
Portrayal of a betrayer
In their biopic of Norwegian politician Vidkun Quisling, writers Anna Bache-Wiig and Siv Rajendram Eliassen wondered how they could portray the Nazi collaborator without eliciting sympathy for him. As they tell DQ, they found the answer in the form of a priest.
Vidkun Quisling served as an army officer and as a minister of defence in the Norwegian government. Yet his collaboration with the Nazis during their occupation of Norway after 1940 mean his name became a synonym for traitor.
This meant that when Anna Bache-Wiig and Siv Rajendram Eliassen were invited by director Erik Poppe to partner with him on a biopic of Quisling, their first thoughts were how they might do it without portraying him as a hero or encouraging sympathy for his actions.

“We usually say to each other about Erik that whenever he calls, he always calls with a project we really don’t want to do but can’t refuse somehow,” Eliassen tells DQ.
The writers had previously partnered with Poppe on feature films Utoya: July 22, about the 2011 terrorist attack on the titular Norwegian island, and The Emigrants, which follows the journey of Swedish people emigrating to the US in the mid-19th century – both subjects that filled them with the same “mixed feelings” they felt for writing a story about Quisling.
“There’s always something about the projects Erik brings us that means they are impossible to refuse, even though our first instinct maybe is to do that. And that was the same with Quisling,” Eliassen continues. “But we really didn’t want to make Quisling the hero of a film. When you take someone’s perspective, it’s really hard not to make them the hero of their own story.”
“Erik’s ideas are often quite distinct but there’s something that feels important about them – but that’s also why they’re scary,” says Bache-Wiig.
That wasn’t the only part of the prospective project that scared them. Quisling was initially developed as a feature film, but in order to raise additional financing, Poppe and producer Paradox started discussions that would see them partner with Norwegian broadcaster TV2 on a sister series that would expand the world of the film over five episodes – but with relatively few additional resources to bulk up the material they would have available for the alternative cut.

“We were very sceptical,” Bache-Wiig remembers. “Our answer was, ‘Absolutely not.’ We asked for a meeting to tell them this could not work. We couldn’t see it working [as a TV show], and we love a good TV show. That’s where we come from as a couple. We didn’t want to do that just to please the financiers. We were actually quite reluctant.”
Eliassen continues: “For once with Erik, we did say no. But when we realised this was going to happen anyway and the material we wrote for the screenplay would have to be used for the TV series, we had to say yes once again.”
“And we’re so happy we did,” Bache-Wiig adds, “because it was a really interesting challenge and it turned out to actually be quite fun. The solution was trying to open up the universe and find other interesting characters and it was a chance for us to think more about his wife, who really is still an enigma for us. But we were really fascinated about her.”
The feature film, Quisling: The Final Days, was subsequently released in September last year and is described by the writers as a “chamber play” based on his relationship with a priest, Peder Olsen, and the discussions they had while Quisling awaited execution for his crimes at the end of the Second World War.

The series, which launched under the title Quisling on TV2 last November, goes deeper, expanding the world of the show to explore how his wife, Maria, does everything she can to save him and secure his legacy, while the priest tries to save his soul.
Gard B Eidsvold plays Quisling, with Anders Danielsen Lie as Peder Olsen, the hospital chaplin providing his care, and Lise Carlehed as Maria.
“What made it possible for us to avoid the apologetic angle was to have the priest, who in his diary made a note about what happened during the last day when he was consoling Quisling, and he [Quisling] did express some kind of remorse,” Eliassen says. “To us, he [the priest] became the protagonist of the film, and in that way the priest is us, asking our critical questions and making our reflections. So that was our angle to Quisling and that made it possible. Otherwise, I think it would have been really, really hard.”
Although the film remains at the core of the series, the two projects are very different because of the alternative storytelling structures in play, she adds. “It was important to us that the series had a series structure with closed episodes, and not just chopping up the film in five different sections. We have too much respect for the series format. We wanted it to be this distinctive series.”
Different editors and composers also worked on each project to ensure they could stand alone, while also complementing each other. The colour grading also changed slightly, but both works still revolve around themes of forgiveness and retribution.

If there’s one reason why the writers might love the series more than the film, it is that the whole project is based on conversations between just a handful of characters, and that dialogue is given more room across the five-part drama.
“To us, it’s really satisfying because there is less cutting in the dialogue in the series,” Bache-Wiig says. “Characters really get to talk, and that’s quite bold, actually, of Erik as well, and it was a big challenge not to make those long conversations boring and to keep the energy in the conversations. So that was a challenge to us. But the actors are so amazing and it’s so satisfying to see that on screen.”
Eliassen jokes that it would be a “very hard sell” to pitch a series with just two men discussing religion and philosophy and “talking, talking, talking,” but she adds: “What’s fascinating is it has been a top-rating show [on TV2]. It’s really rewarding because we really love to write dialogue and long, talky scenes, but we never get to do it. Now we got to do it in a strange, backward way. And now we have done it, it turns out people want it.”
Meeting and starting their working relationship together 15 years ago, Eliassen and Bache-Wiig are very much together through the whole writing process, whether that’s in person at Eliassen’s beach house near her home in Sandefjord, in Oslo where Bache-Wiig lives or in their online Whereby office.

But as Bache-Wiig admits: “That’s our superpower and also our problem,” because it then becomes very hard to bring in additional writers to work on their projects.
“Many times we have discussed whether we should make a writers room and get other people to help us out in making bigger projects. But we really like writing together and that’s the most fun part of the process,” she says. “In the beginning, the first drafts, we can say, ‘I’ll do the first act, then you do the second’ and then we glue it together until we have something that looks like a script.
“But all the magic happens when we sit down together with a shared screen and actually write over each other’s lines. Even when we meet [in person], we share a screen. We don’t know how to do it otherwise. That’s how we work.”
“We discuss everything, even the development and all the phases of any project,” Eliassen says. “And we play act. ‘You be Quisling’ or ‘you be the priest,’ and we just talk and talk and talk. There’s so much talking. I always think when you write, you’re discussing with yourself in your own mind. We are each other’s first critics, and we argue and we fight and we come up with something that we agree on. It’s like I have outsourced my inner discussion partner to Anna.”
Those discussions often include their frequent collaborator Poppe, though Bache-Wiig says the trio never agree straight away. “We have a very different way of working and thinking, and that’s actually quite fruitful,” she says. “We like to argue with Erik. We like it a lot.”

“The good thing about working with somebody for several projects is that we get to know each other,” Eliassen says, “and now we have learned that when Erik asks for A, very often he means C. He has gotten to know us and we have gotten to know him, and that makes the collaboration easier because we share a language by now.”
On Quisling, they wrote the feature film script first before expanding it for the series, although that process came with practical issues to do with the production schedule, actor availability and how those additional scenes might be captured during a limited shooting run.
But to their relief, Quisling, which is distributed by Reinvent Studios, didn’t come across as apologetic, despite the fact the character gets to defend himself on both the big and small screens.
“We wanted people to maybe understand and reflect [on what he did] and not distance ourselves too much because this can happen over again,” Bache-Wiig says. “You have to learn from history and all that. It’s a cliche but we actually believe it.”
“It sounds grand,” adds Eliassen, “but what we hoped for was to create some kind of understanding that authoritarianism and these dark and unpleasant feelings and thoughts that drives it is not something else. It’s not ‘the others,’ it’s not out there somewhere. It’s something that we all somehow can relate to and even fall into if the circumstances are right. To make Quisling a part of us and not something out there is maybe what we aimed for.”
tagged in: Anders Danielsen Lie, Anna Bache-Wiig, Erik Poppe, Gard B Eidsvold, Lise Carlehed, Norway, Quisling, Quisling: The Final Days, Second World War, Siv Rajendram Eliassen, Utoya: July 22