20/11/2024 - The Swedish festival regular behind Falkenberg Farewell, The Ape and other more auteur-driven titles discusses his new crime series

(© Jallo Faber)

“It doesn’t look like anything you’ve done before,” an audience member reflected after the screening of Cry Wolf [+see also:
series review
interview: Jesper Ganslandt
series profile], a crime series directed by Jesper Ganslandt that world-premiered at the 35th Stockholm International Film Festival. Known for Falkenberg Farewell [+see also:
trailer
film profile], The Ape [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] and other more auteur-driven titles, the Swedish festival regular likes to investigate new possibilities.

Cineuropa: Cry Wolf has the same writing-directing duo as Snabba Cash [+see also:
interview: Evin Ahmad
series profile]. Did one experience lead to the next?
Jesper Ganslandt: Partly, but not entirely. After Snabba Cash, I was approached by the Cry Wolf producers. I then approached Oskar Söderlund, who did a simply excellent job [at the screenwriting]. Cry Wolf was something quite different from Snabba Cash in terms of both the working process and the story type. It felt just right, and very exciting.

It’s based on a novel by Hans Rosenfeldt, the creator of The Bridge and Marcella. How faithfully, or freely, did you adapt it?
Hans himself did a first draft, very faithful to his original – a classic case-centred plot – while my own vision went in other directions. I wanted to depict the small-town people of the story and their encounter with, to put it bluntly, evil. The same characters are featured but are given further depth, I feel, and a different perspective. In short: we kept the things we liked and discarded the rest. A quite fearless adaptation, one could call it. Literature is literature, and cinema is cinema, and at times, one has to reinvent the story in the process.

A “Coenesque” touch can be found, merging quite organically with the northern-Swedish setting and its people. Not least your assassin Kat shares traits with the Chigurh character in No Country for Old Men. Would that observation be correct?
It is, and I take it as a compliment to be among such company. I’ve always liked the Coen brothers and have never really been able to draw from them in any of my own projects this far. Here, I found potential. I tried to analyse where their uniqueness lies, and one aspect is how their characters are neither winners nor losers, and certainly not heroes. There’s usually a theme on crime and punishment, some explicit and frightening violence at times, and some darkly hilarious situation comedy. There’s also the neo-western aspect of their cinema, which, as you say, works well in northern Sweden with the open landscape, the vast distances and the very solitary atmosphere in general, in terms of both people and places.

Can you talk about the casting process? The result is colourful, from Eva Melander’s investigator protagonist to the villainous performance by Eliot Sumner, plus a number of very good supporting thesps.
Eva Melander was on my mind from the start, and she was equally enthusiastic. In all, there’s a good mix of actors that I knew well and some I didn’t know. Eija Skarsgård, who worked with the casting, suggested Eliot Sumner, who was keen to be on board – and he adds this unique star quality to the project. In all, I think it’s an ensemble that’s very much in sync with the project, who are perfect for their parts and are totally into the overall vision, going all in.

When you presented the screening, you said this series was really made as a film. Can you elaborate?
I’ve treated the whole project like a feature film, and an auteur-driven one at that. Not for my sake, but for what I wanted it to become. I think the audience will be blown away, to be completely honest!

Considering your CV, this also makes sense. Your filmmaking journey took off with Falkenberg Farewell, which opened at Venice in 2007. You’ve been a frequent festival regular, and your venture into crime series could feel radical. What led you in this direction?
I’ve enjoyed a lot of series through the years, not least in the golden era with Mad Men, Sopranos, HBO and all that. When I got the Snabba Cash offer, I decided to try it out and investigate the possibilities of giving it a voice of its own. It resulted in two seasons. First and last, I’m interested in many different types of cinema storytelling and am a great movie lover. So, it’s not just one thing that I want to do; I almost get restless if I don’t test out something new now and again.

What’s next in line for you now?
A psychological horror film in English, based on a novel by Jon Nesbø, called The Night House. Then I’m working on an original story called Hello Darkness, not a horror but rather an old-school mystery thriller. So right now, I’m all set to return to feature film.