Something fishy
A summer vacation meets murder mystery and extraordinary creatures in Swedish coming-of-age story Summer of 1985. DQ speaks to producer Anna-Klara Carlsten, director Björn Stein and writers Amy Deasismont and Melina Maraki about this adaptation of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel Sommaren 1985.
In the midst of post-production, Anna-Klara Carlsten and Björn Stein are overseeing the final touches to six-part Swedish series Summer of 1985. It’s a show that blends a coming-of-age story with a murder mystery, set on an idyllic archipelago, and based on the novel Sommaren 1985 by John Ajvide Lindqvist, who is best known for the vampire tale Låt den rätte komma in (Let the Right One In).
As the show nears completion ahead of its launch on SVT later this year, there are issues of VFX, music and sound effects to consider after each episode has been picture-locked. Then there’s the mermaid.
“It’s an extremely rewarding feeling just to see everything being enhanced one step further, especially with this show and the last little effects on the mermaid. It makes her even more real to us,” Carlsten tells DQ. “It’s a pleasant phase we’re in.”
As the show’s title suggests, the drama is set in the summer of 1985, the year of Live Aid, when 15-year-old Johannes reunites with his friends on an island in the Stockholm archipelago for a peaceful holiday.
However, the calm is shattered when a local boy is found drowned near the mythical island of Svärtan. What seems like an accident then becomes a murder investigation, exposing fractures within the tight-knit community. As the investigation deepens, the hidden discovery of an ancient and inexplicable creature begins to blur legend and reality, forcing the island to confront a darkness long kept at bay.
Produced by Media Res Studio for SVT and distributed by Fifth Season, the series comes from writers Amy Deasismont (Thunder in My Heart) and Melina Maraki (Happy jävla Pride). Deasismont also directs with creative director Stein, working with a largely young cast featuring many actors making their screen debuts. Carlsten is the producer.
Media Res head of international Lars Blomgren first suggested that Carlsten, who heads up the company’s Nordic slate, pick up Lindqvist’s novel.
“I’ve never had a murder in any of my previous work, or a dead body. And I actually said before we started to develop this that I want to have a dead body,” Carlsten says. “Then I read the book and I was like, ‘Oh, this is a dead body!’ But it’s also coming-of-age, which has been a genre I’ve been fairly close to, but it was also something else. It felt like a great mixture of elements.”
Stein has previously worked on stories featuring vampires (Underworld: Awakening) and magical realism (Eld & Iågor), in addition to crime drama (Midnight Sun) and Cold War series (Whiskey on the Rocks). It meant he knew the supernatural elements of Summer of 1985 needed to be believable for the characters if viewers were to believe in them too – something he admits was a “tough job.”
The director was deep in other projects when he was approached to join the show, bringing his experience of multiple genres as well as a knowledge of the 1980s that Carlsten, Deasismont and Maraki didn’t have.
“To be honest, I’ve never worked with such an old director,” Carlsten laughs, “but I was barely born at the time. We did appoint two writers before Björn came in, and they were actually born in the 90s. So we really needed his vast experience of everything from the supernatural to magical realism, but also he lived these memories. He grew up in the summers on the archipelago, and we needed the real flavour of a summer of 1985. He couldn’t say no.”
“I read it and it was like, ‘Wow, I can’t say no to this,’” Stein says. The project also gave him the chance to reunite with Blomgren a decade after they worked together on Bron/Broen (The Bridge). “The coming-of-age thing was also something I really wanted to explore. Me and Anna-Klara connected instantly and we had similar visions, so I put the other projects aside and jumped on this ship instead.
“It’s a coming-of-age story but it’s not a youth show. It’s for grown-ups. The youth will love it as well, but it’s not aimed at the youth. The first episode is a little bit of an adventure, but it’ll turn darker and darker and become quite bleak.”
Carlsten worked on two seasons of actor-writer-director Deasismont’s own coming-of-age drama Thunder in My Heart and brought her on to write the series with Maraki. “They were a good match, pushing each other in new directions. It just felt like a good combo,” she says. “Then it was great having Björn coming in, looking at the scripts from another angle and enhancing them.”
One of the main challenges facing the writers was externalising the inner voice of the book’s protagonist on the screen. They eventually settled on using narration in parts of the series, with Lindqvist lending his own voice to the adult Johannes as he looks back on the events of that fateful summer.
“Other than that, it’s just a great story for the screen, mainly because of the setting, which is such a wonderful, magical place to show childhood, and also just the fact that it’s quite contained, so it becomes its own little world, which I loved about the book,” says Maraki. “It was so distinctly Ajvide.”
“What I really liked about the book was that there were these big moments in the story that really felt like you could build the episodes from,” notes Deasismont. “That felt very clear to start with.”
They also discussed reducing the book’s seven main characters, but ultimately felt they all served a purpose in the story alongside its adult characters – roles that have been expanded for the series as rumours begin to swirl around the circumstances of the boy’s drowning. Some of Johannes’ memories in the book were also brought into the main story. “It’s the classic show, don’t tell,” says Deasismont. “It’s such a rich story. There was so much to work with, but it was also challenging to pace it correctly.”
The writers had an initial meeting with Lindqvist to ask questions and “interrogate” the author. But from the outset, he was very open to collaborating with them, having previously seen his work adapted for the big and small screens.
“Once he read the pilot, we felt we got his blessing,” says Maraki. “But it definitely felt like working with someone who had done it before. He knew what it meant to adapt something for the screen. Maybe a first-time writer would be quite scared to let go in that creative way, but he was willing to see where we were going to take the story and was open to exploring it.”
When it came to introducing the mermaid, who is discovered by Johannes and his friends in episode one, Deasismont and Maraki went back and forth to determine what a “realistic” reaction to such a scenario might look like. “Because they are kids, they’re quicker to accept the world for what it is. They start talking scientifically about what they are seeing,” says Maraki.
“One of the things we were working on a lot was to introduce Johannes as a person who has a lot of imagination,” says Deasismont. “The kids are all in different stages when they meet. Some have gone further into puberty than others, some have maybe taken steps into adulthood and some of them still want to play games and use their imaginations.
“It helps a lot that Johannes loves reading books. He loves playing. He loves movies and ET and stuff like that. So for him, it feels quite natural that [when he discovers the mermaid], ‘Now this is happening to me, what I’m reading about in the books,’ and it feels organic.”
While not all of his friends react in the same way, Johannes finds he can relate to the mermaid because they are both different. “It makes him feel more accepted in some ways,” Deasismont adds. “It’s very complex, but that’s maybe one of the reasons why he wants to be around her. Meanwhile, some of the other kids are a lot more interested in if they can find a beer somewhere to try drinking, or some of them are falling in love. There are different things taking their attention away from her.”
Drafting the scripts, the writers plotted the show together and share credits on episodes one and six. Maraki then took episodes two and four, with Deasismont penning episodes three and five. Then behind the camera, Stein took episodes one, two and six, with Deasismont shooting three, four and five.
For the look of the show, Stein was inspired by the image of a canned drink that has been left out in the sun for a long time – “colourful but muted or faded.” Though the show is set in a specific time period, its island setting also lent it a “timeless” quality, in a place where the latest styles and trends weren’t front and centre.
“It looks more like Jaws, that kind of vibe,” Stein says. “There’s quite a lot of colour and the lenses make them blend in a nice way. But there are many different parts that have to go into this thing. It’s a collaboration with the set designer, costumes, everything.”
Deasismont didn’t know she would be directing when she started writing on the show. Then when the production start date approached, she sat down with Stein to talk through the scripts and discuss key elements in each episode. Both writers were also on hand when location changes or other circumstances required a rewrite.
“Things come up during production. Sometimes I would get a call and it would be like, ‘How do we solve this?’” Maraki says. “That’s fun for me to be like, ‘OK, how do we fix this in the best possible way?’ In the beginning, everything’s possible. Then when you get into pre-production, it’s like, ‘That’s not gonna work. You’re gonna have to figure something else out.’ That’s when you start troubleshooting a bit, but you’re always retaining the story’s essence.”
Filming took place on the island of Ingmarsö, part of the Stockholm archipelago, where almost the entire series was shot. But the logistics of shooting there were both expensive and time-consuming. Any forgotten equipment would be an hour’s boat trip away.
“It was also challenging shooting in the middle of the summer,” Carlsten says. “We did take a break during the five weeks when the archipelago is crowded in Sweden, so we shot in late spring/early summer and then late summer when everyone had left [last year].”
When it came to creating the mermaid, special makeup effects designer Göran Lundström was already familiar with the world of Lindqvist after working with the author on feature film Border. But rather than designing a “stereotypical mermaid” akin to Darryl Hannah in Splash, with the upper body of a woman and the tail of a fish, he opted for a “fishier” creation that was largely brought to life on set with prosthetics.
“With the mermaid, of course, she’s a fish out of water,” Stein jokes. “We really wanted her to be as physical as possible. If you were to do her full CG, you decide every frame and second of how she’s moving. Here, all those moments created by an actor inside this suit are things you can’t plan, and it gives you so many more options. We have to buy the illusion of this supernatural creature in this very mundane, everyday-ish world.”
“Ariel [from The Little Mermaid], Darryl Hannah and all those kind of mermaids, we’re quite far from them. She’s not in that world. But it’s to make it believable for the characters in the story that they would react the way they do when they find her. That’s why we made her the way she is.”
“What I love about how she is described in the book is that some of the kids find her repulsive, and some of the kids are drawn to her in some way,” Deasismont says. “I really think she’s quite cute at some angles. She has all these things about her that make her unique.”
“From the book, she was almost alien-like,” says Maraki. “For me, it was important that she’s not this sexualised fantasy from a lot of stories about mermaids, that she was more like this alien animal. She is quite different from the book, but I kind of like it. She’s adorable.”
Maraki now hopes viewers of Summer of 1985 – which is titled Svärten in Sweden – will experience the same feelings as she did when she first read the book. “It’s this coming-of-age story that’s not afraid to bring in darker themes,” she says. “It’s about kids, but it’s a message about grown-up life. It was such an amazing book to read, and I hope it translates on screen.”
“It’s escapism,” says Carlsten, “and I think that’s very valuable in these times, because we are in a very dark phase in history right now. That’s universal. The mythology is also universal. But since it is so local, it becomes exotic. Looking at it, who doesn’t want to go out on an island in summertime? It just makes me long for summer when I see it.”
Like that? Watch this! Suggested by AI, selected by DQ
Sommaren 85: In a fictional Swedish village in 1985, a single mum, her teenage daughter and a determined grandmother’s plans for language trips, love and a local sausage festival collide, changing their family’s lives over one chaotic summer.
1985: Three young friends come of age in mid-1980s Belgium, only to find themselves entangled in the real-life Brabant Killers case, where first jobs, first loves and political unrest intersect with a growing climate of fear.
My Brilliant Friend: From their 1950s childhood through turbulent teenage years, two girls in a poor Neapolitan neighbourhood form an intense bond, as first love, education and class mobility push them together and pull them apart across long, transformative summers.
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tagged in: Fifth Season, Media Res Studio, Summer of 1985, SVT