers Tobias Lindholm and Michael Noer discuss their hard-hitting prison drama, R, which received its American premiere at the 2010 Los Angeles Film Festival

By Todd Konrad

Receiving its American premiere at the recent Los Angeles Film Festival, Tobias Lindholm and Michael Noer’s visceral prison drama, R,forces viewers to identify with the emotional and physical perils of life within a brutal Danish penitentiary. The plotline features a dearth of traditional back story for its characters, instead focusing on the day to day struggles of Rune, a young Danish hoodlum, and Rachid, a Muslim criminal. Both prisoners formulate a small drug smuggling operation in order to protect themselves from abuse by the older inmates. However, with twists and turns that are both shocking yet tragically inevitable, the film careens along to its violent climax. Lindholm and Noer were kind enough to share their thoughts about the film as they were in the midst of their LA Film Fest experience.

Vegas Outsider: How did you come up with the film's premise and storyline?

Tobias Lindholm: Well, we based the whole thing off of a lot of serious research on the prison that we filmed within. We contacted as many ex-inmates as we could find and let them tell us their stories and experiences whilst inside the prison, and then tried to mold them into a story about these two particular guys arriving to jail and their separate lives within it.

VO: The film has an amazingly gritty look, which underscores how unforgiving this world that the main characters inhabit is to them. Would you say that much of the story is taken directly from those incidents you’d researched or was it more of an inspired riff off of everything you had learned?

TL: Everything in the story happened to someone in real life; of course we’ve changed the context and made it fit into our story, but all the elements of the story as detailed in the film actually happened inside that prison.

VO: One underlying theme within the story is this explicit racial tension between the Danes and Arabs, despite their business dealings. How realistic is this dynamic within the prison system there as well as any indication of in society in general?

Michael Noer: For us, it was very interesting again to do the research because we found out that even though they are rivals they still work together. So in that sense it’s a very true portrayal of how things work within the prison. And in many ways,they actually do more business together inside the prison than many Arabs and Danes do outside in regular society, where they are even more segregated. So it was interesting to create this mini society within society, which is reflective of what is going on in Denmark and Europe in general with these cultural clashes.

VO: How did youcome upon the film's specific point of view? Because there is almost literally no backstory and as a viewer, you are led around by this character R, which takes on an entirely different level closer to the end with the twist.

TL: Well we wanted the prison, the building in and of itself, to be the main character when we started out because this is the character within which all the other stories would be portrayed. We then made a decision to follow more than one character, so that instead of making the film about the character Rune alone, we just follow him around with the camera instead. And because we also wanted to see the whole jail system, we knew at a certain point we would have to follow someone else in order to move the story into a different ward to portray this other facet within the prison.

MN: It’s similar to a way that you would make a documentary film about someone in a prison, why would you follow anyone else but him or her unless something happened during which time you’d then have to change your perspective, i.e. that person dies. So I think it was an interesting way for us to find a natural point in which we could change perspective within the film since we only focus on one character’s story at a time. We hope that it enhances the drama because you never know more than R knows, therefore we hope people show empathy for him just by the fact that we only follow him. That idea also dictated our decision not to include much backstory, as a way to enhance the drama by creating a certaindistance and then having a few emotional scenes.

TL: We also found that when we tried to include some backstory about what these characters did to end up inside of the prison, it became less interesting to us because it opened them up to being criticized for the crimes they did rather than focusing on their experiences inside the prison itself and thus risk any empathy you would have with them.

VO: How has the film's reception been thus far in your opinion and is it pushing any buttons that perhaps you wished to see pushed?

TL: It was released in Denmark a couple of months ago to great reviews and a lot of debate, in which the prison system tried to defend itself. But no one could tell us that what we portray in the film is not truthful.

MN: We showed the film to the actual prisoners two days before the premiere and they were very moved by it. These men came in looking like they don’t verbalize their emotions very often but they spoke deeply of the film and we were very proud of that. That they felt it was an honest portrayal of how it feels emotionally to be inside of that place and since we weren’t trying to make a documentary but rather appeal to the emotions that meant agreat deal to us. Also because it seems that in Denmark there is this bubble in which people think it is less tough to be in a Danish prison rather than let’s say a Filipino or American prison. But it is still tough to be within a Danish one as well. Because prison is a system within a system no matter what society you are in, which I think also gives the film hopefully a universal appeal as well.

*R will receive its official American theatrical release in early 2011 courtesy of Olive Films, to learn more and keep up to date with any developments, be sure to go to www.olivefilms.com