22/02/2008

On February 26, Danish filmmaker Niels Arden Oplev will start shooting on Men Who Hate Women – the feature film based on The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by best-selling novelist Stieg Larsson and the first of his crime trilogy Millennium.

As announced previously in Cineuropa, the two lead characters in the novels, Inspector Mikael Blomkvist and IT hacker Lisbeth Salander, will be played respectively by Michael Nykvist and Noomi Rapace.

The rest of the cast, announced last Tuesday, will include Lena Endre (who will play Erika Berger), Sven-Bertil Taube, Peter Haber, Marika Lagercrantz, David Dencik, Annika Hallin and Sofia Ledarp among others.

At the latest Berlinale, where he introduced his latest film Worlds Apart at the Generation 14+ section, Arden Oplev told Cineuropa what attracted him toMen Who Hate Women.

“I really like to do totally different things,” he said. “Among my films, We Shall Overcome [+see also:
trailer
film profile] and Worlds Apart are probably the closest emotionally. But I’ve also made major television series. This is a crime drama with a very interesting lead female character. She’s a hunky squatter turned hacker. She is petite, skinny, yet ultra violent. I think this character is very interesting.”

The director said he was inspired by Luc Besson’s Nikita for the role of Salander.

The Swedish-language film is produced by Yellow Bird in co-production with Nordisk Film, with co-financing from broadcasters SVT in Sweden ZDF in Germany and DR in Denmark and support from Nordisk Film & TV Fond. Nordisk Film Distribution will coordinate the film’s release across Scandinavia on January 30, 2009.

The other two Larsson books – The Girl Who Plays with Fire and The Air Castle That Blew Up – will be made for television and DVD, but with different filmmakers attached.