With funding in place for my next film project, my mind is all about nightmares these days. The protagonist of The Knife is a serial killer, and the film may best described as a state-of-mind portrait of his final days. It doesn’t belong to a certain genre, but I like to refer to it as a nightmare.
Is it possible to be more happy?
Today we were informed that our short film project The Knife will receive funding from The Norwegian Film Institute. The decision is based upon our application, including script, director and producers’ statement, some conceptual work and budget, as well as various meetings with the short film consultant at the Institute throughout last year With the money we received from the Mid-Norway Film Commission before Christmas, we will now be able to go into production in just a couple of weeks. The shooting itself is planned to take place in early April.
It’s an enormous relief to get this support, as it both means we have a solid project and that I will be able to finalize a project I’ve been developing for quite some time now. I feel both lucky and of course nervous – we really have to deliver something unique and interesting! You can read more about the project in previous posts, and find a synopsis of the film in the right side column. Here’s the statement from the Institute.
Back in 2007, a friend of mine challenged me to put together a simple story for a short film that we could shoot over the weekend with friends in cast and crew positions. It was just a few months after wrapping film school in Paris, and I was trying to figure out how to get into the film business her in Norway – simply put, it was not the best of times in my life and the challenge came as a welcome breather. We decided to update a short script I was initially planning to shoot in Paris the year before, but that was cancelled due to heavy preproduction on my end of studies-film. The script was neither especially original and certainly not very “me”, but it was fun, simple and just what we were looking for.
I’m not a filmmaker. I mean, I went to film school, I have made a few shorts that have screened in festivals, I’ve made a documentary that was bought and screened on television, but I’m not a filmmaker. That being said, I’m certainly an aspiring filmmaker. I think in images, I have all these stories and characters in my head, I live for cinema and the only thing I really want to do is make films.
I’m juggling two projects at the same time these days One is of course The Knife, a short film project that I have already written several blogs about. The other is what I hope will end up as an application for script development funding this winter; my feature project Shadows (Skumring). It tells the story of an elderly woman and her struggle with Alzheimer’s, and is a project I have been working on for almost two years already. Instead of treating this as a classic drama, I’m using the more surreal sides of a person living with the disease to create a highly atmospheric thriller that includes an unsolved murder case from the past, a love story that goes horribly wrong and the present day absurdities and problems for a person that no longer works in everyday society.
Yesterday we received the great news that Midtnorsk Filmsenter (The Mid-Norway Film Comission) has granted us NOK 400.000,- in financing for our short film project The Knife. We originally applied for 300.000,- so naturally it was a great surprise to be receiving even more. The total budget for the film is of course higher, but what a way to kickstart our financing work!
Concept illustrator and storyboard artist Thomas Sandnæs and I sat down at Bar Bocca in Oslo yesterday. Thomas immediately realized what I wanted for this film in mood and atmosphere – the idea of a melange of German Expressionism and Film Noir at its’ most gritty, with elements from the darker sides of Norwegian painter Edvard Munch. It was the first of what is hopefully going to be many design meetings for our short film The Knife. Here’s a taste – both a rough drawing and a more elaborate one.
I consider Fritz Lang’s M (1931) one of the most successful portraits of a serial-killer ever made. As atmospheric and stylish as any genre film made today, with a subtle sense of creating psychological horror. One of my favorite things about creating a script is developing the backstory, and perhaps more so than ever with my current film project, The Knife. The short film itself will be constructed as a nightmare, with abrupt changes in time and place, somewhat unreal visuals etc. But I also hope the audience will catch the bigger story behind all this; the backstory of The Knife before the nightmare consumed him.
Three songs run throughout my film project The Knife, all written or co-written by German composer Kurt Weill (1900- 1950). When I first started developing the story of this lonely serial killer, the inspiration came from the idea of creating a world around the beautiful and haunting Youkali. The song was originally part of Weill’s instrumental music for the French play Marie Galante, while the lyrics was added by Roger Fernay in 1946. The song is a playful tango, telling the story of a world far away, an sort of utopian dreamscape that can never be. In my screenplay this of course refers to my protagonist’s wish to find a way out of the labyrinth of dark memories he is trapped inside. At the same time, it has a very strong erotic feel to it as the female jazz singer uses it to lure him into the jazz club where he will have to confront his violent past. Here’s an excerpt from the lyrics -
A jazz ensemble performs the story of a serial killer, while red clouds circle over the empty city outside. Meanwhile, The Knife wanders the desolated streets, haunted by the memory of his first victim; the female jazz singer. Accompanied by the music, the city sinks into shadows, as he faces his victims one last time.
Producers
John Einar Hagen
& Agnethe Buus Jensen
Short film, in production with support from Mid-Norway Film Comission and The Norwegian Film Institute
K10: Bodyguards and Assassins (2009)
The Box – en utmerket B-film
K10: Ola Lund Renolen Internasjonale Filmfestival
Ømt og uvanlig i En helt vanlig dag på jobben
K10: Fra høyfjell til betong i Snøhulemannen
Flashback: Catch Me If You Can
Trash-estetikkens problem i løvens hule
Batman Returns (1992)
Litt for historiebøkene, det meste i glemmeboka
Alle mine kjære – Brian Eno mot røkla
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