Tobias Lindholm’s war drama, A War has been chosen to represent Denmark as Best Foreign Film for the 88th Academy Awards. The film follows Danish soldiers in Afghanistan and the choices they have to make while at war. I had a catch up with Lindholm while he was in LA to talk about working with real Tailban fighters and discussed his relationship with Pilou Asbaek.
Awards Daily: It’s nice to see A War being represented as the official film for Denmark, how does that feel?
Tobias Lindholm: It feels great, it’s a pleasure and honor to try to make it. You always want people to see the films that you make and this is a large window. Even if we weren’t selected for the shortlist and nominee, we would still have presented the film to more people than we would have otherwise. So, in many ways it’s a great pleasure, and at the same time it’s strange. I never aimed for something like that. I aimed for making a complex and truthful story about being soldiers in Afghanistan, so this afterlife is always exciting.
AD: What’s the journey of the film?
TL : In 2002/3 when Denmark went into Afghanistan with the UK/USA, it was the first war that we ever fought in my lifetime. It has defined my generation more than any else, that we were the generation that became professional soldiers for the first time in modern Danish history. It’s a very new thing in Denmark and that interested me and I was certain there was a story to tell, and I’d been looking for a story since 2008, but I couldn’t find my angle to a war story. I feel there have been enough stories that tell the story of how war dehumanizes a human being. You go to war with a young man who’s healthy and good, and through out the war you will destroy and change him in dramatic ways, so we needed to find another approach.
In 2012 I read an article with a Danish officer who was going on his third term to Afghanistan and he said that he wasn’t afraid of getting killed out there, but that he was afraid of getting prosecuted when he got back home because of rules of engagement and the whole political atmosphere in Denmark. The world had changed around the war, and I knew right away that it was complicated enough for me to dig into and start researching, so I did.
I spoke to so many Taliban warriors, soldiers, prosecutors and lawyers, as well as wives and children to try to get the logic of the story.
AD: The title, A War is so simple, but it’s also so deep and compelling, What was the thinking behind that?
TL: We needed something that could cover the whole story. It was a war, that’s what the story was about. We tried to be more creative, but every time I started adding words to that, it became fake and looked like I was trying to push emotions down the throat of the audience.
Making this film, I wanted the audience to live this story, rather than tell them what was right and wrong. In so many ways it made sense to just continue with what we had started with.
AD: What was it like in talking to the survivors and the Taliban soldiers, circle back to that for a moment. Was it a challenge to get those stories?
TL: The first thing was to even locate them. These people had left their farming houses in the middle of the night because of war, right? So, where do you find them? The problem with a country like Afghanistan is it’s not a country where everyone speaks the same language, they all have different dialects and accents. The area the Danish soldiers were in was in the Helmand Province and they spoke a certain dialect so I needed refugees from that area to make it real. I found a huge refugee camp near the Syrian border in Turkey and spent time there meeting people. Slowly I found the people. The thing with human beings is we all want to tell our stories in some way, which is why we want to listen to other people’s stories too, we have that urge.
I never tried to be demanding in getting all the details, I didn’t necessarily want blood and guts on the table, I just wanted people to tell me what happened, what they did and it’s a great angle to have a story that would unfold. You’re getting down to details like what time they left the village, was it in a car, a horse? It didn’t become emotional but practical and then the emotions could be added after, once we gained their trust.
Movie making is practical, it’s about how you do stuff, how do you leave? The story is so different whether you go by car, or by horse, so you need to know stuff like that, instead of trying to suck all the bloody psychology of war from that perspective. It really opened the whole community to us.
What we realized was just how complex the world was, some of these guys had been fighting for the Taliban, they weren’t just fighting because they necessarily agreed with them, it was the only way of putting bread on the table, and that really nuanced the whole picture for us in many ways.
Getting them as the witnesses of war was what we wanted to do to make sure we represented the truth, or were loyal to the logic of these people.
The big challenge of course was, as you can imagine, was when you have former Taliban warriors, refugees,and Danish soldiers who have all been in the same region, I was nervous about that situation, but the great surprise was they all felt fine about each other’s company and started exchanging stories. They started confronting a time in their lives that had been brutal from different perspectives but they used that opportunity to get clarification on things, and great friendships have been formed as a result of that time.
AD: Pilou Asbaek is great. How do you direct him?
TL: We actually started out together, he came out of acting school around the same time I came out of film school. I gave him his first lead in my first film. We did Borgen together and then Hijacking and now A War. We’ve been together for 8-10 years, and I would only write to him.
When I had the idea for A War, I called him right away and asked if he could shoot two years from now, and he could. So that was a done deal.
The thing about Pilou is he extremely good at reacting to situations. He’s extremely good at finding a level where all these normal professional guys who are not acting, but reacting to situations in the film, they all act at a certain level. If you go in and act at that level, the audience sees you as a fake. You can have two consequences of that. One is that your acting looks bad because you’re not doing what the other guys are doing. Or, you make the others look like amateurs, and what he’s good at doing is finding that level of energy that fits that reality really well.
He doesn’t care how he looks. He doesn’t want to be looking a specific way, he just wants to be loyal to his character and the work he does with that is amazing.
[Jokingly] I didn’t like him the first time I met him, but his casting was so good for the first film we did so I just had to have him. I didn’t like him. I thought he was too emotional.
He’s from this creative elite family in Copenhagen, so I felt that he was snob, which he wasn’t.
We developed this great friendship on our first film and I’m totally devoted to him. There are so many things in the world that don’t work, so when you find something that does work, you hold on to it. Right?
I’m the only person in the world who wants Pilou to get killed really quickly on Game of Thrones so he can come and work with me.
AD: He really does have a great on screen presence
TL: [Jokingly] He’s a handsome guy, but in real life he’s not that handsome. As soon as I point a camera to him, he looks amazing. That’s stuff you can’t learn. He has that gift.
AD: It’s the filters. One of my favorite scenes is when Dar says, “You don’t know what it’s like out there.” Talk about that scene.
TL: Dar Salim who was in Hijacking is an amazing actor. It was a fairly small part, especially that scene, I decided he was the only one who should come and give witness in uniform to separate him from the rest of the group.
I remember sitting by my monitor and having a small celebration when he gave that scene. For me, that was when I knew the film could work because I was right back on the battlefield when he said those words.
When he says, “You don’t know what it’s like out there.” I was there, it reminded me of the whole film. That is the truth. We sit at home in Denmark with my three kids and wife and have dinner, we talk about the news and it’s so easy to be judgmental.
So, you’re looking at the world through your own image, so when he says that line, it’s the truth, we don’t know what it’s like out there, so who are we to judge?
AD: That’s something you take away. But also another scene, the final one. Talk about that decision to end it the way that you did. (Without revealing spoilers).
TL: I’ve never been a soldier, but I’m a father of three boys. The fact that I gave Claus three kids was my emotional window into this film, I could relate 100% to him. So, I would ask myself, what would be the worst thing that could happen? That could be me realizing how much I value the lives of my kids, by confronting that and knowing that kids are dying in war.