Despite its name, booze is mainly a film about life and how we can sometimes get stuck in it. You celebrated your fiftieth last year, have you experienced the crisis of middle age?
You’re right that Booze it is mainly a celebration of life. Our four heroes have reached a point where they lack curiosity, enthusiasm, energy, they want to “revive” again. But I didn’t come from my own experience. Until recently – certainly at the time I wrote the screenplay – I led a great and joyful life. And even since last May, when I lost my daughter in Belgium, there is no room for any middle-aged crisis. I’m experiencing something much worse. I don’t lack curiosity, I miss my daughter.
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Your daughter, to whom Chlast is dedicated, is said to have played in it.
Yes, she died in a car accident four days after the start of filming, on her way from Paris. The only real reason to continue filming was her letter she sent me from Africa a few months earlier. She writes in it how unconditionally she fell in love with the project. She used to be brutally honest with me, but this scenario suited her. So we made the film for her.
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The film introduces Kierkegaard’s quote – “What is youth? Dream. What is love? The purpose of the dream. ”Why did you choose it?
It’s like a poem: full of meanings. In addition, it reflects the contrast between youth and middle age. I remember when I was sixteen and in love at four in the morning I picked flowers in the commune garden where I lived then and felt infinitely light and happy. It was one of the defining moments of my life, I long to come back every day. Even my characters long for it. That’s why the quote.
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Thomas Vinterberg
Photo: Profimedia.cz
How did you think of including shots of drunk politicians in the film: from Yeltsin to Juncker?
We came across them during searches. We realized how many important personalities were drunk at important moments. We also wanted to show that drunkenness is not just a phenomenon of a small Danish nation, but that it is a global issue. Plus, the clips sounded pretty funny to me.
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You also mention Winston Churchill several times in the film…
We were very interested in how alcohol spoke into world history. And you can’t miss Churchill. We wondered how he could make such an irrational decision as sending two thousand civilians in fishing boats to Dunkirk, right for war. Was he drunk? Probably yes, because as far as I know, he drank more or less a day. Would he decide just as sober? Is this a decision you make only if you have an “extra dose of courage” in you? That’s why we talked a lot about Churchill.
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Booze however, it is a film mainly about ordinary people, about the daily life of four teachers. Churchill was important to us as an example of something we all come across. Just think – how many do you know of couples who got together sober? There probably won’t be many. Alcohol is everywhere.
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How important is it that the main characters make their living as teachers?
Writing the script kept me busy for a long time, I couldn’t move with it – until the day when I realized that the characters could be teachers. Suddenly it fell into place. Regardless of their age, teachers are constantly confronted with their youth, moreover, they are like game that must appear before a horde of predators every day – their students. In my opinion, teachers are heroes, I liked being on their side for a while.
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Mads Mikkelsen in the movie Chlast
Foto: Film Europe
However, we will not learn much about the past of the quartet of heroes.
The actors and I know their past and we hope that you will know from the film that they have already experienced something together. I don’t think the audience needs to know more. Every time I create a character, I come up with not only the part you see on the screen, but also its past, future, secrets, desires, everything, even what is not said directly, but what I hope the viewer will at least partially sense.
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You call booze a “fun drama.” How did you find a balance between making the film entertaining and taking your characters’ problems not only with alcohol seriously?
We didn’t want our film to just take a moral stand in the sense of “alcohol is evil”. You will not find my answers in it, only my questions. It was an open work. And I always strive for a balance between humor and drama. After all, my old movie Family celebration, which tells of severe family traumas, I once found in the New York video store under the genre of “dark comedy.” Humor strikes me as useful: it can open people to both characters and spectators. However, we wanted to finish the whole story. We were fascinated by both ends of the alcohol curve. The fact that you can relax and lift your conversation – and at the same time you can die because of it.
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What is your relationship to alcohol?
I think quite civilized. When I wrote the script for the film She, I drank cognac sometimes and it was great, I was neither drunk nor sober. I’ve achieved something that the characters are trying to do Booze. The downside is that I have a fairly structured life, so there is no time for alcohol.
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Drinking has several stages. In the first, you are a better version of yourself. In the second, you have to drink to become yourself again. And in the third you have to drink so that you don’t shake and you don’t feel sick. I recommend staying in phase one. Once you get to two, stop drinking. Wait a while – and then you can return to phase one.
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But our film is not just about alcohol. It’s about uncontrolled status. There is not much space left for him in our world. Especially young people today have a smart phone, they constantly have to express themselves on social networks, they have to schedule their education, their future. They have everything planned. There is less and less chaos in their lives. I think that is why we have so many adolescent alcoholics in Denmark, we are the “best” in Europe. Young people want to get at least a small space where they would be completely free.
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It is not possible without alcohol?
It is unmanageable when you fall in love. And it’s amazing! You fall into it, you lose control, and suddenly there’s something bigger than you. Getting an idea, which is part of my job, is also something that cannot be planned. He just comes from somewhere, you don’t even know where. When you get out of the bottle, it’s as if you make a deal with uncontrollability. You go somewhere where you don’t know exactly what will happen, to meet the chaos. You start taking risks again, discovering, your creativity will return. That’s what our movie is about. About the willingness to take risks and insist that you want to live.
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But if your heroes injected heroin, we would probably feel less sympathetic to them. Why is alcohol still associated with a certain romantic touch?
Probably because it’s more old-fashioned than all the drugs young people take. I wanted to focus on this most classic addictive substance precisely because it is socially accepted, I would say required.
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Vinterberg’s Chlast had its Czech premiere at the Be2Can festival.
Foto: Film Europe
It is true that whenever you show courage only through alcohol, there is also a bit of cowardice in it. Why not be brave for sober? That is an interesting question. In the film, we only touch her briefly, when one of the characters goes on a canoe trip, where she is not drunk, but she can still untie, enjoy it to the fullest. It reminds me of an experiment with thirty young people in front of whom they put cocktails in a bar, half of them without alcohol and half of which was alcohol. But everyone “got drunk”. Sometimes you can get drunk from life, from the environment in which you are. And you can certainly live inspirationally, creatively and boldly without alcohol.
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We, as a society, have just started to use alcohol as a gateway to that state, an acronym that has subsequently become an integral part of our culture.
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Did the Dogma 95 movement, of which your Family Celebration was the founding film, come out of a similar desire to try new things?
Certainly. I have always been attracted to groups of people trying something impossible together. That is the pinnacle of solidarity for me. When you take a risk, you risk failure, but you are in it together. That’s how I grew up – in a commune. And it was the case with the Dogma movement.
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