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00:00 (dramatic music)
00:02 - My name is Nikolai Arcel.
00:08 I'm here with The Promised Land,
00:09 film starring Mads Mikkelsen and Amanda Colleen,
00:12 about a man who journeys out to the wild heath
00:16 in the '70s, '50s Denmark to try to tame the land.
00:20 - My name is Amanda Collen, and I play Ann-Barbara,
00:24 who is a really brave,
00:30 cool woman in the heath in 1755, '55, yeah.
00:35 I don't know, it's really hard to describe without spoilers,
00:39 but she's really badass, in a soft, sweet, loving way.
00:45 - The film is based on a novel by a female novelist
00:51 called Ida Jessen, who's quite big in Denmark.
00:54 This was probably her biggest bestseller book,
00:58 and also, I think, her first historical piece.
01:02 So I read that before it even came out,
01:05 and fell completely in love with it.
01:07 But it also had a lot of themes that I loved,
01:11 and some very personal things in it for me.
01:12 So I fell in love with it immediately, wanted to do it.
01:17 So it started with that book.
01:19 - Well, I think always when projects come in,
01:24 I have an instinct that says yes or no quite fast.
01:29 And when Nick called, he said a very,
01:34 very scarce description of the project,
01:37 but it was an immediate yes in my whole system.
01:40 And so it was really interesting to go from there, actually.
01:44 And two years later, we started shooting,
01:46 so I think also just time in itself is such an advantage.
01:50 But yeah, also to be able to do some period,
01:54 and to be able to give voice and body to a female in 1755,
01:59 that was, to me, really, really exciting.
02:03 Yeah, an eye-opener.
02:06 - Mads Mikkelsen plays Ludwig Kallen,
02:09 who is a very ambitious, driven man,
02:13 whose entire sole purpose in life is to become somebody.
02:17 And this film is really about how much
02:21 is he willing to sacrifice in order
02:23 to become that somebody?
02:25 And will his, I suppose you could say
02:30 that the journey, part of the journey is discovering
02:33 whether he will lose his soul or gain a soul
02:37 in this quest to become a man of importance.
02:40 I mean, the character of Anne Mamouse
02:42 is actually one of the reasons
02:43 I even fell in love with the story.
02:45 She's one of the most amazing characters in the novel,
02:48 and I really wanted to translate that into the film.
02:51 That was a really tough role to cast.
02:53 Obviously, a nine-year-old,
02:56 we were trying to find her in Denmark,
02:58 and we couldn't, we had cast like 120, 130 young girls.
03:03 And then we eventually went to Sweden,
03:07 which is our neighboring country,
03:08 where there was just this one standout, incredible girl
03:13 who we were so lucky to find in Melina Harkberg,
03:18 who was a joy to work with every single second of the film.
03:22 - Well, I think always when you work with children on set,
03:26 it creates a great vibe,
03:28 because everyone relaxes a little bit.
03:30 (laughing)
03:32 Because children are just having fun,
03:34 and I think it spreads a great vibe on set
03:38 when they're just like being kids.
03:41 And Melina is very funny and super entertaining,
03:45 and yeah, it was a joy to work with her.
03:47 - She's actually very much like her character,
03:50 she's like very intuitive and just laughs all the time.
03:55 And she couldn't remember her lines half the time,
03:58 but we just laughed at that,
03:59 because it's just so fun to be on the set with her.
04:03 - She ate a lot of candy.
04:04 - She did.
04:05 (laughing)
04:06 There's a lot of sugar rushes after eating candy.
04:08 - Yeah, yeah.
04:09 - I would say it's inspired by the true story.
04:12 Ludwig Kallen, Mads' character is real.
04:15 The shingle, the antagonist of the piece is real,
04:17 or was real.
04:19 But Ida, who wrote the novel,
04:22 has sort of fictionalized a great part of the story.
04:25 She's taken some of the events that happened
04:28 and sort of made them a little bit her own for the novel.
04:32 And since we adapted the novel,
04:33 it's not exactly a true story,
04:35 but it is, some of these events did happen.
04:37 He did go to the Heaths.
04:39 There was sort of a,
04:41 there was this antagonism and all these things.
04:42 But there's certain characters that are her inventions.
04:46 It's very fun to write,
04:47 an antagonist who knows more about life
04:50 than your hero does.
04:51 (laughing)
04:52 Because in a sense, he's always,
04:54 he's a horrible person,
04:55 but he's also usually the smartest guy in the room,
04:57 which is really fun to write.
04:59 So he would have these theories about life
05:02 and what life is,
05:03 that were probably closer to what my theory of life is,
05:07 which is that life is basically chaos.
05:09 And he would keep repeating that,
05:11 you know, in the script,
05:12 he would keep repeating that to Ludwig,
05:14 who was always like, "No, I can control my life."
05:16 So that was quite,
05:17 he was a very fun character to write.
05:19 And again, if it hadn't been for Simon,
05:22 showing up in the casting,
05:24 I think it would have been a very, very different part,
05:26 but he made it so much his own.
05:28 - Of course, when you have two years to kind of,
05:31 as I say, put a character in your pocket
05:33 and walk around with her for a while,
05:36 lots of things accumulate.
05:39 But I, from the beginning,
05:41 had quite a strong feeling that I needed to
05:46 keep her as open as possible
05:49 to let as many women take space in her,
05:53 if that makes sense.
05:54 It's not something that we've talked about,
05:56 I don't know, I can't remember.
05:59 But anyway, so there's,
06:01 I kept trying to pin her down, but I couldn't.
06:07 And I think that's very much what we see on screen.
06:10 Then we worked a lot of,
06:11 you were kind of scared that I was too,
06:15 I don't know, modern,
06:18 and so we worked a little bit on voice
06:19 and toning her down, because I'm like this.
06:24 - Yeah, I meant like this.
06:26 And then Barbara's a little bit more like this.
06:28 - Yeah, yeah.
06:29 - But I think you nailed that pretty--
06:31 - Yeah, yeah, yeah.
06:32 But so there's a lot of different prep,
06:35 but I think she's a mix, when I see her now,
06:38 she's a pretty good mix of a lot of women
06:42 that surrounds me, which I think is very beautiful,
06:47 actually, if I can say that about my own character.
06:50 I don't know.
06:52 - You can.
06:53 - Am I allowed to say that? - You can say whatever you want.
06:55 - No, there's a lot of my mom,
06:56 I mean, it's a character that,
06:59 a lot of women have gone through this over and over,
07:02 and women still go through this,
07:04 being as modern and having the same wants as needs,
07:07 and needs like I have in my life,
07:09 but the surroundings don't allow them
07:13 to say or do what they feel.
07:17 And I think when I watched it the first time,
07:19 I was really heartbroken, actually,
07:22 because the big difference between me and her today
07:27 is that I have the freedom to love,
07:29 and she didn't, and she fought for it, though.
07:34 Yeah.
07:34 - Yeah.
07:35 - You know, I think my biggest highlight
07:37 was the highlight of making this movie
07:41 was probably being on the actual Heath,
07:43 where he actually built the real house.
07:46 We were on the actual location
07:47 where we built this house,
07:49 and every morning when we would get up
07:51 very early in the morning to be ready to shoot
07:53 and see the sunrise over this amazing landscape,
07:56 it felt like being there.
07:58 It was also quite harsh at times to be there,
08:00 because it was cold and sometimes raining,
08:03 but it was just so beautiful,
08:04 and we felt that we were truly part of the story
08:07 that we were telling, which was amazing to me.
08:10 - And I think also it reflected on the whole team.
08:12 So, I mean, I said it was a scene that was my highlight,
08:16 but the whole experience was really,
08:18 for me at least, joyful and beautiful,
08:22 and the way that everyone came together
08:24 and really had personal,
08:26 I remember we shot the Christmas scene,
08:29 and Jeru does the sets and do all these amazing things.
08:32 She came to me and she whispered,
08:34 like, "I've made you a little,"
08:36 I don't know what it's called in English, "engrance."
08:39 No, like a little round thing made out of sticks or leaves
08:44 or whatever it's called.
08:45 Yeah, I just thought Barbara would maybe have made this.
08:51 So everyone kind of added to our characters
08:54 and find little special things that are so valuable
08:59 in order to make something whole, I think.
09:02 And I don't know, to me it was really special
09:05 that people kept doing that, or found a little,
09:09 Kiki found a little handkerchief
09:11 that I had in my pocket the whole time that nobody saw,
09:15 but it was just like these little secrets,
09:17 I think are super cool, yeah.
09:20 (upbeat music)
09:23 [Music]