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Mikael Chr. Rieks

Producers on the Move 2013 - Denmark

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- Danish producer Mikael Chr Rieks has been on the move for a long time – ever since he decided he wanted to depict the world and its peculiarities on film.

Danish producer Mikael Chr Rieks has been on the move for a long time – ever since he decided he wanted to depict the world and its peculiarities on film. After graduating from Copenhagen’s Media and Television School in 1992, he worked for Danish pubcasters DR and TV2 – he was on the team setting up local station TV2 Lorry – and signed several internationally acclaimed films, formats and series, including the Emmy-nominated FC Nerds (2005).

When joining Danish major, Nordisk Film, in 2003, he turned to documentaries, producing ao Danish directors Tómas Gislason’s Overcoming (2005), an insight into the Tour de France, and Asger Leth’sGhosts of the Cité Soleil (2006), about the gang-controlled, impoverished neighbourhood of Haiti’s Port-au-Prince.

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Having staged his first feature, Danish director Charlotte Sachs Bostrup’s Karla’s World (2007), he left Nordisk to instigate his own production company, Koncern Film. There he realised two films by Danish director Martin P Zandvliet, Applaus (2009), which won several Danish and international awards, also for his lead actress wife Paprika Steen, and Dirch/A Funny Man, the 2011 local No 1 chartbuster. Last year, he returned to Nordisk Film.

Cineuropa: Documentaries are supposed to be a corner of the world seen through a temperament – which corner is it you want to depict?
Mikael Chr Rieks: I think it starts with a feeling, a point of fascination – here is a story or a character that triggers you and needs to be unfolded. The fact is that one human being has a great story to tell to a large audience, sometimes too good to be true, which should be developed for a narrative about a slice of reality.

Nordisk is a big and strong production company – why did you decide to leave in 2008?
I was extremely happy working at Nordisk – after all I was there for five years – but Nordisk was a major, a part of film history (it still is), and at the time I felt it had difficulties getting out of the bubble of its past, tripping itself to keep up with the creative progress, running risks and exploring new talents. I felt I needed some challenges on my own, outside a big corporation, and take full responsibility. But when in 2011, when I was setting up Dirch/A Funny Man and found out it was too large of a mouthful for one man, I turned to Nordisk, which came in as co-producer, and that was the start of my homecoming.

And you made two films by Zandvliet. Why, and how did you run into him?
We met at a script symposium, got quite drunk, and talked for the rest of the night. We had 100% confidence in each other – not the way that we adopted each other’s points-of-view, but there was an honesty between us, and I felt he had so much at heart that we just had to work together. A film may be one man’s idea or vision, but it takes quite a team to realise it – a lot of money, so many risks: I think it is still a miracle, every time you succeed in making it.

Now you are completely into features. What do you require from a screenplay that makes you decide this is a film you want to do?
I think a script is a working paper, not an answer book – if you give the same script to three different directors, you will end up with three different films. I need to see a director who is completely blinded by his project – who just has to see it on the screen – if I get this feeling, I am with him all the way. We share the responsibility ofmaking it work – creatively, administratively, financially – but it requires this 100% confidence. It must be so strong I could ask him to take care of my children, and vice versa.

Anything in production you are particularly good at – and anything certainly not?
I am very good at collaborating, to find the talent and to support it, make it stronger – I am not good at being a one-man-number band, trying to wear 10 producers’ hats, especially on numbers - I am not a budget cruncher. Of course I have an idea what things cost, what the result will be – but I am more of an estimate producer.

What’s next on your agenda?
I have almost finished pre-production of Zandvliet’s A Place Under the Sun, a historical drama set in 1945 after the Nazi Germany’s occupation of Denmark: 2,000 German soldiers were prevented from returning to Germany – they were detained under miserable conditions to ‘volunteer’ to clear the Danish coasts of 2.2 million land mines that the Wehrmacht had planted. 250 of them were killed, 600 wounded in the operation.

For his fourth feature Zandvliet will direct The Great Americans, developed in Denmark, but to shoot in the US. It is a home-for-closure story, which you will find all over the world, but especially in America – a young couple with a child, who have been forced by their financial situation to leave their home.

Then I am developing the The Missing Bureaucrat, from Danish author Hans Scherfig’s 1938 novel, not a remake of Danish director Gert Fredholm’s 1971 adaptation, The Case of the Missing Clerk, but a new interpretation by Danish director Charlotte Sieling and Norwegian writer Mette M. Bølstad.

  

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