Vinca Wiedemann is a renowned script consultant, creative producer, former editor and screenwriter who has worked with filmmakers such as Lars von Trier, Susan Bier and Thomas Vinterberg. She was a teacher and also a director of the National Film School of Denmark. At TIFF.24, she is in the jury of Transilvania Pitch Stop.
You’ve just finished the Rise of Series & the Art of Collaboration masterclass and you’ve arrived yesterday in Romania. How is the TIFF experience so far? How was the masterclass and the Transilvania Pitch Stop project?
Profesionally it’s very interesting for me to be in an area of Europe where I’m not so often. It’s a good, very diverse bunch of projects. The audience was so nice when I did the masterclass, a lot of nodding and smiling.
You were also smiling a lot, so it was contagious.
That’s how you make a connection. If you don’t smile yourself, how would you imagine to get a smile in return? I must say I’m blown away by the festival. I think it’s a beautiful, wonderful way of making a festival. You should be proud!
Thank you. Talking about connections. You work as a script consultant. How do you choose the people or the scripts with which you work?
Basically, I don’t choose them, they choose me. They call. I’m a freelancer and I have a long track record. I worked in the film industry for all my life and I worked with some of the greatest people in my area. New people call me and I’m curious. If I can do it, I say yes, and sometimes I don’t have time. But it’s actually very rarely that I say No to a project. Of course I don’t do it for free, so people have to pay me to do it. And I have a lot of projects and sometimes I don’t have time to do it. I used to be a commissioning editor, I commissioned feature films at the Danish Film Institute. Sometimes I would read a script that I didn’t like very much, but maybe there was just one tiny little thing that made me ask to meet them. And then once I met them, sometimes it was a beautiful crew and it changed my whole conception of the project. Sometimes really great films came out of it. And that made me even more curious. I find it very difficult to judge a project before I meet the people behind.
You’ve also taught at the film school. How did this experience help you in your work?
In a way, it was very much the same, but I think it probably helped me to have a little bit more strategic perspective on what you are trying to do. Experience is key if you want to make movies. But also knowledge is important. And if you’re just having practice and no theory or only theory and no practice, your perspective gets limited. If you can combine it, it’s a really highly explosive cocktail, a lot of things can come out of it. It’s a wonderful combo. And I think we have too little of it in our industry, we are practitioners, mostly, at least in my country. And we leave the knowledge to people from academics. And they’re doing brilliant research in theory. We should imagine ourselves like if we were medical doctors. They are in the hospital, they stay with the patients, but at the same time they do the research and they innovate their own craft. Where would they be if they did like we do, just do the practitioner stuff and leave the theory to someone else?
You’ve also been or you are a film editor, scriptwriter, creative producer. Did I miss something? You did a lot of things .
I was also head of the film school.
So how does everything fit in the puzzle of your career?
You’ve wrote a feature film and you said that you wanted to continue doing this work, but then other things happened. Do you want to work on your own project again?
No, actually not. I think because I also changed my path many times. I realize it takes such a stamina, you know, to continue to do the same, the same, only that one thing. And personally I think for me it was fun to try it but I’m not quite sure that I would find it fulfilling. What I find at the core of my activity it’s not the artistic production, but it’s meeting with other people and what happens working with them. It’s that chemistry to create a room of inspiration. I think that’s the core of my activity.
And you also focus a lot on collaboration.
Whenever I enter a room, it becomes a collaboration. If someone has been sitting alone, it’s been a collaboration between the person and the text or the idea. And you can also create a dialogue there. But when I enter the room, it’s in order to have a dialogue. And that dialogue, I love that. So I’m just so lucky that someone also likes to have the dialogue with me.
Can you tell us about New Danish Screen – a production support programme for talent development – and what motivated you to found it?
I thought it was a moment in Danish film where we had a lot of success. The whole Dogma 95 movement had just started out a few years ago. And it was like, what happens when you have a lot of successes that you become a little self indulgent? It’s like „ohh we’re so good”, but we knew also that we had some possibilities that we wouldn’t have at another moment in time. So we thought now we have to think forward for the future and secure talent development so that the next generations will also have possibilities to experiment and develop. We had one scheme which was a less experimenting scheme. And we managed to change that to secure the funding, but change the scheme. So we did this scheme where we also had TV stations and the Ministry of Culture and the Film Institute from where the funding was coming and we made it a place where you had to take a risk and also the funders had to take a risk. We also had money for development, which is not so usual in a talent development scheme. We had also a principle that if it’s gonna be a mistake, it’s gonna be an interesting mistake. If you succeed, it should be a good film, and if not, you will learn. The head of fiction at the national broadcast said that if you fail with the project, with the film, then „I’m just happy we didn’t do it when something had to air. But you learn so much from it. And when you come to us and do the next movie you have done all this so it have made you grow.” To have the support from a broadcaster saying that meant a lot to the industry and secured the project. There was actually a big resistance from the producers because they felt that they couldn’t earn enough on it, but both broadcasters were very encouraging and in the end it became a really huge success and now it has existed for 20 years.
You’ve gravitated towards TV series lately, can you tell us about the recent projects you talked about at the masterclass?
I’m working on so many projects as a script consultant. I worked on a number of national series as well. I worked on Thomas Vinterberg’s first TV series Families like Ours, which is a very personal project for Thomas. It was a very interesting and moving experience because he managed to combine a societal topic about climate change and what will happen if you have to move out of your country with universal themes of having to say goodbye to your closest relatives. What happens when you have to part, whether it’s because someone dies, or you’re getting a divorce? It was very much about parents and children and also what happens when you divorce and the children lose the family they had and, even though it may be right to divorce, it always creates an ambiguity in the child. Where should I be? With whom should I be? Why can’t we be together? Why can’t we be like it used to be? It’s universal for parents and for children and even for grandparents.
Hope we can see it in our country as well. And Other People’s Money?
Other People’s Money – the series created by Jan Schomburg that premiered in Berlinale‘s Panorama section – was a really fun project in the sense that it deals also with serious societal problems, which was a big tax scandal. A fraud where some banks and criminal investors cheated on the tax systems all over Europe and made billions and billions of euros. It continued for a number of years. And as a documentary, it would be interesting, but we also know that tax and the people working in the tax system is not maybe the most exciting subject. We may have a lot of prejudice against that, could that be interesting? The Danish lady, from the tax ministry, was the one who saw it at a very early stage and really tried to let the ministers and the political system know something was going wrong. She’s the most exciting and charismatic woman. And I also think that Jan Schomburg managed to make a really exciting and interesting story out of it. I enjoyed very much working with him on it.
In an interview you mentioned Lars von Trier, you said he was almost a genius. Why almost?
Ohh… I think that maybe you can only acknowledge a genius at a distance. When you say genius, I think of Mozart. I don’t know how many people could see that during his life. I mean, he was praised, of course, when he was alive. But there were so many things… he was also an annoying person. He was a troublesome person. And when I say „almost a genius”, it’s also just to tease Lars, but also because I think that we can all develop talent. I think he has a very special point of view and I am a huge fan of him and a huge admirer of him. But if you’re going to work with the guy and you say he’s a genius, it’s the same as saying you don’t need anyone, you can do it on your own – and it’s not true. So the „almost” is just a way of making us not at all equal, but putting us in a dialogue where we are on the same level. Somehow. So I would respect him. I would acknowledge his talent, but I would also reserve the right to tease him. A little bit.
Once I was working with a beautiful director and world famous actress of Ingmar Bergman, Pernilla August. I was working on her first feature film as a director, on the script. We were at Zentropa, at Lars von Triers’s company. When he saw us, we were walking past the premises with some some cups of coffee. And he said: let me carry it for you, I want to carry it. And she said: oh yes, thank you. Thank you, Lars, do so! Because he loved to take the role of a servant. I think that in a professional relationship you have to have mutual respect, you have to have fun and you have to treat each other like human beings.
That’s very true. And also another thing that intrigued me from that interview was that you said you regret being so harsh and serious towards mediocre scripts during your younger years. It reminded me very much of something Călin Căliman, a film critic from Romania, said about the only negative review he’s ever written and the regrets he had. And then I am a film critic myself and I wonder: how can we balance being generous and kind with being frank and not compromising our ideas?
This is such a good question and actually I don’t think anyone has ever asked me that question before. I think first of all, you have to remember two things. I would never be a film critic. I would be too harsh. It would be horrible. You wouldn’t love to read it. But as a script consultant it’s completely different because the script is kind of a blueprint of something that’s going to be. It hasn’t been made yet. So that’s one thing. Another thing is that, when I was a commissioner I used to say it was my luck that I was kind of the gatekeeper of the money of the state. It was taxpayers money. But on the other hand I had an obligation to use those money. So that made it important for me to also see the good things. I also realized that you can’t judge.
You can have the most brilliant script. And then something happens: the wrong cast or just things go wrong. Chemistry between actors, chemistry between the crew. Some things you didn’t see coming. You couldn’t predict all the layers of the story. The locations, the cinematography, the clothes the actors are wearing, the production design, everything comes together. I mean, you can’t predict the results. I’ve seen a script that was so funny I was laughing. When I saw the reading we were all laughing. When I saw the uncut takes, people on the shooting were laughing. When I saw the film, the first cut, no one was laughing. Oh, no, that was not that. Actually it was about a really fragile moment where two people realize they might be in love and it just didn’t work like that. I still don’t know why. We just realised it’s not gonna be. And another scene is going to play that role. So that’s how it is. You can’t judge. But even if you could judge more, you can never know. And I would also say I’m not the one doing the film. I’m not the one doing the script. It’s so difficult to build something. It’s so easy to tear it down. And who are you? Who am I to to tear it down? Who am I to judge? Take the example of my husband and I. Sometimes we go to the cinema and we see a horrible film. It happened to me once. I won’t say which one. Terrible movie, like I can barely sit in my chair, and I think maybe we should walk out. Then, afterwards, I turn to my husband and say „ohh this film was so horrible” and he turns to me and says „I think it’s one of the best films I’ve ever seen in my life” – she laughs. And we didn’t talk for the rest of the night. A lot of people may agree that this is ******** and one person has a different opinion. Who has the truth?
So I think that we overestimate opinions and I think that when we work on these pieces of art or stories, we do it as good as we can. And if someone is trying to do that, it’s so difficult. There’s so few telling good stories. So we should encourage the ones who actually dare and have the stamina that I don’t have. We should support them. We should, of course, give them honest reactions or observations, but it can be „I didn’t understand that. I think you may have a problem there. There’s a red flag here, but this is the potential”. But you have to acknowledge how difficult it is and what it takes.
Thank you. This really helps me personally, I hope our readers as well. And to end this interview, have you seen any films at TIFF?
Not yet. I did the masterclass and I saw the pitch. I felt like I saw some movies there, but it was all mostly in my imagination. And tomorrow I’m going to be in the pitch jury. So I won’t have time to see movies there or anything. And on Saturday, I’m going home.
But I hope you still have fun though.
I have a lot of fun. It’s a nice festival!
Thank you very much.