Three years after his successful launch of A Hijacking at Venice’s Orizzonti sidebar, writer/director Tobias Lindholm (pictured) will be back tomorrow on the Laguna for the world premiere of A War (Krigen). He spoke to us about the film.

What was the starting point for A War?
Tobias Lindholm: I’ve been interested in writing a story about Denmark’s involvement in Afghanistan for many years. Then in 2012 I read an interview with an officer on his way back after his second term in Afghanistan. He said he was not afraid of getting killed but of being prosecuted when he would come back home. He felt the rules were too hard to follow, that the demands on the soldiers were too hard to live up to. I suddenly felt I had the angle for the film. 

Was Janus Metz’s documentary Armadillo an inspiration or the Oscar winning The Hurt Locker?
TL:
I was perhaps more inspired by the US doc Restrepo than by Armadillo. Then The Hurt Locker was indeed a great inspiration and I actually spoke to Kathryn Bigelow about it. I also watched Stanley Kubrick’s amazing Paths of Glory that also brings the order from an officer commander to trial. 

This film has three settings – the frontline in Afghanistan, family life and the trial of Commander Claus Michael Pedersen (Pilou Asbæk), while R was set in a single location and A Hijacking in two. Was this part of your desire to expand the scope of your filmmaking?
TL:
Yes I felt that as human beings, we can be defined from 3 angles: our personal life – in this case we follow the main character’s wife and kids -, our professional life – in this case Pilou is a soldier - and then we are citizens, part of a democracy – here there is a trial. So to view the Commander from the three different angles is a way to give a fuller and more complex portrait of this particular human being.

Until the end, you don’t take sides and leave the audience to judge for themselves….
TL:
I have a deep interest in life and the world that surrounds me. I think that what we see these days is a simplification of reality. We are tweeting, facebooking, showing only the good sides of us on social media, not the nuances. Therefore I can only describe the complexities of life, of war and hopefully invite people to talk about the fact that we have been a warfare nation for now 12 years.

What research did you do on military operations and for the jargon used extensively in the first part of the film?
TL: 90% of the time I research my films and the remaining 10% I just write. I spoke to refugees from the Helmand province in Afghanistan who also play in the film. Some soldiers in the film are also professional soldiers and I checked with the Danish military, nurses, translators etc. Everyone read the script to make sure it was correct. The scenes at home are very close to me as I’ve got a wife and three kids like the main character. I also spoke to a real defence lawyer and a prosecutor. They actually helped write the lines to make the trial sound totally true. 

Indeed there is a real docu-feel to A War, and capturing reality seems to be what interests you the most…
TL:
Yes I feel my imagination is just a reflection of me, how I see the world. I prefer to focus on the world around me. Even coming out of the Danish film school, I had the idea of making films where the audience wouldn’t be sure if they were watching a documentary or a fiction film. This is the third film that I do with Pilou, the same sound editor, producer, DoP. I have tried to develop a film language with them that refers to real life. 

You’ve now written two films about war [A War, April 9th), Thomas Vinterberg’s The Commune. Are you tempted to go back to long serial storytelling for television like Borgen?
TL
: It is fantastic when you have a great writing room and we had that with Borgen. It is a privilege to work on TV drama because characters stay alive for a long time, they become almost real and that comes with responsibility. But since Borgen, I’ve had three kids. That’s my focus, and of course, the release of A War that will open in Denmark in a week.