My father was a soldier. He was a frogman in the special forces in Denmark before I was born, and always the reality of that inspired me. My mom is very left-wing, classic socialist, and she always talked about the solders as almost crazy, violent, sick people, and I want to confront that because its very judgmental, and I'm not sure it's true.
Tobias Lindholm
Denmark is a country built on a commercial fleet. That's basically what we have been doing. We're just a small country of islands, and every family has a sailor. So, in many ways, my father was a sailor before I was born.
I love to work with friends.
I studied screenwriting at film school and was constantly learning how to construct three-act dramas.
Everyone in Denmark has at least two or three sailors in their family; sea travel is part of the DNA of our nation, and because of that, I'd always wanted to tell a story aboard a ship.
Denmark is a small nation of five million people, but our economy is completely dependent on our commercial fleet. Every family has some connection to it.
I have three sons, and the oldest wants to play pirates all the time. It has all these associations of living some kind of very free life. It's interesting for me as a filmmaker to show a whole different side of that.
In 2007 and 2008, the first two Danish ships were hijacked. I started to research it. I've had the idea of writing in this arena for a long time, but I could never find the angle of what kind of story.
After film school, I would write 8 hours a day on film and 8 hours a night on TV, and then sleep once and a while.
I've never been a soldier. In Denmark, at 18, as a male, you go in a draw, and if they pick you, you go and serve for a year. I didn't.
I'm a filmmaker; I want to make films. I don't want to sit in a hotel room waiting to make films, and I can control my thing in Denmark; I can make the film I want to make... of course, I have to write a good script, all that, but if I do my job, it will happen.
My dream is that my kids grow up into nice people; that's my dream.
My mother - she's a good old classic Northern European socialist - she's totally wonderful, but she raised me up believing that rich people have stolen their money from poor people.
I don't want to write lines where characters tell me exactly how they feel; I want to see people talk about anything but their feelings, like they do in real life.
