Stealing the show
Swedish drama The Pirate Bay explores the true story behind the titular file-sharing website, its role in activist culture in the early 2000s and Hollywood’s effort to sink it. Director Jens Sjögren joins stars Helena Bergström and Simon Gregor Carlsson to tell DQ how they have dramatised this global story born in Stockholm.
As the global entertainment industry continues to battle online piracy in a bid to ensure movies, series, music and more cannot be illegally downloaded and shared, a new TV drama explores the history of one of the world’s most notorious file-sharing sites and the efforts to bring it down.
The Pirate Bay introduces the eponymous website’s founders, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde and Fredrik Neij, as they lead the battle for a free internet in the early 2000s. Their creation would go on to change the World Wide Web, influence politics around the globe and shake up one of the world’s most powerful industries: Hollywood.
Blending political drama and thriller elements with character studies of the figures behind The Pirate Bay, the story follows the trio as they face the full force of an entertainment industry that claimed it was losing revenue comparable to an entire country’s GDP, while their native Sweden gained a reputation as a file-sharing paradise.
But at home, the Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau, headed by Henrik Pontén, did everything to stop the site amid pressure from the White House, with star lawyer Monique Wadsted hired to help the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) pursue legal action in what would become the biggest trial in Sweden since the murder of prime minister Olof Palme.
“For me, it’s been a journey,” director Jens Sjögren tells DQ about making the six-part series, which has now launched on Sweden’s SVT. “It started as a reaction to the adult entertainment system, and then as I started digging, it really struck me that these were characters and an environment that were really political.
“It wasn’t at all about downloading movies, porn, free music, stuff like that. It was mostly about making their voices heard, their belief that the internet was created to be free and their fear that five or six big companies could own the whole internet for their own interests.”
In fact, Sjögren likens The Pirate Bay to a Greek tragedy, where a character fights for something and dies in the end anyway, after the three founders were found guilty of assisting the distribution of illegal content online in their 2009 trial.
“So it turned out to be much more of a character drama than just a cool, witty, fast drama about kids on the internet,” the director continues. “It was also really engaging to have a story that doesn’t take sides in a conflict. It’s totally up to you to decide what you think.”
Produced by B-Reel Films (Thunder in my Heart) and distributed by Dynamic Television, the series is based on an idea by Piotr Marciniak, who wrote the scripts with Sjögren, Jakob Beckman and Patrik Gyllström. Gyllström also directs two episodes.
Part of the show’s development involved separating fact from fiction, as Warg, Sunde and Neij wanted little or no contact with the production team. But during his research, Sjögren was drawn to the founders’ motivations he previously knew little about and wanted to focus on their attempt to use The Pirate Bay as a political statement.
“This is the first project I have worked on that has the same energy and ADHD personality that I have. They were all over the place and I thought that was so interesting,” he says. “They were so driven and they talked really fast. People outside this community didn’t know shit about what they did, but they sat on so much knowledge that they could change the whole world. That was so interesting, and that’s why we started working with the characters.
“Then we also noticed that these three characters were so different from each other and, as a director, I couldn’t ask for more to make a great drama. If three people should strive to create something that could change the environment for entertainment, and they are left wing, right wing, neo-liberals and anarchists, how should these three characters get along with each other?”
The other side of the story concerns “more traditional” characters such as Pontén and Wadsted. “They are just born in another time and they feel different about this whole thing,” Sjögren adds.
On screen, Arwid Swedrup, Wiljam Lempling and Simon Gregor Carlsson play The Pirate Bay founders Warg, Neij and Sunde, respectively. Antipiratbyrån’s Pontén is portrayed by Robin Stegmar (The Andersson Family) and Wadsted is played by Helena Bergström (Backstrom, Codename: Annika).
While Bergström has experience playing a real person, having starred as 1909 Nobel Prize-winning author Selma Lagerlöf in the 2008 TV movie Selma, she says it was still a “scary” prospect to play “an active lawyer still walking around the streets of Stockholm.”
“She’s very special and, of course, it’s an honour to be able to play her, but also kind of stressful,” the actor says. “Jens really helped me to let go of the real person but keep her energy. I don’t look like her, but I studied her and saw her on YouTube to see how she speaks. But then, of course, you need to tell the story. That was the most important thing.
“Jens said I should not meet her before [filming], for her and my sake, but now I’ve met her and I can say it’s been really fun. One thing I can say to Jens is we nailed the energy. I feel like you are really pulled into this story.”
Sjögren also spoke at length with Carlsson about how he might play Sunde as someone who is extremely passionate about their cause, despite his seemingly nonchalant exterior. Similarly to Bergström, he watched videos of Sunde on YouTube to capture his physical mannerisms.
“But the most important thing was the cause and the fight, that was the thing that drove my character,” he says. “Then it became not so much about playing a person that’s existed or is alive. It was just like portraying a character that is really striving for something. That was the most important thing.”
In the series, Sunde and Wadsted don’t meet until the court case puts them in the same room for the first time – and Sjögren believes that had the real figures met sooner, a lot of the problems thrown up by The Pirate Bay could have been avoided.
“They have some mail correspondence that is documented, real emails and stuff like that, in which they get really angry. But they never really met,” he says. “It was like an introverts’ love story in one way, and then in the end, they sit down really close to each other in a courtroom. That’s also why we talked about it a little bit like a Greek tragedy, because they never met. They just talked about each other in different rooms.”
“You really felt in the courtroom that we were two sides. You actually got personally engaged in it in a way that was very interesting,” remembers Bergström. “We were all burning so much for what [our characters] wanted in the series, and I’m so impressed by Jens’ work and the whole crew. You can think, ‘How can you make that [story] exciting?’ But they really succeeded because of the energy.”
Unlike Pontén (Robin Stegmar), who has been following the emergence of The Pirate Bay, Monique is thrown into the story when she is asked to represent Hollywood in the ensuing legal battle. But along the way, it becomes clear she has chosen a fight she believes the police do not adequately understand, leading her to demand they do a better job.
“As a female character, it was really fun to play Monique because she’s not trying at all to please anyone. She doesn’t give a shit how she looks. But she has so much energy,” Bergström says. “She knows what she wants and she goes to the government and police and says, ‘We’ve got to be able to take these guys down, because as an artist you need to be able to live on your work.’”
That idea particularly resonated with the actor, who was making films through the company she ran with her husband during the period explored in The Pirate Bay. “We were petrified they would steal our films before we went into the cinema, so I’ve been personally quite involved with this feeling,” she says. “You see the effect it has on the film companies. They are so scared of the net, and that is still the same now. So I’ve been through this as well, and I totally understand Monique’s energy.”
The Pirate Bay is more than just a Swedish story, however, and its global reach is reflected in the decision to shoot parts of the series in Thailand and Chile. “This is something that’s not just interesting or happening in Sweden. It was created in Sweden, and it was the start of something that would turn out pretty ugly,” Sjögren notes.
The relatability of the story is not lost on Carlsson either. When he joined the project, he “got the feeling that people were very excited because everybody had a connection to it somehow, depending on their age or how they used it,” he says. “Either they were like, ‘Oh, this was problematic as hell,’ or, ‘I loved this site when I was a kid.’”
Rather than concerning himself with recreating every specific detail of the period in which the show is set, Sjögren was more interested in replicating the spirit of The Pirate Bay founders’ ambitions as they set out to change the world and right some perceived wrongs. “When I see it now, before we do the final picture lock and the grade, it’s emotional,” he says. “People are going to say a lot of shit about it. ‘It was not exactly like this, blah, blah, blah.’ No, but we really broke our fucking backs to try to just embrace the feeling of really struggling with something you believe in so hard – so much so you would almost be ready to go to prison for it.
“It’s so much just about characters striving, and it gets emotional. People get scared, angry, happy. In one way it’s a series about everyday life. But it’s packaged almost like an action thriller, and sometimes like a really scary thriller as well. It was a part of history that really engaged people, and that’s what we really try to put into the series, rightly or wrongly.”
tagged in: Helena Bergström, Jens Sjögren, Simon Gregor Carlsson, SVT, The Pirate Bay