Matter of tax
Other People’s Money showrunner Jan Schomburg and star Nils Strunk reflect on the task of dramatising events surrounding the largest tax fraud in European history for this eight-part drama that blends ‘Shakespearean’ characters with elements of screwball comedies.
It’s safe to say that the subject of tax law doesn’t exactly sound like fertile ground for entertainment. So when showrunner Jan Schomburg landed the job of dramatising the true story behind the biggest tax fraud in European history, he knew he would have to overcome the challenge of staying true to the facts while also making a series that could entice a broad, global audience.
The result can be seen in eight-part drama Other People’s Money, which delves into the so-called Cum-Ex trading scheme that cost national governments an estimated €150bn (US$163bn) through weaknesses in tax laws. In practice, this meant investors would sell shares to other parties before the payment of dividends but delivered afterwards, creating confusion as to who owned the shares at the time of the dividend payment and allowing multiple refunds on a tax that only had to be paid once.
The series focuses on fictionalised versions those involved, telling the story of young lawyer Sven Lebert (Nils Strunk) and his boss, Dr Bernd Hausner (Justus von Dohnányi), as they expand this scheme across a global network of banks, lawyers and investors that steal billions from European citizens.
In Denmark, tax officials Inger Brøgger (Karen-Lise Mynster) and Niels Jensen (David Dencik) watch helplessly as state funds vanish, with little support from bankers or politicians. When Niels faces financial struggles and personal pressures, he loses his moral compass and joins the scheme.
Then in Germany, District Attorney Lena Birkwald (Lisa Wagner) uncovers the massive fraud – and facing fierce resistance from banks and politicians, she fights tirelessly to bring those truly responsible to justice.
Commissioned by Germany’s ZDF and Danish broadcaster DR, Other People’s Money is produced by X Filme Creative Pool and True Content Entertainment, in coproduction with EPO-Film. The show, distributed by Beta Film, had its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival last month ahead of its debut on ZDF’s streaming platform this Saturday and its April 13 terrestrial roll-out.
“When the producer asked me if I was interested in writing something about it, I just thought it’s some assholes who robbed the state again,” Schomburg tells DQ. “It didn’t really interest me so much.”
But when he started to read more about the case, Schomburg began to believe that people need to understand what happened. The series is inspired by Oliver Schröm’s book Die Akte Scholz and work by journalist Christian Salewski, plus additional research by Niels Fastrup and Thomas G Svaneborg.
“I thought it’s important people understand that [those involved] influence legislation, that they have lobbyists, that they just do stuff to prevent us from preventing them from stealing our money,” he continues. “This is a crazy case, especially because they steal from the money we pay as taxes, and somehow they have the feeling it’s their right to do it.”
He was also drawn to the characters involved. “When I started to do some research, the characters from the real case are so juicy, so Shakespearean and so Lubitsch,” he adds, referencing German director Ernst Lubitsch’s reputation for screwball and romantic comedies including The Shop Around the Corner and Trouble in Paradise.
Yet when it came to writing the series – which Schomburg penned with Astrid Øye and Pål Sletaune – he was cautious to ensure the screenplay didn’t become a tax lecture.
“When you come to the details, pretty much no one understands why it works,” he jokes. “When I did the research, I had the feeling I needed to understand it once at least, so I worked for a week only to understand all the details, and I had it for an hour. Then it became really complex.”
Understanding tax rules wasn’t the aim of the series, however. Instead, “it was more important that people understand structures, that people understand what’s going on and of course what’s going on between the characters to have an intellectual but also an emotional access to the show,” Schomburg notes.
For cast members including Strunk, a German theatre actor making his screen debut, the challenge was to become at ease with the jargon and complex language often spoken by their characters. And not only in terms of speaking themselves, but also in responding to other characters in a way that shows they know what’s going on.
“We had an excellent script,” he says. “You get some scripts and you think, ‘Oh my God, how can I ever say this line?’ But this one was really still a mixture between a theatre play and screenwriting because you need to really switch on your brain. It’s not that this is complex stuff [to say], it’s more that if a person says a line to another person, it’s not like I can immediately understand what he wants with it.
“We had a director who understood that. The director was really fighting for the script and for the scenes, sometimes against us or with us. But it was really nice and I’ve had a very good experience.”
“Normally actors say the worst text or the hardest text to perform is [18th century German playwright] Heinrich von Kleist,” Schomburg says. “That’s really hard language to put in your mouth. But all this text about tax fraud, to make it your own and to make it soft in your mouth, it really takes some time. Some of the older actors who just came for a day, they totally underestimated it. But the main cast made it sound so nice, I really enjoyed watching it.”
Coincidentally, the then-unknown Strunk was the first audition Schomburg saw. “I didn’t know Niels. I know most of the theatre actors [in Germany], but he was in Vienna, so when we started to do the casting, the very first audition for every role was his,” the showrunner remembers. “I saw a tape and I thought, ‘That’s really good, but probably it’s just very well written. Probably everybody will do it that well.’ And then I saw the others and I was like, ‘Ah no, actually it was a bad scene and he made it good.’ So it was really amazing, especially because Nils is so tremendous at making the text his own. He just speaks from the heart.”
Strunk’s character, Sven, is an ambitious and driven lawyer at legal firm Touraine & Franzen, and is also more intelligent and ruthless than his colleagues, making him the perfect partner for tax auditor Bernd Hausner to execute cum-ex deals on an unprecedented scale.
“I wanted to play him as a young man that tries to take every chance,” the actor says of Sven’s relentless ambition, which may also be his downfall. “He can read situations and he always thinks, ‘This is my chance. Now I have a chance to go to the next step.’ He admires Hausner, definitely, for being the guy who has done everything he could do in this position.”
Perhaps part of the reason why Sven is so ambitious is the fact he comes from a poor East Germany family and has a resolute desire to be successful. “I like to think of Sven as someone who has very good abilities to manipulate people, nearly no moral compass and also a weird philosophical emptiness inside him,” Schomburg adds.
“I really enjoy that he’s a fraudster in the sense that he really tries to make people happy, to give them something or to have their aims fulfilled. It doesn’t matter if he talks to the journalist or the state prosecutor or the bankers. He just feels what they want and what they yearn for. He just has this magic ability to please.”
Over the course of eight episodes, Other People’s Money injects drama and humour into a complicated story that features multiple characters, numerous international locations and two timeliness. Naturally, “it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” says Schomburg (Above Us Only Sky).
He also says he underestimated the task at hand, imagining he would write a pilot script and then pass the project over to other people. “Then I got into it and it took me three years,” says the writer, who had previously only worked in features. “It’s really weird because [writing television] is just so different. Normally when you write a screenplay, it takes a few weeks, then people read it, there are a few weeks off, you can somehow reflect on what you wrote, and then at some point there’s a meeting. It’s a good lifestyle.
“Here, you’ve finished episode two and a week later it’s the deadline for episode three. This million-euro machine is on and they’re just all waiting for your scripts – and if they don’t come, you lose money.”
It was also Schomburg’s first time working as a showrunner, with Dustin Loose and Kaspar Munk on directing duties for a series that will also air in Norway (NRK), Sweden (SVT), Iceland (RÚV), Finland (YLE), the Netherlands (NPO) and Belgium (VRT).
“We are not used to this system,” he says of having one person overseeing every creative aspect of a series, “so there’s a strong possibility that you really hate each other and you really get into huge fights afterwards. I know a lot of projects where it totally didn’t work and people screamed at each other. So I have the good thing that I’m a little bit lazy, and for the first days I really loved that the directors did the work and we just had a beautiful trinity going on.”
Schomburg was aware that, at some point, he had to take a step back as production ramped up. “I said to Dustin, ‘Don’t worry. I won’t be on the set all the time. I’ll just give it to you’ – and this is totally not what happened,” he laughs. “For the first days, I was there all the time.”
After speaking with Loose, Schomburg agreed to give the director some space and would take himself to a Viennese café at the start of each day when filming was underway in the Austrian capital.
“He’s really wonderful and he’s great with actors,” the showrunner says. “Both [directors] are amazing with actors, and very kind people. That’s also so important for me, that they can work in a gentle manner with a team. I hate it when people scream or are aggressive and, with both of them, I learned a lot about how to communicate. I really enjoyed that.”
Strunk describes being on set in Vienna as an “extraordinary time.” Other People’s Money was the first of consecutive projects on which he would work with Loose, during a period when he was simultaneously rehearsing and performing with a repertory theatre.
He would also watch filming even when he wasn’t on that day’s call sheet, so he could see parts of the story in which he wasn’t involved to better understand the story as a whole. “It was good to be in one place with Justus [von Dohnányi] together for some parts of the story. But I read the screenplay so often because it was fun to read it again and again,” he says. “Preparation is key – that’s what everybody told me before. For me, that’s the hardest part. It’s not chronologically [shot], so the first scene I had to shoot was the fucking second-to-last scene.
“I can see it in the result that this was my first day. But at the same time, it was good because I learned the script by heart and I knew what happened before. I loved this work.”
If Schomburg had only needed to consider a story contained in Germany, “that would have been quite a lot easier.” But combining it with elements in Denmark and the numerous legal details meant Other People’s Money threw up a number of challenges..
That former German chancellor Olaf Scholz was caught up in the real story from his time as mayor of Hamburg – he denies any involvement or wrongdoing – meant the series also couldn’t premiere ahead of the recent national elections. His SPD party came third.
“In episode seven we talk about the whole case [relating to events in Hamburg],” Schomburg says. “In a narrative sense, it’s not so interesting and it’s not so strongly related to our main characters, but I had the obligation to put it in, just to show people, ‘OK, this is what happened, this is what we know and now you can make up your own mind.’”
Now, ahead of the show’s local premiere on ZDF, under the title Die Affäre Cum-Ex, Schomburg says he felt an “obligation” to tell this story about a “very important topic.” “Somehow, a few filthy-rich fuckers managed to tell us, ‘No, the main problem is some very poor people who are on the run from some shitty situation,’” he says. “Of course, people don’t watch mainly for moral reasons, so I felt the obligation [for viewers] to have fun or to be touched, but also understand a few things.”
“And also to maybe understand something about yourself,” Strunk adds. “To become a billionaire because we buy Teslas and iPhones, alright, but this is tax money – the state is us. They stole money from the box of money we already paid. So we need to understand it’s our fight. It’s everybody’s fight.”
tagged in: Beta Film, Die Affäre Cum-Ex, DR, EPO-Film, Jan Schomburg, Nils Strunk, Other People’s Money, True Content Entertainment, X Filme Creative Pool, ZDF