Snow queen
Filmmaker Amma Asante takes her biggest step into television as the director of Smilla’s Sense of Snow, a six-part crime drama set in a futuristic Copenhagen. She speaks to DQ about how she related to the title character and the demands of making a miniseries.
A Bafta-winning director responsible for feature films such as Belle and A United Kingdom, Amma Asante has previously stepped into television to shoot episodes of A Handmaid’s Tale and Mrs America.
Yet it is her latest project, Smilla’s Sense of Snow, that has led her to joke that she’ll “never complain again” about making a feature film.
“My bones are feeling it, but I’m still standing,” she tells DQ as the final touches are being added to the show. “I think mostly what was hard was the cold, doing all six episodes in the freezing cold. In my mind I’d fantasised about a reality where it snowed and it looked beautiful, but it wasn’t really cold. Then reality hit.”
Based on Danish author Peter Høeg’s novel, the series is set in 2040 Copenhagen, where Smilla Jaspersen lives in a near-future surveillance state under threat from an impending energy crisis. She is alone and leads a withdrawn life until she meets a young Inuit boy who finds a way to her heart.
When the boy suddenly dies in mysterious circumstances, Smilla wants to know why. Her search for answers leads her to the icy scenery of Greenland and right to the centre of dangerous political power games. Smilla’s extraordinary abilities are the key to the truth – about the boy and her own identity.
Filippa Coster Waldau leads the cast as Smilla, with Asante also an executive producer alongside Oliver Berben and Robert Kulzer. Produced by Alicia Remirez, the series is a Constantin Film production in coproduction with Viaplay, ARD Degeto Film and Baltic Film Services, in cooperation with Netflix Deutschland and in association with ITV Studios, which is also handling international distribution.
Asante wasn’t familiar with Høeg’s 1992 novel, titled Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne, or the 1997 feature film adaptation, but came to the project on the back of doing Mrs America, a US series about battle to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, as seen through the eyes of women on both sides of the battleground in the 1970s. She had returned to the UK after her mother had passed away and was looking for her next thing when her agents in both LA and London separately called her, told her to stop reading scripts and instead pick up Smilla’s Sense of Snow.
“I had never read the book before, but it was during lockdown, around about the time that all the Black Lives Matter marches were happening,” she remembers. “We had seen that horrible, awful eight-minute video of a man being slowly murdered and I felt quite helpless in many ways. The world was definitely a different place [to me], having lost my mum, and I started to read this book about a young woman who had lost her mum in a world where the author was talking about things that would have been a little bit unusual in 1993.”
What she found particularly interesting was that she could relate in so many ways to Smilla, as a woman and as a woman of colour. “She made me feel strong. She made me feel hopeful, not hopeless, and not in a cliched way,” she says. “She had a really interesting outlook on the world. She’s very much an observer. She takes in the world. She comments on the world as you can in books. I just found her so powerful as a character that I wanted to put everything else down. I didn’t want to do anything else. I just wanted to work on this, and that’s what I did from there on.”
In some ways, Smilla’s Sense of Snow marks fresh genre territory for Asante – her first crime drama – yet the director is quick to point out what it has in common with shows such as A Handmaid’s Tale is that there is some social commentary wrapped around the main crime plot.
Notably, many of the themes in the novel have become more prominent since it was published 30 years ago, not least the ongoing conversations around climate change and identity.
“It’s a story of a woman who wants, who desperately needs, to understand why a little boy has been killed and has to get to the bottom of it. She has to get those answers,” Asante says. “But it is true that once I made my last film [2018’s Where Hands Touch], I was really interested in how I can take those skills that I enjoy using and place them in a world that I haven’t been in before and do something quite different. I loved being able to deal with the very mild science fiction that we have in it, it’s got magical realism in it as well, but it still talks about who we are today as human beings, who we are as a set of countries and nations, and who we might be in a few years’ time as well. That element of it is really different and I’ve enjoyed playing around with that.”
As for the show’s setting, the director describes 2040 Copenhagen as a near-future world but one that viewers could easily imagine becoming reality. It’s a world where everybody wears a body-cam – it’s illegal not to – so the government can monitor everyone’s activity outside their home, while drones also survey the population of a society that would be described as politically right wing as it teeters on the brink of civil unrest.
“But it’s not a grey, dystopian world,” Asante explains. “I live in Denmark and Denmark is very low-rise in terms of buildings and there’s a lot of water. So that changes the way that light works. It’s a world where you pay high taxes and there’s supposed to be a security net to catch you if you need it.
“So my thing was, I don’t think that if Denmark fell into a kind of dystopia it would be grey and drained of colour – the Scandi noir route. It would be really interesting to see what a colourful world like Denmark looks like but with dystopian themes.”
Energy is also an important focus in the series, as each person is given a specific allocation of electricity each month. Of course, the richest in society can buy more if they want, and also donate power to hospitals to secure faster and better healthcare in the event they need it.
“So the world is a bit divided, if you like, into the haves and the have-nots in a way that doesn’t have to do with religion or race necessarily,” Asante continues. “Energy is a massive theme in the story and in the crime as well, the reason why the little boy was killed, so we are using subtle things that could really affect our world and are all the more frightening.”
Smilla herself is an “unforgettable” character, and all the more remarkable for the fact she’s a “very untraditional” person who takes it upon herself to solve a crime. “She’s not really a detective but she has to solve the crime, so she’s walking in the footsteps of a detective,” notes Asante.
“In many ways she’s disconnected from the world, as when we meet her, she has a wound from losing her mother at seven years old. She’s decided that being in this world alone is a safer way to be. If you don’t fall in love with anyone or don’t create attachments to anyone, then you can’t be hurt if they leave you in some way – and what happens is this little boy comes to her door and puts a crack in that ice around her heart.”
But the moment they make that connection the boy dies, leading Smilla on a journey to find out who killed him and why.
“I would say the first three episodes are about who killed him, and the second three episodes are about why he was killed,” the director explains. “The answers to the why lie beneath the ice in Greenland. But the problem is that to really dig in and get those answers, she has to go back to Greenland, which is where she lost her mother. So she has to face her own inner wounds, her own inner fears, and she does it because this little boy means so much to her.”
Asante read both the book and some early scripts before she joined the project and then brought together a team of writers including Tanha Bubbel, Clive Bradley, Tina Hastings, Rebecca Martin, Julie Nørgaard Jensen, Keith Hodder, Sonya Desai and Pipaluk K Jørgensen. At the outset, the director herself had no intention of doing any writing, but as she got pulled into the project, she ended up writing across the final drafts of all six scripts.
But being at the centre of an English-language, multi-national coproduction was “extremely complicated” as she sought to focus on the details of the plot and the world of the characters that would ultimately make it a universal story for audiences around the world.
“That’s what doing films has really taught me more than anything, and that’s the one thing I can bring to TV – that sense that being very specific allows you to be universal,” Asante says. “I’ve tried to handle it just by being really authentic to Smilla’s world and to her emotions, and the drive that she has to solve this crime and the suspense of not only her solving the crime but her coming to terms with her own history, which is nerve-wracking for her.
“There’s an authenticity in that, as there is in just the plain human emotions of what it feels like to lose your mum and what it feels like to want to protect a small child. She’s not a mother by any means, but she’s a human being that wants to protect another and feels that she’s failed and has to try and deal with that by being the person who finds out why this happened.”
Filming of the show took place first in Vilnius, Lithuania, before switching to Latvia – both of which double for Copenhagen. Then, when both locations lost the snow the show needed, production moved to Finland.
“Finland was where it was just icy, freezing cold and brilliant and had parts of nature that I’ve never seen and experienced before,” Asante recalls. “Two weeks before we arrived, the wind had whipped up the sea so we just had these massive boulders of ice that had piled themselves up into their own structures that were 15ft high or so and created their own ice villages on the newly frozen sea. Then we had a unit in Greenland as well.”
Asante’s partnership with two composers, Anne Chmelewsky and Egon Riedel, also brings two sides of the filmmaker to Smilla’s Sense of Snow. “There’s just something wonderful about their work entwining together,” she adds. “Anne brings the old, who I was as a previous filmmaker, and Egon brings what I’m bringing to it as the developing filmmaker. In those things, together in the music, you find the meeting of those two Ammas.”
Reflecting on making the series, Asante is now glad to have added a six-part miniseries to her list of accomplishments after taking on a project that left her always trying to stay ahead of the production schedule.
“I’ve done it once; I don’t know if I’ll do it again,” she admits. “But it’s really nice to say, ‘OK, I’ve shot six episodes, I know what that feels like.’ Shooting a two-hour film, I will never complain again. That six-hour slog in the cold, with absolutely everything on your shoulders, is a tough call, but I’m so glad that I did it because you grow old muscles and you use different muscles.”
tagged in: Alicia Remirez, Amma Asante, ARD Degeto Film, Constantin Film, Filippa Coster Waldau, ITV Studios, Netflix Deutschland, Smilla’s Sense of Snow, Viaplay