Tobias Lindholm‘s film A War (nominated for an Oscar in Foreign Language Film), explores an often overshadowed side of war: the possibility of prosecution for soldiers upon returning home from combat. Lindholm was struck by the complexity of this issue that many soldiers fear and face and his research for A War began shortly after completing his previous film, A Hijaking –research that included having tea with a former Taliban warrior then inviting him to a discourse over coffee with Danish soldiers. The film also employs many real soldiers in lieu of actors, furthering the movie’s dedication to reality.
A War focuses on Danish Company commander Claus M. Pedersen’s (Pilou Asbæk) time in Afghanistan, as well as the life of his wife Maria (Tuva Novotny) and her challenges of raising their three children while he’s away. Pedersen’s duties in war are cut short when he is accused of killing Afghan civilians. His wife and children, who had been anxiously awaiting his return home from war, now must await the verdict that could send him to prison for four years.
I met with Tobias Lindholm to discuss the dedicated research he went through for the film and how to make a war movie that is free of political rhetoric.
Where did the idea for this story stem from?
The war in Afghanistan and Iraq was the first war that Denmark fought since the Second World War, so it defined my generation more than anything else. Suddenly brothers and friends became soldiers and were killed in combat, killed other people, and the complexity of that. And I knew there was a story there that needed to be told but I really couldn’t find it until 2012 when I read an interview with a Danish officer going on his third tour of Afghanistan. He said, “I’m not afraid of getting killed there, I’m afraid of getting prosecuted when I get back home.” The complexity of that statement stuck with me and I thought, there’s a story hidden in that that could be interesting. That became the starting point. I called Pilou [Asbæk] right away and said, “Can you do a film two years from now?” And he said, “Yes.”
So showing a side of the war we don’t typically think about. Typically we think the fear is just being in war.
Realizing there were rules of engagement that he felt endangered his life and his men’s life in a way he wasn’t sure he could follow them, which ultimately would put him on trial in Denmark, was shocking to me. I had no idea about that reality. So I made a pretty simple structure about a commander who ends up in a situation where he needs to decide if he saves his own men or risk the lives of civilians. Then I would go out and do a lot of research in the year coming and try to fill out this empty frame where it’s more anecdote and bits and pieces of what I could find out there. Speaking to soldiers, Taliban warriors, wives, and kids, and prosecutors, and defense lawyers. Trying to stay loyal to the realism and logic of the world out there.
How was it speaking with the Taliban warriors? How did you reach out to them?
Well I never reached out, I went to a refugee camp in Turkey that had a lot of Afghan refugees and I started to talk to a lot of these people. I have almost all real Danish soldiers in the film, there’s only two or three actors amongst the soldiers, the rest is veterans from Afghanistan. So I went to the refugee camps and I started to talk to these people, especially one of them who I felt was extremely clever and good at explaining Afghan reality to me. And then after we had talked for a couple of hours and had tea he said, “I have to tell you, I’ve been fighting for Taliban,” and I just froze. I said to my producer, “Can you please, in Danish, pretend there’s a phone call we need to do and get me out of here?” We went outside and I had a cigarette and I had tears in my eyes and I didn’t know how to phone the soldiers back in Denmark asking them to work together with this guy. He had potentially killed friends of theirs and they had potentially killed friends of his and that scared me a lot.
But then I do what I usually do and went the honest way. I called the soldiers and said, “I met this guy from Taliban. He’s a great guy and he knows what he’s talking about and he has his point of view.” They agreed to meet with him so we flew everybody down and sat down and had a cup of coffee and a cup of tea. Pretty soon it became a conversation between guys with mutual respect. I remember one of the soldiers I was close to in the beginning turned to me and said, “Don’t worry. We understand him more than we understand you. We actually fought the same war.” They ended up with this odd friendship.
Wow, so you bringing those two opposing groups together, you were directing reality at this point.
It’s a great feeling and extremely scary at the same time. But then I understood the reality of Taliban and I understood that this guy escaped the war when he had the chance, but until then he needed to fight. He was a Mujahideen fighting against the Russians when he was a kid and this is what he does and he provided for his family by doing it. And suddenly I understood it. He wasn’t an extremist, he wasn’t a terrorist, he wasn’t Islamist at all. He was just a guy whose country was torn apart by war for so many years that that was the only way he could provide for his family, so he did. And that was a really interesting moment in this filmmaking.
Right, and for him it was the situation he was born into.
And again, the whole film is about not being judgmental towards the soldiers and I didn’t want to be judgmental about the Afghans and we constantly got confronted with how judgmental we all were, and we’re never open and we never accept the complexity of the world. We always try to find what’s right and what’s wrong instead of coping with the fact that nothing’s right and nothing’s wrong and everything changes to the perspective that it’s heard from.
How do you feel the war was being represented in Denmark and the U.S. through the news, and in what ways did you want it to be different in your film?
When you become a soldier you get a uniform and that’s part of the dehumanization. You lose your individual expression in the way you dress and it’s so easy to forget that it’s real human beings in those uniforms, because all you see is one hundred guys in uniforms. If you add a wife and three kids, then suddenly it’s not just a soldier, it’s somebody’s husband and somebody’s father. It adds human layers to these uniforms and I found that extremely important. I’m not out to defend any actions that happen out there but I definitely feel that we owe it to ourselves and to them to try to understand the complexity of the situation they’re in. And that for me was the most important part of it. Try to tell it from a soldier’s perspective, not from a professional soldier perspective but as a human perspective being a soldier.
And stripping away political arguments.
Right now in Denmark we are still called into this discussion whether we are pro or against the war and I find that extremely boring. The war is over for Danish troops, most of them are home now and we need to start to actually talk about what happened there instead of getting stuck in this stupid argument. We need to try to understand each other. I don’t think we should separate that much. We should get together and try to cope with what has happened and hopefully learn from it so that we can move into the future that’s here, the new war that’s coming. The refugee crisis in Europe is huge now and there’s so many nuances and layers to that. I remember watching Precious and you probably could not create a character more far away from me. I am a blond, tall man from Scandinavia and I related so much to her in that film and I believe I became a better version of me by watching it. That’s the beauty of fiction and storytelling and I think we need to do that instead of getting caught up in a situation where I want to prove a certain political point of view. If that was the point I could easily buy a lot of billboards and spray paint my political point. And that’s pretty boring.
The kids in this movie are great, I’m wondering how it was working with them?
The kids were great. We built a home and I allowed them to do anything they wanted. So if they wanted to watch TV they watched TV. When we called them for dinner they would come and eat. So they would just play around and then, of course, there’s scenes where the daughter asks if he killed civilians and killed kids. But the rest of the time, they were just being kids. And they accepted that it was like a game, they played family so they accepted that they had new names. I have three small kids at home and it was just fun to work with them. I would go to their real homes and see what kind of toys and interests they had, and luckily the oldest son was very interested in geography, which gives us the last scene in the film where he asks, “Is that Afghanistan?” It’s his own map hanging in the room. So it’s all him improvising, I did not write any of that. It’s him saying, “Is that Italy?” and then everyone laughs and the dad says, “No that’s USA.” It’s so beautiful and so real and adds so much to the story. I wish I was clever enough to write that, but I wasn’t.
Your answer to this might give away the ending, but had you wrestled with the idea of having an alternate ending?
I shot two endings. But I never gave the actors the last five pages of the script, so they didn’t know how it ended. So first we shot the ending that’s not in the film and everybody was shocked. They started crying and it was terrible and they hated me. They froze and they hated me. And I remember Tuva [Novotny], who plays Maria in the film, just went crazy. “What the fuck are you doing? You can’t end it like this!” I said, “I have the power, you’re just the actor, sit down, we’re going to do one more take.” Then we had the judge sit down and say something different. Then they started to laugh and we got the real relief that I was looking for. I knew I was aiming for this ending but I thought to myself, we have the location, we have the actors, let’s shoot both and see what happens.
