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WILBUR (WANTS TO KILL HIMSELF)
A conversation with
LONE SCHERFIG & ANDERS THOMAS JENSEN
Lone Scherfig joins us in Edinburgh to talk about her latest Wilbur (Wants to Kill Himself)
EDINBURGH FILM FESTIVAL 2003
Saturday 17 August 2003
Co-writer/director Lone Scherfig and screenwriter Anders Thomas Jensen joined us after the premiere of Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself for a conversation with Scottish filmmaker Richard Jobson about their film.
ON REWRITING
Lone Scherfig
[Exec producer] Lars Von Trier always encourages me not to re-write anything, just to shoot it and fix it when you shoot, and fix it in the editing and not to think too much. Really irresponsible producers!
Richard Jobson
That sounds like a total recipe for disaster - and this is a much more traditional conventional type of movie.
Lone Scherfig
Yes and of course you can only do that if the structure is as tight as it actually is in this film.
Richard Jobson
How many drafts of this did you go through?
Lone Scherfig
Two. Two and a half. The last draft is in English.
Richard Jobson
That’s amazing. The average, if you can talk in averages, is the five to ten draft stage.
Anders Thomas Jensen
That’s normal too. And because it’s a character-driven story, a lot of writers would think that it would take fives times the amount of time a plot-controlled film would.
Richard Jobson
If you look back at the structure of the first draft, how much did it change as you moved into the second draft, how radically had it evolved from that first draft?
Anders Thomas Jensen
Not much!
Lone Scherfig
We had quite a detailed structure before we’d even started writing. I’m sure anyone who writes here does the same. Sometimes people write an eight hundred-page script, and then they boil it down to a hundred pages.
But in this case we’d just written a scene-by scene outline and then we wrote the scenes. We decided the whole story should be built on each character’s approach to life, and if you analyse the film it’s really mechanical.
ON MAKING THE FILM IN ENGLISH
Richard Jobson
Obviously you wrote the film in your own language before transferring it to English. Why did you take the decision to do this film in the English language? Why didn’t you shoot this in your own country, in your own language?
Lone Scherfig
We had trouble with the Danish cast of the film and instead of finding a plan B, we got the idea of moving the whole film to a different country. Glasgow was the place that seemed right for the film production-wise, and in terms of visuality and humour. The whole spirit of the film seemed to get better in Glasgow. We could have moved it to France, and Sweden would have probably been the most logical next country, but that wouldn’t have been right for this film. I feel the film belongs in Glasgow more than it does in Copenhagen. It’s become a better film because we moved to Glasgow.
Richard Jobson
It’s regarded here at the Edinburgh Film Festival as Scottish Film, which is quite strange but quite beautiful.
Lone Scherfig
I’m very happy if it is, because that was the intention.
Richard Jobson
People are talking of great Scottish films this year - Wilbur, Young Adam, and a film just about to be shown called Afterlife.
Lone Scherfig
Wilburis a great Scottish film.
Richard Jobson
Here come the tough questions. (Laughs) So what the f**k do you think you’re doing coming to my country with your script, okay?!
No…seriously, sorry for the language, everyone. I genuinely think it’s a beautiful Scottish film and I think people are very proud to think of it as a Scottish film. Transferring it to English language is one thing, but transferring it to Scottish-English language is another thing entirely. We have our own sense of humour, our own rhythm. Even in the east of Scotland to the west of Scotland that humour and rhythm is very different, and people are also clearly proud of where they come from in this country. So you were walking into a minefield by bringing it here. How did you get through all these problems, and how did you ‘get’ the Scottish sense of humour, which is quite different from English humour?
Anders Thomas Jensen
That worried us quite a lot because obviously we don’t know Scottish and we don’t know the nuances of the language. We had the script translated and we had two Scottish scriptwriters looking at it who told us you would never talk like this. But they said we should but keep it because it’s nice the way it is. I think it would have been a problem if we were trying to do a social realistic film, then we would have run into some major problems. But it wasn’t that type of film that we were doing and people understood that. It was the same with the research. It’s not group therapy, it’s what we think group therapy would be. For me, I don’t know if the film is Scotland. I’m glad if people think it is, but for me it’s the way Lone and I think Scotland is.
Richard Jobson
I’m sure a lot of the writers here today, who are interested in writing, have deconstructed your work and looked closely at how tightly your structure works. You really are a master of structure. How did you learn how to do that if not in some formal way?
Anders Thomas Jensen
I don’t know. For me it’s all about being able to read a script, it’s as simple as that. I don’t know how it is here, but in Denmark there are really very few people who can read a script. You can do a script where the action is very literal, and then you get funding, but the script is no good. So it’s about doing it and sitting down and reading it and saying, “Whoops here, here it’s no good, it’s boring, it doesn’t work.” So it’s a feeling.
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