Thomas Vinterberg on Climate Change Miniseries Families Like Ours

When war broke out in Syria in 2011, triggering a wave of refugees into Europe, Thomas Vinterberg felt a surge of empathy for the millions of families forced to flee their homes and seek refuge in foreign lands. But when the Oscar-winning director of Another round, The hunt, AND The celebration After seeing the response of many Europeans, often hostile, sometimes violent, he began to wonder: What would happen if a disaster struck closer to home and “we were the refugees”?

More than a decade later, that “thought experiment” led to Families like ours. The miniseries, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival before heading to TIFF, imagines a near future in which rising sea levels force the government of Denmark to evacuate. The entire country. Turning its six million inhabitants into refugees, forced to seek refuge in any country that will take them in.

The series features an ensemble cast of top Danish talent, including Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Thomas Bo Larsen, David Dencik, Paprika Steen and Magnus Millang. StudioCanal and Zentropa produced the six-part series, which will air on TV2 in Denmark in October. StudioCanal sells worldwide.

Talking to The Hollywood ReporterVinterberg explained why he avoided “disaster movie clichés” to focus on the human drama of climate change and mass migration, creating “a slow-motion dystopia,” and how a rude French waiter inspired the show.

This is a dystopian story, a bit sci-fi, but it also feels very personal. Where did the initial idea for Families like ours where does it come from?

This idea came to me at least six years ago, before Covid and the war in Ukraine. It came from the way we treated people from Syria who were coming to Copenhagen. And I wanted to do a thought experiment to test humans in Western society, thinking about what would happen if we were refugees, if we had to say goodbye to everything we love. How much resilience could we muster? How many coping strategies could we come up with? It’s like: who do you put in your lifeboat if you only have four seats? Those are the psychological questions that concern me the most, they are the backbone of this series, which is why I didn’t want to show scenes of floods and natural disasters.

But the real spark to write this show came when I was in Paris for work. I had been living there for a year, a year and a half, and I felt super unwanted. I went to the same bar every day and they still treated me incredibly rudely, like a tourist. One Sunday, I just wanted to go home to my family, I missed my daughters, and I worried about what it would be like if we were forced to be separated, like in the movie Brooklynon the great immigration from Europe to the United States [in the 1950s]And thinking about my daughters, I was inspired by their concern for the state of the planet and climate change.

As you said, there are no natural disaster scenes here. There is no disaster porn. But did you do any research on the science of climate change or the other elements of the story?

We did a lot of research, not about climate change but research of a different kind. We did research about the state of Denmark. If this kind of disaster happened here, what would our Foreign Office do? Obviously, you can't research the future because it hasn't happened, but we talked to a lot of people, to try to imagine, how would this country, this little county where I come from, react? And we decided that we would react in advance, before the water flooded the country. We would try to take care of all our citizens instead of spending a lot of money trying to save parts of the country, we would try to save as many as possible in the best way possible. I also talked to people who know about climate change and we talked about dams and drainage systems, where the water would come from and how the state would get rid of it. But it's all still a guess, even if the experts are guessing. They know that something will happen, but exactly what, exactly what form it will take, even the experts are still guessing.

This is a story about families, which gives it a universality. But it's also specifically Danish, and I wonder if, politically, Denmark is an interesting country to watch with this story of mass migration. Because Denmark was one of the first countries in Europe to really start cracking down on migration and immigration, almost setting the template for the rest of Europe.

First of all, I would like to say that my series here is mainly about human beings, with these individual people, who all react differently. As Rilke says: “there is no unanimous way of reacting as a human being.” There are millions of ways of reacting. I am concerned about the courage of refugees and things like that. But your question is particularly painful for me, it really puts your finger on the wound. Because when I grew up in Denmark, we had a very different reputation. When I received my first awards with The Celebration, one was in Los Angeles to receive a Jewish award for the help that Denmark gave to Jewish refugees. [in World War II]Denmark smuggled people out [of the German-occupied country] safe in Sweden. That was our society. And then in 2016, our government destroyed that history and it became a country that I was no longer proud of. We created a law where we could confiscate refugees' jewelry at the border. I thought that was so far from humane, I couldn't believe it. I said publicly that I was embarrassed by my country, I had a public fight with a Danish journalist about it. It was a very painful time. There's an echo of that in Families Like Ours. I think our country has recovered from that dark time and hopefully our identity will recover at some point. But there's definitely an echo of that in my story, trying to turn this around and say, “Okay, what if Us are they refugees?” There is also an element of satisfaction in this.

All over Europe, there is this idea of ​​a European fortress. Political forces in almost every country seem to want to build walls to keep people out. This idea of ​​a united and borderless Europe, which somehow still exists, is now very rigidly defined by who you are and where you come from.

But if we talk about fortresses, this is more than a local, European or Danish phenomenon. It is more universal than that. Look at the fortress of America, where they are building a wall, not tearing down any. It is the agenda all over the world. That is why I find it interesting to reverse things and put Westerners in the position of refugees.

As you said, you avoided catastrophic and stereotypical images. What was the most challenging thing for you in shooting this?

Well, now it's a challenge to position this show in a way that people understand that it's a human drama. It could be a disaster show, but it's a slow-motion disaster. And the show takes place in seven different countries that I didn't know about. So we did a lot of research to make it all plausible. It was a huge challenge. We did a lot of test screenings with the audience, and they kept asking questions like, “Why are they leaving the country when there's no water in the streets?” that kind of thing. So we had to find ways to inform the audience that this is what it would be like in a well-functioning Western country like Denmark. We would know in advance that the water was coming and we wouldn't wait for the flood to leave. We don't think it would work that way. We found it unrealistic. But getting that agreement with the audience through months and months of research to figure out how to explain that was very difficult.

Did the research extend to how different countries would react to a wave of Danish refugees?

Yes, but you can never say exactly how a country reacts, because the only general thing you can say about human beings is that when there is a crisis, when you feel threatened, there is a regression. You retreat, you find the people closest to you, you start protecting yourself. This creates aggression. You can see that Poland has been very friendly, generous and welcoming to Ukrainian refugees. But if Poland were flooded with foreigners, as in our future world, it would create a crisis, a regression and aggression. [But] There is also a lot of generosity to be found in this series. The core of the series is a girl who sacrifices her life, her career and everything else, to help her mother. And then there is Elias [played by Albert Rudbeck Lindhardt] who crosses a continent to be with a girl who abandoned him.

Did you end up making this series with a more or less optimistic attitude towards the future?

Well, it's kind of like the question, why do we keep flying? Why do I keep flying and buying new clothes and all those things that are destroying our planet, knowing that they're destroying our planet? But I guess it's because it's the best we can do. That [climate change] it's something we can't handle, it's just too big a catastrophe. So we go back to focusing on our little self and our world. I find that really interesting. And there's an element of forgiveness in that, because that's the best we can do. It's not that we don't care, but that's just the best we can do.

Have you ever gone back to that bar in France and thanked the rude waiter for inspiring you?

I didn't, and he would say, he would probably just say, “Who the fuck are you?” and insult me. In French.

Watch the trailer of Families like ours under.