Interview with Peter Høeg
Taken from TV2 Denmark. Translated and transcribed by John Fogde.
Q: The movie Smilla has been on it's way for a long time. Tonight is the big night. Did you sleep alright last night?
A: Worse than usual. Just the thought of 1500 people or so watching the movie makes me want to take a deep breath and I have to wear a tuxedo for the first time in my life.
Q: Are you satisfied with the movie?
A: Yes, I am.
Q: Then Bille's Smilla is also your Smilla?
A: I don't have a Smilla. The Norwegian author Jan Kaerstaad once said: "I've never met a real person in a book". That's pretty deep. A book consists of paper with letters on it. There are no people in it. There is a mood. To me, Smilla is a voice. I can hear her speak, but I've never invisioned her. Julia Ormond's Smilla is a fullfilling physical version of what that voice may look and act like. (1)
Q: Has Bille understood your Smilla?
A: I think so. The idea was not for Bille to make an exact copy of the Smilla I have portrayed and I'm not sure that is possible, because to me Smilla is words while a movie has an extra dimension, the pictures. One of the first things Bille and I discussed four or five years ago, when we first met was that Bille shouldn't feel obligated to translate the book into a movie. That story has already been told. If he could, he should find inspiration in the book and then make his version of the book and that's what I think he has done. There are a lot of things in Ormond's Smilla character that I recognize. The combination of fragility, bitterness and female sensuality in her portrayal of Smilla, which has made a great impact on me.
Q: Explain the emotions you had when you saw the movie for the first time.
A: I can tell you some things, but something has to be between me and Bille. There is a risk in this situation, because I am a cinematic illiterate. I watch one movie a year, that's it. And every year I am amazed by the progress in filmmaking. I still rate movies by the standard of the late sixties, because back then I watched movies more often. So in many ways I'm the worst person you could ask about this, because I don't know anything about movies. But at the same time I'm involved in the movie and I like Bille and his earlier work. So naturally I'm biased. I saw the raw edit of the movie with my publisher, my girlfriend and Bille last summer. I felt amazed by the monumentality of the depiction of Copenhagen and a sense of awe by what was made out of the modest things I wrote and that it was possible to blow these things up to that size (2). I also felt a fascination by and enjoyment in the Smilla character. The combination of bitterness and female sensuality really impressed me. But at the same time I was a bit concerned by the size of the movie. It dawned on me how expensive and risky this movie was.
I see the movie as something in itself, not as something that has to have a certain loyalty towards my book. I think it's dangerous to go see the movie with the book in mind, because then you've created your own images in your mind and if you go see the movie and look for something in particular, then your mind is closed and that's dangerous. Bille is taking a risk because his popularity in Denmark is so immense that it can only be compared to that of the national soccer team (3). It is not enough that the national team plays well or even wins, but they have to win in a certain way and win with a certain amount of goals. If they don't fulfill these standards, people are filled with an instant rage as great as the combined expectations of the nation. These expectations are unrealistic and unfair to soccer players and also to Bille. The anger and hate this movie has generated is totally out of proportions, but that is because of what people expect of Bille and when they feel he doesn't deliver exactly what they want the enormous expectations turn into anger.
Q: Why was "Smilla" made into a movie?
A: What happened was I got a lot of offers from America in 1992, when "Smilla" had been translated into English. The book had been sent to Hollywood without my knowledge even before it was available in book stores and when I began getting offers from film companies I informed my publicist that I wasn't interested. I felt it would be too risky. Then my publisher arranged a meeting between Bille and me. He liked the book, he wanted to turn it into a movie and suddenly it felt right.
Q: Would you do it again?
A: I have felt from the moment I made the deal with Bille that this was something I should only do once. Because no matter how successful the movie is it's just too turbulent a situation. There are a lot of hard artistic and business decisions to make and I feel like it's something I should only do once.
Q: You've worked on the character Smilla for years. Do I sense correctly that she in some ways came to you in a dream?
A: "Smilla" is the only book that was written because of a dream. Or rather two dreams. I'd known for a while that I wanted to work on a plot that stretched over an entire book and I wanted a main character, who could hold an entire book. Those were the technical boundaries, which I had created. I also wanted to work with the thriller element and a plot. I had imagined a male, Danish lead character, but then I had these two powerful dreams about Greenland. In the first one, I saw the fur from a polar bear which covered several mountains and had a certain glow, and in the dream I knew that this was about a book that it was possible for me to create. There was a tiger inside the rug, but that's a long story. For the first and maybe last time in my life, I decided to follow a dream and the fact that Smilla is Greenlandic and female was a part of this dream. The dream set the tone of the book and from there I worked on the story.
Q: It took four different screenwriters to write the script. Why didn't you do it yourself?
A: I didn't think I would be able to do it. Bille asked me if I wanted to and my first reaction was to say no. I'm a cinematic illiterate, I had no knowledge of the work process and I felt exhausted by Smilla. I had just finished "Borderliners" (4), so I had just been in another world and I didn't feel distanced enough to Smilla. But when I saw the movie I could see the similarities between the work of an author and a screenwriter, because both has to know how to build suspense, create scenes and end story lines and at that moment I felt I could have written the screenplay. I also then realized that I'll probably never write a screenplay. I love the written language and the one thing that truly fascinates me is books. I can get really jealous, when I read something I wish I had written. Movies will never be my world. So the answer to your question is, I believe I could have done it, but I don't think I'll ever write a script.
Q: Before you became an author, you were an actor. I would have loved to see you in this movie.
A: On of my friends said that to put my mark on the film I should do like Scherfig (5) in Den Forsvundende Fuldmaegtig, where in a scene he is a prisoner in jail. But I never asked Bille if I could be in the movie.
Notes:
- Peter Høeg means that Julia Ormond's portrayal of Smilla is one way of portraying Smilla and it's a way that meets the expectations he had.
- He is impressed by the transformation from not very visual descriptions in his book to the pictures on a huge cinema screen.
- Soccer is the most popular sport in Denmark. When the national team won the European Championship in 1992, the entire country was in a state of euphoria and the players were treated like semigods. Then when they didn't qualify to the World Championship in 1994 in the US and didn't make it to the finale round at the European Championship in 1996, people were outraged and demanded the coach fired.
- Famous Danish author, who wrote the book on which the script for Den Forsvundende Fuldmaegtig is based.
This is not an accurate transcription of the interview. I have left out parts of Peter Høeg's answers and I had to change some sentences so that they would make sense in English. Hopefully, I have not altered the answers in a way which could lead to any misunderstandings (John Fogde).
Conversation with Julia Ormond and Gabriel Byrne, on the March 22, 1997 broadcast of the Canadian entertainment weekly, "On the Arts".
Q: Did actually shooting in Greenland enchance what you were doing?
Julia: Oh definitely. I mean, Bille [August] and I went to Greenland actually before in November, and spent about a week to ten days there, and that was very important because it was important for me to establish a relationship with Greenland and an affinity with it as if it were a character, and it does kind of act as a sort of character, a character that is yearned for by Smilla, that is missed, that is part of so many of the characters lives.
Gabriel: Not for me it didn't. I mean, it to me was very separate. To me it was a very physical world, and I'm not predisposed towards that kind of physical deprivation, that living there demanded.
Q: The thing I was interested about - I had read the book beforehand, and the book is densely written, and the descriptions are very vivid - what kind of relationship did you have with the book?
Julia: Well, I read the book as well, obviously, and reread it and reread it, but ultimately you work from the script, but I felt the script is pretty faithful to the book, faithful to the spirit of the book. Obviously there are things that can't be included in a two-hour film, but I think Bille worked quite hard, and Ann Biderman wrote a beautiful script in terms of it.
Gabriel: But the book itself was absolutely fascinating because it's rare that you get a thriller that's written with such a literal kind of style.
Q: It maintains an intellectual curiosity, it's fascinating. Now, your character is the most enigmatic in the movie - is that difficult to maintain throughout making a picture, a character whose function seems to be to keep the audience slightly off-balance?
Gabriel: Yeah, it is difficult, because it's kind of in a way like playing poker, in that you want to be able to keep one step ahead, but at the same time you can't reveal too much and at the same time you can't reveal too little. So it's a delicate line, and I think that suggesting mystery and enigma comes from inside, there's nothing you can do in the exterior to suggest it - you can't put on glasses or, you know. So it has to come from within, and a lot of it has to do with silence and looks and reactions as opposed to active kind of acting, if you know what I mean.
Julia: For me, the thriller aspect of it on its own was not that interesting - if you hadn't had this complex character being in the centre of it, then it really wouldn't have been that interesting. But because she is who she is, and because it's also as much as it is a thriller, it is an emotional journey for her, where she resolves a lot of things, it's about the falling of Smilla herself. And she is a character who is quite tough and quite inscrutable at moments and that's because of her vulnerability, she's sort of brought down all of these barriers, to just cope with the fact that as a child she felt at a certain point when her mother died she was put into a loveless environment, and she associates love with pain, and she's going to prevent anybody from causing her pain.
Excerpts from Julia Ormond's appearance on the "Rosie O'Donnell Show", February 6, 1997:
Rosie: That new movie you have, Smilla's Sense of Snow, tell everyone what this is about.
Julia: It's a terrific film. It's a thriller, um and a love story. It's about a woman who's half-Inuit and half-Danish.
Rosie: What's Inuit? ... I have no clue what that is.
Julia: Inuit, um, means Greenlander. "Eskimo" is not a politically-correct phrase to use - it means "fish-eater" and they don't like it.
Rosie: ... Do you have a clip?
Julia: Yeah, there is a clip, there is a clip. Um, Smilla is somebody who knows snow intimately because, because she's Inuit, um because she's also a glaciologist, and she's befriended this little boy who dies at the start of the movie, and she doesn't believe, um that it was an accident.
Rosie: That's Smilla's Sense of Snow. Looks great! With the very talented Gabriel Byrne.
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