What is lifelike at a maternity ward from the midwives’ perspective? Everyone who has given birth might think they know, but do they really or do they just get a glimpse into an intense and demanding world where life comes to light and those who help make it happen are more or less like soldiers at war? That is at least the comparison Lone Scherfig made in her mind when she created and wrote The Shift, an eight-episode TV series, which is her first Danish-language project in 14 years. The Oscar-nominated Scherfig, who is best known for her English-speaking projects such as An Education, Their Finest, One Day and her Danish-language film Italian for Beginners from 2000, also co-directed the show and felt that the role as showrunner came quite natural to her. We spoke to Scherfig from Chile, where she is prepping her new film.

You are the creator and writer of the show The Shift, which takes place at a maternity ward in a hospital in Copenhagen. Why did you pick this particular department of the hospital, and which possibilities did this offer to you as a creator?

There is a built-in intensity here. The people are not sick, but they are in the middle of the worst and best moments of their lives, so there is a lot of drama that you can take for granted and build on. We have made this group portrait of the people who are there every day and we focused on them rather than the people who come in in extreme moments of their lives. It is both a portrait of a generation and the midwives, but also the people who come in and give birth to the babies. They arrive there and they build these super intimate relationships to the midwives whom they may never see again. You get portraits of people in extreme happiness or drama I thought that that arena would be a machine for emotion and to a certain extent politics and drama and some humor here and there too.

 

The maternity ward is a special place in the hospital – this is where life is created and celebrated, and womanhood is celebrated. Was this project a deliberate celebration of women?

We started ten days before our whole world closed down and it brought a natural attention to the people who worked at the frontline and the gratitude towards them. It mirrored the rest of us who think we have a terribly important job but actually it is nothing in comparison. We follow both men and women. It is quite rare that men are midwives, but we do have one and also some of the doctors are men and some of the fathers who come in to have a child. There is a certain spirit between the midwives, which I have experienced in real life. It is a group of people who are very different, and they work with such tolerance and warmth. They are smart women and incredibly different from each other – but they share this combination of being relaxed and underplayed, but then they immediately turn into people who can save lives and having that shift from being a kind colleague to someone who has an emergency to deal with – that can save and change lives. I was so impressed by that. Many of our actors were on a shift for inspiration and also for technical knowledge and were amazed by how disciplined and calm the midwives are. A lot of people think they know so much about it because they have a child, so they were maybe there for a few hours, so that gives everyone memories of it but actually, there is a huge variation.

The lead character is Ella (Sofie Gråbøl), who is the head of the maternity ward, with the major responsibility of making sure that everything runs smoothly – which is easier said than done when the budget is not always there to do it and when you never know when the ward will get busy. We see a woman in a situation where she is a true leader. Was it important to you to create a female character like this when you started writing the show?

The part is written for Sofie Gråbøl, who is an extraordinary actress with a very wide range. We wanted her not to play your typical manager but someone who is at the same time quite complicated and a very loving person. Of course, you land on the maternity ward at the time that turns out to be the most dramatic time in her life. So, she is the main character, and she is also the leader of the midwives, who experiences her own private issues too.

Ella is also facing a dilemma of her own, trying to figure out what she wants in life – whether she wants children of her own for instance, an issue with which she is confronted every day. Talk about how you created a professional world that manages to incorporate a very personal narrative too.

One of our rules is that you never leave the hospital. You can detect who the characters are from the little information you get when they meet them at work because the hints you get mean a lot. Most of the staff have very little free time and invest themselves completely in their work-life, so even though you do not get to know their homes, you have an idea and a feeling of how their surroundings would be, because you, via small props, dialogue and few costumes,  see the top of their mental and visual iceberg and you’ll guess what the rest of their lives are about.

 

The characters work a lot, and since we never leave the hospital, it feels like they work all the time too. What made you choose to shoot it in just the one location?

We focus on the almost abstract world of the light Nordic hospital architecture that has focused on nature that is what we do now where they believe that daylight is healing and where the set itself is quite transparent and you get an esthetic that is beautiful but also it enables you to keep shooting in these circumstances where the day passes and the year passes and then it is Christmas, New Year and we have snow. The set is almost like The Truman Show – it was a huge studio where we could control light and weather and sound and seasons. So it was quite a fantastic way of working in this arena that is a machine for drama and emotion and where we could totally focus on that rather than more mundane production issues. But the main focus is always character, eyes, skin, reactions…

Ella has a relationship with her colleague, the pediatrician Jerry (Pål Sverre Hagen of Valkyrien, Beforeigners, Exit), who is in an unhappy marriage in which he has a son, and who is unable to get a divorce for religious reasons. Ella is hesitating about making this anything other than an “office romance,” so to speak. Did you worry about having a relationship unfold in the workplace in today’s #metoo climate?

I always thought that Ella was a quite physical, passionate person with few social skills. As she says, she cannot have Mexican dinner with the man she loves, but she can certainly have sex with him in the linen closet. It is part of her problem that she lacks the ability to have an everyday life except with her patients. That was super inspiring to have a character, who is in many ways different from what you would expect her to be – especially as a midwife. You also meet her mother, elegant and very witty Birthe Neumann, who is a lab analyst, and their mother-daughter relationship is another subtheme in the story. They can play that out in the workplace because they are colleagues.

This is the world of midwives, in which women are in their element and have been for centuries – the men like Vilhelm (Patrick A. Hansen) have a hard time being accepted and are discriminated against. Was it a deliberate choice to show that men also experience discrimination at times?

It was not so much to see him be discriminated against but to show how hard he fights for the job he loves which is traditionally a women’s job. It is rare that men become midwives, but you also get to experience wherein his talents lie and I think it is quite beautiful and fun to watch him grow, while he is studying as an intern. They quite quickly get to help women give birth, I believe it is a couple of months into their internship, so we follow Vilhelm’s last year of the midwives’ education and see how he will do.

You have been making films outside of Denmark for many years now. What made you want to turn your perspective back onto your native country?

It was the show. It was not necessarily about returning as now I am in Chile doing a feature film. I was motivated by the idea and by showing gratitude to the healthcare workers. My obsession was not so much about writing and shooting in my own language, as about the midwives and if I had not thought about telling that story, I might not have worked at home It was that particular story I wanted to tell.  But it was wonderful to sleep in my own bed after work for once.

And you shot it during the pandemic, I believe?

It turned out to be something we could work on despite Covid, which made us concentrate and be able to design the workplace and process for the circumstances. We got the green light early on, so we could allow ourselves to just get on with it front and center with it without having to wait. Often, you have a procedure where there is so much wait ng time between the different steps of the screenwriting and the financing but this time, we could just focus completely. So, something good came out of Covid. You do hear about people where the creative process has been much more intense than normal because all they could do was work.

The show is not political, but it does celebrate the Danish national health system (versus the private one) and at one point Ella says that the taxpayers should pay more money to make the ward function better and that there is no way she would work at a private hospital in spite of being able to make more. What role does the Danish healthcare system play in the show?

It is one of our crown jewels – our public healthcare system – it is something we are very proud of, and it still has a fairly high standard even if it is not at the level it used to be. Ella’s boss says, “I want to die with my boots on,” while talking about working in the public system rather than the private one, which is getting more significant in all of the Scandinavian countries.  It has been inspiring for me to think of this project as a war film. No comparison, but still it has a heritage of perhaps a Vietnam war film, where the characters have no idea what will happen next, where the enemy will come from, and often there is an unreliable general, who is not qualified. Also, the lingo in the show is now and then deliberately military. I always thought that it had some of those connotations and it has worked as inspiration for the writers and the crew – even if most of our characters are dressed in scrubs and female, there is a lot of blood and unpredictability. In episode 3, I thought of it as one soldier is getting killed, but it is actually a midwife having a meltdown, but it has been an inspiration to look at in terms of storytelling and character.

This is your first experience as a showrunner – how did that go?

I have enjoyed it. Being a director is actually quite a good background to have for this job. I have the craft and the knowledge to suggest technical solutions to production problems. In a way, I find it surprising that it is often writers who are show-runners and not directors, but I have of course also been head of the writing process. Being a director more than a writer, I have given the other directors a lot of space, because I know what they can do, and I trust them, and they really are very good and thrive better without too much interference. I directed the last two episodes once the scripts were finished, and I had more time. I thought that as we were planning for season two, it would be a good experience to just feel how it was to be in the epicenter of the series and feel what worked and what needed fine-tuning for the next season. So, I directed the finale and that was a great joy.

You mentioned before that you are in Chile. What are you shooting there?

I am doing an adaptation of the Chilean book The Movie Teller. I am in the middle of prep here.