we're looking into disappearances some
recent others dating back several years what do you need a small team the casting is fantastic each person is very
different to the next everybody's got their own rhythm and personality and color which is
exactly what you want especially for a thriller he's playing games it's just so enjoyable to
see all these high-profile names on a list and and actually seeing them in person as well
it's quite mind-blowing something that thomas does brilliantly is ca
st for the specific
roles if you put all these characters in front of a light everyone has their
own silhouette everyone has their own character their way of standing there walking
their height everyone you can pick them out harry hall is a laconic and very gifted
policeman from the very beginning you know we had michael in mind for this
role harry is very sensitive and very vulnerable which makes him much more interesting
than a hard-boiled officer the reason why thomas really wanted to h
ave michael is partly because
of that that he is vulnerable and can show sort of deeper and inner emotions with his enormous
acting ability he's very naked in what he does the lack of vanity you could see in his work
he's very open-minded to stuff even though he's his intuition is to say no ellie quail
tell me michael is very real his way of discussing scenes with thomas is where
finding his character it feels authentic he's so interested in making the best out of
every scene all the time
i'm learning so much about acting and the work and the process
just by watching him i'm katrina brat harry hall i know who you are we um we
actually studied your cases at the academy i didn't know they date back that far rebecca
ferguson was the first actor we offered the role to and when they met and talked about this role it
was very clear to thomas how much rebecca wanted to do this and i think thomas felt without
a doubt that this is an actor that he wanted she's great she's good fun an
d sort of
easy going so that's a really nice mix she is very passionate about
acting you can see that you know she really cares about it and so it
lends very nicely to her character while the camera is here so we get a bit
closer into this eyeline and uh she is a very passionate actress
she's swedish too which is um you know we we have our secret
language which i couldn't share with with the english-speaking actress so to say
but it's it's been fantastic to work with her god what's lovely
is to sit with michael and
thomas and you laugh and you have coffee or tea and you discuss the scene or you're in detail sort
of walking through watching michael and rebecca inhabit these characters and and watching that
relationship between them develop is uh is a big part of what will make this movie interesting it's
down to chemistry you know sometimes you just have a chemistry with somebody and that's something
you can never really plan for or something that you know it's there it's th
ere it's it's not
and we've definitely got a very good chemistry i miss you charlotte gainsbourg is just such
an ideal actor for that particular role she's totally gorgeous she's totally original she's a
very graceful actress and i think the triangle of her rebecca and michael works tremendously
well i mean why would you ever stop being in love with charlotte gainsbourg it seemed as soon as we
started working together that we had a past and a future and that's always great in storytelling
when we're coming from somewhere and hopefully we're going somewhere you know where if when a
film ends you imagine the characters continuing it isn't just the letter he reported a message
before he killed we've got actors of enormous quality for tiny tiny little roles and
i think they have all done it because um they want to work with thomas
alvertson because of the script and because of the existing material i believe
in my heart tonight oslo has already won jk is artist group it's just e
xciting he throws himself into the row and out of
it very easily i now cannot see anyone else i got to work with val kilmer and loved that uh
thomas cast him as rafto i think he's he's one of our greats and any film is gonna be enriched
by his presence sorry i'm late honey it's great to see so many scandinavian actors getting an
opportunity to work on an english-speaking film like this thomas said from the beginning
i want jonas i want jonas in this film and i can completely see why jonas h
as put so
many different colors and shades into him we've done all of our scenes now together just the
nuance that he uses the rhythms the inflection it's been a lot of fun watching him i know
why you blame her sophia a lead we've got her for an incredibly small part currently
small but incredibly meaningful parts we offered her this part she just without
question just immediately said yes of course and this is fantastic of course i want to work
with thomas again even if i was to be an ext
ra in his film i would say yes he's so passionate
about telling stories and watching humans what we are doing to each other and to ourselves
thomas has been on my favorite director lists since i've sort of got into film i can't believe
i'm doing this with him and seeing him in action seeing him work it's heaven here and you turning
up in the background it's a very free-flowing loose experience but it's also very precise a bit
closer to your to your face we spent time talking about the scene
each of us has an opportunity
to put some color or shading in the scene or the characters so we've worked very closely
together it's really easy when you're on set just to see the amount of detail that he will go
into to make sure everything is right and i think that is why he is such a renowned artist almost
because you know he looks at the fine details when you have a director who is just phenomenally
brilliant it doesn't matter the size of role because you know that you will be able to
create something wonderful beautiful thank you this film is set in real places in oslo in bergen
thomas alfredson said i will do this project but i need to do it in scandinavia where it's set
and written i think it always was a priority for thomas because it's intrinsic to the story
it was for the writer there's a reason that he's put the story of the snowman here he's done a lot
of the work for you why try and change it thank you the norwegian landscape is something i wanted
to have as al
most like a character of its own in the film it's never dull or not interesting it's
always their present so i wanted to bring that to the film too today we're in mulder which is on
the west coast of norway and we're a place called the atlantic road and it's a very dramatic bit
of road we have an opening and closing sequence which are pretty spectacular and thomas always
said i would like to shoot up in atlantic road the one thing one needs to know about atlantic
road which is the first thi
ng i know about atlantic road which is it's where all the car
commercials are set everybody who makes a car commercial at some point goes up to atlantic road
because it's the most unbelievably convoluted road we're filming with something called a russian
arm which is a big crane that's attached to top of a mercedes-benz and it allows you
to race up and down get nice car shots cars drive up very extreme angle on a bridge
that curves around and things like that so it just looks fantastic the
second unit is a lot of
boy racer stuff it's it's all the sort of stuff where you have all the big equipment and get to
do all the fun shots and it's the bit that when the main unit get to see it they're always a bit
jealous because you get to play with all the toys the snow is so key obviously just visually places like bergen and ruka and they're beautiful
you know so you're going there for the scenery in the mountains we are five kilometers away from
the yukon city up in 850 meters above
sea level a place called vemmat and i'm the power plant
manager of the poor plants here in this valley we're going to talk about our lovely circular
structure today we need to inform you what's the issues due to safety when you're in the chamber
it's equivalent to a hundred and forty thousand pints per second if they have to open out the
valves that's quite a lot of water coming through it makes a horrendous noise can last for one
minute they're shutting down five power plants all through r
ukin so it's a major thing we have it
shut down from 11 till two two o'clock it's over is we were looking for an island with a hut for one
of the story lines and we were brought to the sun and when we came across this we thought this
is the perfect perfect hut for the story it's stunning it's hard to get to but as you can see
it's an amazing piece of norway it's an absolutely beautiful place and i had expected it would be all
about the permissions to be able to walk over all of this and be
in this area but actually that
was quite easy people really understood that we wanted to be here and they they gave us permission
immediately it wasn't too difficult a bit quicker when we came it was fairly benign because it
was march and it seemed quite easy at the time but since then it's been you know 30 humpers to
bring all the equipment you know three quarters of our crew have actually walked for 40 minutes
to get here most of the equipment have come by helicopter the actors have been
helicoptered
in it's been quite a practical challenge we're now starting our move out of here so
basically equipment wise we've got an empty container there i'm going to bring another
container we've got all our lovely humpers to help with any equipment that has to go with us
it's quite inaccessible getting gear in getting people in and the fact that you're so exposed to
the weather was the big fear and the big challenge on days like this people are so up for the
challenge you know this is
why we became filmmakers it has been really challenging we have had experiences of shooting in -17
complete white-outs outside the mountain for two days but we have actually achieved
some extraordinary exquisite landscapes to be able to do that is just really extraordinary the norwegians the city of oslo the city
of bergen have made it so easy for us the backup we had in oslo was fantastic coming
down to blocking streets and giving us parking space and they were really really supportive
i
find the environment equally as important as the characters to be able to tell their
story i'm so happy that we are shooting here the contrast between nice and still little
oslo and this very very dramatic landscapes with the high mountains and everything
i think that works very well with this movie this very rich film in terms of
the visual experience that's for sure i'm catching brett i transferred
from a missing person harry hall i know who you are you're
up there with the legends when
i read the script i really liked it started
to introduce myself to the books and to yo nesbo's harry hole and the world that he sort of occupies
and i've i've loved them i can't keep covering him you mentioned the name nesbo around oslo and you
know he's a fixture here harry holt came to me in 1997 on a on a plane from oslo to to sydney
this really tall typically scandinavian guy didn't speak much he was a loner and he had this
blue blue eyes that was like my first visual image of him when
i was a kid me and my brother we
used to go to my my grandmother for holidays she would always say that if you're not home and
in bed by eight o'clock then harry hula will come get you who was the the local police officer and
i i never saw him but i always imagined this big scary guy that was coming to get us so it was
a combination of that and also there was a hurry was the name of our local soccer hero
in the town where i grew up and so i combined their names it's an iconic character a
m
ale detective one can quite easily fall into cliche because you've got a standard
character who's a policeman solving a crime what we've tried to do is make the harry hole in
our film as he is in the book unpredictable that is what to me make him interesting as a character
is that you have all these contradictions he cares for those who are close to him but
he doesn't want anyone to be close to him his experience in life is that those people that
he has loved they will be taken away from th
em the storm was our seventh book in
the series it has a horror element that previous books probably didn't have it's a
best-selling serial killer thriller and thomas alfredson is a incredibly original director which
means you can turn it into something unexpected all those qualities made it
feel like a really good fit i was very happy when i understood that the way
the producers saw this movie was the same way that i saw the movie they chose a director who
is a storyteller in his own righ
t and who isn't there just to give a version of the book
but to use the book as input for his story and as a storytelling myself you know i wouldn't have
it any other way i don't know how many times i've seen a film that is exactly the same as a book
i mean that's hard or you decide to actually step away from it kind of a bit and we are staying
as true to the story we want to tell as possible expectations are high people are waiting
to see their version of harry hole but your version won't
be my version my version won't
be someone else's version and all we can do is be as honest as we can be to character and to the
script there's always a balance of script and book me trusting thomas made it very easy for me to say
that you can't do anything to the book the book is there now it's your tip take these pages that are
written use them as hopefully helpful input for a story that you want to tell and shoot a good movie
a woman vanished last night we just found the body he calls him
self the snowman killer he's
completely insane matthias is a very nice guy intelligent reliable he's
almost too perfect to be true they're the ones you always got to be careful of
i suppose we get to see matthias from a young age as a boy and what becomes of the boy in terms
of the making of a serial killer there is a very clear path that he follows and one can understand
where his troubles come from and his obsessions i'm thinking that he's going
after women that he disapproves of he is s
eriously damaged by this childhood
trauma when the car goes through the ice one part of matthias's life stops there
so one part of matthias is always going to be 10 or 11 years old when this trauma
happened although the grown-up matthias is controlling the the situation i think
it is the young matthias who is in charge i think he needs to be this very you know neat
and perfect about everything else in his life because when you have that chaos as one part of
yourself you really need to have
a good order of everything else he's somebody that has their ties
perfectly lined out in a perfect tie drawer and his nails are perfectly sort of
manicured thomas gave me a very specific idea as to try to make him look as normal as
possible with a slight oddity i wanted to try and create a character that was meticulous all
his clothing generally has straight edges to it his ties are very straight his shirts collars are
very straight when you look at him his body shape is very neat he's ver
y straight up and down and
i wanted to reflect that in his clothing that was slightly odd jonas carlson is our best male actor
besides stella skarsgard he has a method of really moving into the characters finding the soul of
the characters it's quite amazing what he does in the film he sort of changes from one side
to the other quite seamlessly and i think this scene when he's visiting raquel in the kitchen
in the end is a masterpiece last question this boy does his mother deserve to live t
he tricky thing here is that the audience
shouldn't know but on the other hand it can't be just out of blue several scenes we have made
in different versions for instance i'm taking a photo with my smartphone on rebecca's car
and from one perspective it could look like i'm just texting but from another perspective
you could really show that i'm taking a photo you sort of get slight ripples of unease
about the character all the way through but you keep having to check yourself in case
it's
you who's just responding to the fact that he's not the charismatic rugged handsome michael
fassbender and it's played very deliberately like that and i have to say i think it's a
really remarkable performance i didn't think when you're walking on a nice lake
it really does feel precarious there's something constantly so
strange about being on a frozen lake at the beginning a car goes through
and at the end a man goes through and we replay the beginning at the end the
opening sequence is a
very complicated jigsaw to put together and involves a lot of people
with something that's just a couple of minutes all those scenes were really really difficult to
shoot because of the amount of snow of course but also difficulties bringing electricity
and everything else and those remote locations it's really hard work the car will
travel at that speed again now so at faster speed we are shooting a part of the opening
sequence of the film where a car comes off the road drives through a w
hite field of snow and then
spins and stops it's a very dramatic scene and it is one of these shots that actually has to be
built in post-production so we're getting lots of elements to build up that shot and then some very
clever guys in london put it all back together you
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