14/11/2025 - The well-travelled Swedish director checks something major off his bucket list with a grand piece of domestic science-fiction

(© Adrius Solominas)

We Come in Peace [+see also:
series review
interview: Jens Jonsson
series profile], premiering in the series section of the 36th Stockholm International Film Festival, boldly goes where few Swedish productions have gone before. Jens Jonsson, an award-winning director of festival films (Brother of Mine, The King of Ping Pong [+see also:
trailer
film profile]) and a skilled supplier of crime stories and thrillers (Easy Money III: Life Deluxe, Blinded), got the call to devise this grand sci-fi project.

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Cineuropa: Would you say that most film directors, or possibly all of them, dream of one day doing science-fiction?
Jens Jonsson: That’s a hard question, but a good one. Certainly, along with the horror genre, it invites the possibility of creating a universe, image-wise, sound-wise and premise-wise, like a dream or nightmare to pull the audience into. It makes for excellent visuals. I’d wager that some filmmakers, grounded in a documentary tradition, will prefer to deal with reality. On the other hand, with my background in comic books and role-play groups, and in general being a big sci-fi fan, for me, this was on my bucket list, no question about it. I honestly didn’t think it would ever happen. But here we are.

We Come in Peace is presented as being inspired by a 2015 short story by Anders Fager, Queer Nouveau 2.0, adapted by your screenwriter colleague Lars Lundström. How was the process of working with him, and when did you come on board?
As I heard it from Lars, he read this short story some five or six years ago, and he was attracted by the notion of extra-terrestrials hanging out downtown in central Stockholm. This image, with aliens and humans living side by side, triggered his creativity to envision how it was when they arrived on Earth. Lars is the creator of Netflix’s Real Humans, another Swedish sci-fi-type series. I was never involved in that, but we’d talked about doing something, and I like his fascination with grand ideas, some of them quite inconceivable for Swedish budgets. When this project came up, they called me.

What has been your contribution, creatively?
I share directing duties with Mani Maserrat, but I’m also the “conceptual director” and devised the series. Before I got started, Lars told me that there was little, if anything, to take from the short story, so we basically had a blank page to fill, for better or worse, with the characters, plot and images… All doors were wide open. I spent an entire spring putting up pictures of possible images on the walls of my studio; they were covered from top to bottom. We brought in people who helped out with the illustrations, and we got a team to build the figures; it was a gigantic job. I often longed for a Spielberg or a Lucas or a Del Toro in the neighbourhood for some urgently needed advice, but sadly there aren’t any yet.

Where did you draw your inspiration from – a Spielberg, perhaps, or a Lovecraft?
We started out with the intention of creating something brand-new; the bar was high. But then, we just went, “Sod it, let’s do something we really like – the best of sci-fi.” We know our Cthulhus and ETs and Aliens inside and out. They get their homage, not least as we’ve physically built more or less everything like in the old days, from the giant egg to the creatures.

Sweden has a conspicuously minor science-fiction tradition. How did you approach that particular predicament?
We carefully researched our national government and its actual authority in times of crisis, and there have been some instances to draw from: the 2004 tsunami in Phuket, where thousands of Swedes were on holiday; the COVID-19 outbreak, where Sweden made some controversial choices; the Ukraine war, when we joined NATO… We tried to play by Swedish rules as much as possible – if nothing else so that the US Air Force would never fly in and shoot down all of the aliens.

What are you up to next? You used to be a frequent festival traveller, visiting Cannes from time to time and winning the Berlinale Bear for Best Short in your “younger” days, before Easy Money and the likes. How’s “festival Jonsson” doing these days?
He was, for a while, a little tired of the political side of festivals, with sales agents calling the shots, not unlike in the art-gallery world. Was this what I wanted, I asked myself, or am I more inclined towards more popular-orientated things? I’m partly very drawn to the latter and have got great satisfaction from it. That being said, I really feel like doing an original feature at the moment. I’ll soon be moving on to that, to a new blank page.