A young man is interrogated by the father of his lover, who has disappeared without a trace during the couple’s trip to a secluded island. This is the premise of Danish director Martin Skovbjerg’s feature film Copenhagen Does Not Exist.

 

The story follows the young man, Sander, as he tries to piece together what happened before his lover’s disappearance – or, rather, what he wants the father to think has happened.

The psychological drama is based on the 1998 novel “Sander”, written by Norwegian author Terje Holtet Larsen. The movie’s script is by Eskil Vogt – who, along with Joachim Trier, penned the Oscar nominated original screenplay for the The Worst Person in the World.

Copenhagen Does Not Exist marks the second feature for Skovbjerg, whose debut Sticks and Stones premiered at the BFI London Film Festival in 2018.

We spoke via Zoom while he was traveling by car from the airport in the city of Aarhus to the film school in Ebeltoft, Denmark. He was on his way to screen his most recent work. The director will celebrate the world premiere of Copenhagen Does Not Exist at the 2023 edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

The film is based on a book by Terje Holtet Larsen, which is called “Sander”. Did you read his book before you read Eskil Vogt’s script?

I was just so much into the script that I was afraid of reading the book. I worried that it would be another kind of landscape. I was so connected to the script that I just wanted to visualize that. But Terje is coming to the premiere, and I look forward to hearing what he feels about it. He is an old friend of Eskil’s, and I hope that he will like it.

You said that you were very connected to the script. What was it that appealed to you and made you decide that this would be your second feature film?

I turned the pages and I was like: what is going on here? Where is this going? I liked the questions it was posing: why are we here? Why are we saying ‘I love you’? Why are we pushing each other to places where we might not even want to be? Why do you want to live in this house? Do you really want to have a girlfriend? Those were really big things for me to understand. I liked the way the story was written. Eskil is a master at writing scripts and I really fell in love with the script.

What is it about Eskil Vogt that makes him such a great scriptwriter?

He starts out by hating his leading characters. Afterward, he falls in love with them. That is what happens in the real world too. You start out by not liking a person. Then, two years later, you are married. Oftentimes, the people you fall in love with immediately are annoying after two months. So, when Eskil starts out by hating his characters and then falls in love with them, he has a better connection with them. That was the case in Louder Than Bombs and with his film The Innocents, which he also directed. When I watched The Innocents – and, also, his film Blind – I thought that this was the way I want to make movies.

Why did you decide to change the title to Copenhagen Does Not Exist?

That was the title of Eskil’s script and I loved the title. It says so much about the idea behind the movie.

Copenhagen plays a big role in the film. Would you talk about the location choices and what you wanted to express through them?

When we started looking for locations, we asked ourselves: ‘What is Copenhagen to us? What is it to me and what do I want to show?’ There are so many spots around Copenhagen that we shot that, when we finished the movie, I felt I was still living in the movie. Most of the shots are from where I live. We wanted to show what real Copenhagen feels like. Not mythical Copenhagen. It is a different angle on Copenhagen and its people. The city has its own personality in the movie.

The film is about an unconventional love story. It is about a couple who cuts themselves off from the world for reasons that we slowly get to understand. Without revealing too much, do you think the film deals with mental illness?

I am not sure if I would call it mental illness. I think it is just about disconnecting from the rest of the world. It is too easy to call it mental illness. Maybe it’s just another way of seeing the world, for better or for worse. There are different ways of seeing the same thing. We are portraying people who might not be considered normal.

Sander is incredibly tolerant when it comes to his father in law’s method of finding out what happened to his daughter. He lets him lock him up and interrogate him. What does this say about him, you think?

He wants to be generous and give his best to his father-in-law. He wants to tell him stories that he will remember and give him good memories. But he has to go to some dark places in his memories of their life together, which he thought he could leave behind and manipulate around the darkness. But her father and brother know her just as well as he does. They know too much for him to manipulate the story. That is when the movie takes a new path. But when he sits in the chair and they interrogate him, he feels he has no problem with it. He wants to share and be generous and he gets money for it. He feels he has nothing to lose.

The characters are very complex. We slowly get to know them and their motives for behaving the way they do. What made you pick Angela Bundalovic (whose credits include Nicolas Winding Refn’s TV series Copenhagen Cowboy), Zlatko Burić, who won the European Film Award for best actor for playing Dimitry in Triangle of Sadness, and newcomer Jonas Holst Schmidt?

The characters are indeed very complex. There are not a lot of characters like Jonas walking around in Copenhagen, so it took some time to find him. The thing with Jonas is that when he closes his eyes and goes through his memories, he expresses so much. You can feel what he is remembering. Somehow, this is where you get empathy for him. Jonas is able to do that and it seems that he is not acting. He is a newcomer. It was amazing working with a person who did not know what acting was. He just did it and gave everything. Angela was also very special and generous. They connected with each other. At that point we had not seen Zlatlo for a long time and I wanted to include him. Then, I found out that he was also doing The Triangle of Sadness. Now he is the best actor in Europe. I have always loved him. I love Pusher and know all the lines by heart.

Talking about Nicolas Winding Refn’s Pusher, do you have any Danish role models?

I don’t really have role models. I never thought I wanted to be a director. I just love being part of the Danish film industry. There are so many beautiful things going on. I know that there is so much edge to what we do. I am a fan of being part of something special.

You are going to the film festivals in Gothenburg and Rotterdam. How important is it to celebrate your movies at film festivals?

That means everything. I am looking so much forward to it. My first film was at four or five film festivals. It makes you so happy to go to different places and share the love of movies with people from all over the world. It is a great feeling to talk to the audience after they have seen your film and hear what they appreciated about it. This is the energy that you take – and bring into your next film. I love being there, watching it with the audience, feeling the energy.