Danish filmmaker Mads Mengel made his feature debut with The Guest, which premiered in the main competition of the 60th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. The Nordic family dramedy won both the Best Director Award and the Special Jury Prize.
The film follows siblings Karl and Rikke as they gather with Karl’s wife’s family and friends to celebrate the christening of his newborn child. When their estranged mother, Vibeke, unexpectedly appears at the event, the reunion begins to unravel, and the painful consequences of her long absence from her children’s lives come into focus.
Screen Anarchy talked to Mengel about shooting the film in just 17 days, constructing scenes around long takes and 360-degree lighting, and allowing the strongest ideas to prevail within a deliberately collaborative filmmaking process.
Screen Anarchy: You have described THE GUEST as a family drama. Why did you choose the confrontation between children and parents as the film’s central arena?
Mads Mengel: I knew quite early that I wanted to make a film about family. One of the greatest Danish films is The Celebration, and the family has always been an interesting theme and arena to explore on film.
It is also something Danish directors have really excelled at. I grew up with those films, and I love them, so I wanted to make my own version of that tradition.
I began talking to Victor Cunhe, my producer, and our wonderful screenwriter about how we could approach it. We explored the themes, the setting and the characters. That was really the beginning of the project.
The screenwriter Christian Bengtson mentioned that parts of the story were inspired by his aunt. How much did you draw from personal experience?
We drew a great deal from our own experiences and from people we knew. I also spoke to many people who either had a loved one living with mental illness or had struggled with it themselves. They were extremely generous in telling us their stories.
The film is made from bits and pieces of everything: Personal experience, observations and research. We gradually brought all of that together in the characters.
What did the research teach you that you had not understood before?
What surprised me was how many people are affected by mental illness or mental-health problems. Almost everyone has known somebody who has struggled or has gone through a difficult period themselves.
Before that, I only knew my own story and the stories of the people closest to the project. But nearly every time we spoke to somebody, we discovered another connection. Now that audiences are beginning to see the film, we can also feel how strongly it resonates.
At least in Danish society, I think we still lack a language for talking about these things. When somebody becomes physically ill, we understand what to do and how to express sympathy.
Mental illness is different because it is invisible, and people often do not know how to behave around it. Denmark has a wonderful healthcare system in many respects, but in this area we are still lacking. People do not always receive the help they need, and I do not think society has fully learned how to support them.
You mentioned the legacy of Danish family dramas. How did you make that tradition your own?
I was not especially analytical about it. It came more from intuition and from slowly unfolding the characters. It was important to me that the family drama did not depend on a huge secret, a shocking revelation or some tremendous hidden trauma.
What these characters had already gone through while growing up had to be enough in itself. In that sense, we took certain elements associated with a film such as The Celebration and bent them in another direction.
Where THE CELEBRATION is overtly transgressive, THE GUEST is built around restrained interactions and microaggressions. Why did you choose that approach?
Because I think it is recognizable. That is often how people behave within families. In Danish society, especially, we tend to restrain ourselves, and then we explode.
The microaggressions also emerged through rehearsal. As we explored the characters’ dynamics with the actors, they began to find the particular ways these people express themselves, hurt one another and press each other’s buttons. It felt truthful.
The film does not turn that conflict into a large spectacle, and its darker moments are offset by carefully measured humor. How did you find that balance?
We spoke from the earliest stages about the need for humor. It was very important to all of us because laughter and sorrow live very close together.
That is particularly true within a family. You can experience those two emotions almost simultaneously. We wanted the audience to move between them as well.
A film that can make you laugh and then make you cry is the best kind of film, I think. But it is a balance. Too much humor can destroy an emotional scene, so we were always asking whether something was too much or just enough.
At the same time, there is so much pain in these characters that, whenever we discovered something funny, we allowed ourselves to follow it. We knew there would be enough sorrow to accompany it.
Victor Cunha: What is interesting for me as Mads’ producer is that the humor is not necessarily written into the screenplay. Because this is his first feature, it helped that I already knew his tone, and the screenwriter knew it as well.
The humor is something Mads finds organically with the actors and then brings forward again in the editing. That could be difficult to communicate during financing, because on the page the film reads primarily as a drama. We had to show people the test footage so they could understand how dynamic the tone would be.
I would not call it a comedy, but it is certainly a drama with humorous elements.
Were there comic scenes that did not survive the edit?
Mengel: Yes. We removed two excellent scenes: one involving the receptionist, and another involving the father-in-law and the hotel owner. They were tremendously good scenes, but in the editing room we could feel that they did not quite fit. They tipped the balance too far in one direction, so we had to cut them. We had to kill our darlings.
How difficult was it to find the film’s final shape in the editing room?
We had many versions, but it was actually a lovely editing process because we did not have to restructure the film. Apart from removing those two scenes, the structure of the screenplay held together. That is not always the case. Sometimes you reach the editing room and have to reinvent the entire story.
Here, the process was quite linear. Our editor produced a wonderful first rough cut, and from that point we thought: The film is here; now we simply have to make it better and smaller. It was too long, as first cuts always are, but because we did not have to spend our time rebuilding the structure, we could concentrate on the details of the characters.
Trine Dyrholm is a major actress. How did you persuade her to join a feature debut?
Cunha: I cannot take much credit for that. The filmmakers had a strong script, and Mads had previously worked with Josefine on a television series. When we began discussing our dream cast, Trine naturally became our first choice.
Josefine helped make sure that Trine actually read the screenplay. Trine receives so many offers that simply getting the material in front of her was important. She liked it, met with Mads, and the meeting went very well. Denmark is a small country in that respect, and personal relationships matter.
Still, when Trine said yes, we could hardly believe it. It was tremendous.
Mengel: We did not hold conventional auditions for the principal actors. I knew Simon and Josefine from other projects, and we wanted to write the roles with them in mind, so I offered the parts to them directly.
With Trine, we allowed ourselves to dream. If we could choose from the very top shelf, who would it be? Trine Dyrholm was our number one choice. We were extremely fortunate.
You rehearsed before the main shoot. What did that process involve?
We shot a pilot, 18 minutes of material over two days. It worked both as a proof of concept for financing and as a way of exploring the characters. It was a very useful learning experience. We saw what was working, returned to the writing room and adjusted the screenplay. It also allowed us to test the dynamic among the actors, although they were very strong together from the beginning.
Our screenwriter works extremely quickly. I think we went through around 16 drafts of The Guest. We would write, talk to the actors, incorporate their understanding of the characters, let them read again, shoot a test and then return to the script.
We tried to keep the process dynamic and avoid locking the screenplay too early. Fixing it prematurely can prevent you from continuing to explore the material.
That suggests a highly collaborative method.
Yes. That is what I love about making films. I am not interested in being a dictator. I make films because I enjoy working with people. One of the most important things a director can do is choose the right collaborators. You have to get that right.
I am very proud of the group we assembled for this film. It was a good experience, and we had intelligent, gifted artists in every department.
I also love working with a screenwriter who is willing to keep the script open for a long time. It allowed us to receive input from the actors, the cinematographer, the editor and many others. I believe the finished film became much better because of that openness.
You already knew cinematographer David Bauer from film school. The subject matter is dark, but the film itself is bright and sunny. Was that contrast present from the outset?
Yes. We wanted everything to appear comfortable, attractive and pleasant. The hotel is the kind of place that demands that you have a good time. That makes the contrast even stronger when these characters are clearly not having a good time. That contrast was very important to David and me, and I think we succeeded in creating it.
How did the cinematography support your work with the actors?
David and I wanted a visual concept that would give the actors as much freedom as possible. In almost every room, we created a lighting setup that allowed us to shoot in 360 degrees. We did not want to lose time constantly reversing the setup, first filming one actor, then changing all the lighting and filming the other. We wanted to shoot as much as possible while giving the performers room to move.
At the beginning of a scene, the actors would walk onto the set and respond to the space. We would arrange the scene together, and David would find a way to move with them and photograph it.
We did not work from a rigid shot-by-shot list. We developed concepts for how the camera could move through the different rooms, but the precise execution remained fluid.
So you avoided a conventional shot–reverse-shot approach?
As much as possible. We usually began with a master shot in which David moved through the entire scene. After doing that a few times, we would decide which additional images we actually needed.
For the large dining-room sequence, we used two cameras with long lenses. The film was shot on zoom lenses because we wanted to maintain a certain distance from the characters and give the audience the feeling of observing the situation as it gradually unraveled.
We shot very long takes, sometimes 30 or 40 minutes. It was almost like watching a theatre performance. The two cameras could zoom in and find moments within it. We impressed upon the actors that they could be filmed at any moment. They did not always know whether a camera was on them, so they had to remain present in the character and in the situation. That gave the sequence a looser and more truthful quality.
Were the long takes primarily intended to capture the dynamics among the characters?
That was part of it. But I also believe that, when you design the process intelligently, you can make yourself available to luck.
You can create more opportunities for something unexpected to happen and invite a degree of chaos into the film. There are moments when the camera catches an expression or a reaction at precisely the right instant. Those moments came from making ourselves open to coincidence.
Our approach was to set the scene free, observe what happened and then correct it where necessary. It still had to function as a film, and we still had to finish each day with the material we needed, but we wanted to leave space for discovery.
That sounds demanding, particularly with such long scenes.
We have strict rules in Denmark governing the length of a shooting day, but some of the days were still long, and the scenes were certainly demanding for the actors. They were a force of nature. We shot the entire film at the hotel in 17 days.
Cunha: The short schedule was partly dictated by the cast. These were three extremely busy, popular actors, so coordinating them was difficult. Once we had them all, we knew we had to complete the film within that limited period.
From the beginning, Mads said he wanted a film in which the technical setup would not get in the actors' way. That made the schedule possible. We were agile, we were working at a single location, and the method was designed around the performers rather than the equipment.
Did you ever consider making the film across several locations?
Mengel: Perhaps in the very earliest versions. We wrote so many drafts that there may have been material set in the surrounding village.
For a long time, the central event was also going to be a wedding. Then some of us became parents ourselves, and we realized it had to be a christening.
I love single-location films. Cinema is very good at showing characters under pressure within a limited period. Films structured around a specific event also possess an invisible framework that the audience already understands. When you watch a wedding film, for example, you know that when the wedding ends, the film will probably end as well. I like that underlying structure.
There is something theatrical about the unity of time and place.
There can be. I have never worked in theatre, but I love it as an art form. Theatre allows actors to occupy a great deal of space, and that is important to me too. In the end, a film lives or dies through its performances.
For me, it was essential that the technical apparatus did not interfere with the actors. Sometimes that interference is unavoidable. I am directing a television series now with a much larger technical setup, and that demands a different approach. I enjoy that too, but my heart probably lies in something more chaotic and stripped back.
I think the performances in The Guest are so strong because the actors felt that it was their film. Our attitude was: We are working for you; show us how you understand and feel the material. That requires very intelligent actors because you are giving them a great deal of responsibility. Fortunately, we had actors who could carry it.
Did that collaborative relationship continue during post-production?
We did not have the actors sitting in the editing room every day, but once we were perhaps halfway towards the final cut, we invited them to watch the film and give us notes. Fortunately, they liked it, and they also offered some very useful observations.
So, in that sense, yes, they remained part of the process. We also brought in our sound editor repeatedly so that we could remain aligned on what the finished film should become.
Did you incorporate all the actors’ suggestions?
Some of them, the good ones.
And who decides which notes are good?
I do. But I believe that, when everybody understands the project and its intentions, the best argument should win. The intentions ultimately come from the director, and the director also has to know when to say no. Not every idea is right for the film.
At the same time, your job is to listen to the people who are making the film with you. As far as possible, you have to put your ego aside. Many of the best ideas in a film come from the people who actually made it.
So you deliberately surround yourself with opinionated collaborators and allow the strongest argument to prevail. How many arguments did you win?
I won a lot, and I lost a lot as well.
The film is accessible and strongly oriented towards its audience. Was that a priority from the producing stage?
Cunha: Because I knew Mads and his work, I was confident that we were making something that would connect with an audience. But I do not think we ever tried to simplify or dumb the film down. It was important that we made the film we believed in.
We often discussed avoiding expository dialogue and trusting the audience. At the same time, we knew we were working with a universal story. It is relatable, and Mads moves very dynamically between humor, pain and emotion.
What the film has already achieved has surpassed my hopes. Being selected for this festival is a great honor. We hoped for it, of course, but we did not expect it.
The film was also selected by the Danish cinema-club network, which chooses only a small number of Danish films each year. That gives us access to a much larger domestic audience, perhaps four or five times what we otherwise might have reached. For me as a producer, that is extremely valuable.
I have always believed in Mads, but now I know the film will find a substantial audience. Its festival exposure will also help us finance the next project. At this stage, although some agreements are still being finalized, the film has been sold to around 11 territories.
Were you more confident about its prospects in Denmark than internationally?
Yes. We believed it could reach a Danish audience, and we discussed that a great deal.
We hoped it would travel internationally, but honestly, I was more confident about its domestic prospects. We did not know whether humor and emotions would translate. It felt like a very Danish film. The characters speak over one another, and the rhythms are quite specific. We hoped there was a universal story underneath that specificity, but we could not be certain.
How do you balance that local specificity against the desire for an international audience?
Cunha: For me, the most important thing when working with Mads is to remain faithful to his vision and to whatever constitutes his signature and voice.
We try not to be overly intellectual or strategic during the conception of the film. That does not mean we are not thinking about careers or audiences. But the biggest mistake would be to make creative choices according to what we think we should do rather than what feels true to the project and to Mads as a director. The film would lose its authenticity.
Once the film is finished, we can be strategic about partners, presentation and positioning. But during its conception, it has to belong to the filmmaker.
What are you working on next?
Mengel: I hope the response to The Guest will open some doors, or at least make the next project easier to finance. The screenwriter and I are already developing a new script. It is a dramatic thriller about journalism, and he is writing it now. I am also directing the second season of a popular Danish television series. It is called Danefæ, and it follows an archaeologist uncovering things from the ground. It is a drama with elements of humor.
That sounds familiar.
Exactly.
Cover image courtesy of Karlovy Vary Film Festival Servis.