Norwegian director Erik Poppe is set to kick off the Norwegian Film Festival on August 15th with his highly-anticipated drama ‘‘Quisling – The Final Days’ prior to it’s international premier at Toronto’s Special Presentations.
In a brand new interview, Poppe discussed his journey to the new film, and what fans can expect.
I started to look into the story of one of the biggest traitors in Europe, back in 2003″ he said, in an interview with Variety. “Already in the early 2000 in Europe, you could see authoritarian leaders and far right movements gaining ground. I spent a few years reading, researching, but couldn’t find the key to the story.
I directed “The King’s Choice” about the German attack on our democracy in Norway, followed by “Utøya, July 22,” about the terrorist attack on the young people on Utøya. Then one day I got a diary from a family member of the priest Peder Olsen who was with Vidkun Quisling in his cell in his final days. His family knew I was researching his life.
Suddenly I realised this is the key to the story. Not who Quisling was during the war, neither who he was as a young man. I had to focus on those few days when he was arrested until his death sentence and execution. His fight to survive, to save his reputation, to explain his actions. The diary offers an exclusive inside look of his mindset. The core of the story is therefore the battle between the humanist Olsen and the Fascist Quisling.”
Poppe also touched on the process of collaborating with his regular writing partners (Siv Rahendram Eliassen and Anna Bache-Wiig) on the new film and how important historical accuracy is.
“First, I had a rough sketch of the story as I saw it” Poppe explained.
“I first presented it in Cannes 2022 and got a massive interest from potential financiers. I started to work on the script with Anna and Siv. We had collaborated on “Utøya, July 22” and “The Emigrants” before, and we love working in a writers’ room. I went deeper into research while they started building on my idea with the structure. We put layers and layers, developed the script until we ended up with version 13, which is not unusual for us. The writing went on for almost a year. We interviewed elder people who had worked with Quisling, members of the Nazi party, people who were close to the priest. That helped a lot. We also got extra written material from historians. I brought to the writing team two of the most prolific historians when it comes to Quisling who read our material, not to correct it but to say if it was imprecise or wrong.
When I look at some Hollywood period movies, I can tell that some are historically inaccurate, as “the story is the hero.” They play with reality to make the story stronger. That said with some biopics like “Oppenheimer”, the filmmaking team has really put an effort to tell the story as close to reality as possible. That has a more powerful impact. This is also what we wanted to achieve.”
You can read the entire interview on Variety.
