Uncovering Secrets
Danish director Kaspar Munk reflects on the changing television landscape that led him to write and direct eight-part drama Secrets, the story of two siblings caught in a spiral of co-dependency and the lies that threaten to tear their seemingly perfect lives apart.
As television has become a more global and cinematic experience over the past decade, Danish director Kaspar Munk has had a front-row seat. And the changing landscape has also seen a spotlight shone on series coming out of his home country.
Starting out in feature films, he moved to the small screen with 2014 titles Limbo and Tidsrejsen, before going on to work on acclaimed series such as Bedrag (Follow the Money), Herrens veje (Ride Upon the Storm), The Rain and Kamikaze – all titles that have helped to put Danish television on the world stage.
“In the last 10 years, television has evolved in a really interesting, creative way. So for me, it was natural to go more that way. It was bringing in a more cinematic language and more challenging storytelling,” he tells DQ. “I guess in the beginning there was a lot of work there. There were a lot of jobs, and then I realised there were also really interesting topics and projects.”
But now that the era of so-called ‘Peak TV’ is cooling down, as streaming platforms and traditional broadcasters alike look to rebalance their books, “you can’t predict anything anymore,” Munk says. That has been particularly true in Scandinavia, where platforms such as HBO Max (now Max) and Viaplay have scaled back their scripted output.
“For the last five years, it’s been really interesting in Scandinavia, as we started getting an eye on our territory and our storytelling [from around the world],” Munk observes. “Then we were invited into the big playground, and we started doing all kind of genres. Now, because there’s a smaller volume being produced here, we are going back to focusing a bit more on our talent and our ways of telling stories after taking inspiration from the international playgrounds. That’s also what I tried to do with Secrets, to go back to a Scandinavian way of storytelling.”
Secrets (known locally as Den Gode Stemning, or The Good Atmosphere) is his latest series, with Munk on directing duties having also written all six scripts with writing partner Lone Hørslev.
Boasting a starry cast led by Pilou Asbæk (Borgen, Game of Thrones) and Iben Hjejle (Dag, Dicte), it tells the story of two adult siblings who struggle to set boundaries for each other and find their lives spiralling out of control, in a story about family relationships, abuse and co-dependency.
“For me, it was a reaction to the fact we started trying to do international television shows in Denmark – really big genres, fantasy and all that,” Munk says of the series. “It was also about getting back to what we are really good at, and more of the dramas inspired by [Ingmar] Bergman and stuff like that, to go back to chamber pieces.”
In some ways, the story is also inspired by his own life. “I found that there’s still room for stories about all of us, normal people. When you talk about family secrets and abuse, they’re often very working-class stories, stories in the gutter. I just wanted to make a story that [shows] it’s in every society.”
Asbæk and Hjejle play Mads and Eva, siblings who live in neighbouring apartments with their respective families in Copenhagen. But though they appear to live privileged lives, they both hide a web of dysfunction and chaos.
Mads is a music teacher who still harbours dreams of being a rock star. Escaping into a world of partying to avoid his predictable day job and family responsibilities, he lives a life of drugs, alcohol and prostitutes until the extent of his double life is exposed.
Meanwhile, Eva faces a crisis of her own when her architectural firm loses a prominent business contract following the death of a client contact – who also happened to be her lover – leading her on a quest to save her business and her marriage. She must also confront her little brother, who she has always protected, and ultimately decide how far she will go to save him.
“They’re traditional middle-class siblings, and they are really close to each other. They live next to each other. She has been taking over their father’s company and she has had quite big success in that,” Munk explains. “He is trying to get a career as a musician. They’re really close, but in the story it’s about her realising that there are some challenges in their relationship and how to cope with that. I tried to keep him as a really charming and enjoyable character but still, of course, with a lot of secrets and a lot of challenges.”
Produced by Monday Scripted, the series touches on Munk’s experiences of being close to someone dealing with addiction. “But [with the series] I was trying to portray something that a lot of people actually identify with, even when they have a normal life, with a normal job, a family and children,” the director says. “Usually we portray people [in these situations] when they don’t have those kinds of strings attached. And I like the contradiction of being a co-addict, where you have to take care of the other person, but you also have to understand that, in a way, you can’t save them.
“That was the main goal of the story, to go into this dilemma of what is the best way of actually supporting your loved ones. It’s often to cut the string.”
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Having worked with numerous writers on previous productions, Secrets presented him with an opportunity to take greater control over a project from the very beginning.
“I’ve been working on a lot of really talented people’s projects, good writers in Denmark and Scandinavia. But I was just really longing to be more in control of the material,” he says. To do so, he teamed up with Hørslev, an author, poet and songwriter who could provide him with a fresh perspective as a different kind of writer.
“I know a lot about dramaturgy and putting the story together. But I needed some inspiration about how you write dialogue and how you establish a scene,” he says. “That turned out very well and it was really inspiring to have this kind of working relationship.”
Notably, Hørslev is also Munk’s real-life partner. “But I never had a dream about doing that,” he jokes about working together professionally. “It’s mainly because we work really well together. We inspire each other, we understand each other and we respect each other’s talents. It’s just a relationship that, in a professional sense, is really respectful and really understanding of what we can do individually.”
Together, they adopted a “traditional” writing process, one that utilises a screenwriter’s best friend, the whiteboard, and plotted the whole series together. Then when it came to writing the scripts, they had just one rule: to always write together. “So we were in the room together all the time,” Munk says. “It could be her writing one scene and me writing another scene, but always exchanging ideas. It wasn’t like a normal writers room, where you go home for two or three weeks and come back with an episode. Here we had to do everything ourselves, and I found that ping pong [back and forth] was really nice in the relationship because we were both responsible for every beat in the story and knew about it also. That was a bit fruitful for me.”
Describing Secrets as an extended feature film because it plays out over eight half-hour episodes, Munk wanted to repeat the format that worked so well for HBO’s Kamikaze, telling a story in chapters with fewer characters than might feature in a typical drama.
“Every chapter also had to be a portrait of where they were in the story. Once we had an overall storyline, we knew where we wanted to go with Eva, and we kind of knew where we wanted to go with Mads, but we didn’t know how to get there,” he says. “But I really like this format – and that’s also a new thing you can do in television. You don’t have to stay with making 20 episodes that are an hour long each. You can have these smaller miniseries.”
As well as enjoying being so close to the scripts, Munk also delighted in bringing in creative partners – such as the DOP and production designer – early in the process to set out the show’s visual style. Asbæk also signed on in the show’s infancy, when he could only read a synopsis, and the actor offered his own notes as development progressed.
As a result, Munk and Hørslev were also able to shape Mads around the actor, just as they could with Hjejle – known to international audiences for her role opposite John Cusack in 2000 feature High Fidelity – when she boarded the project.
Working with them on set, the director found they both brought similar “energy” to the characters they were playing, with Hjejle often being “really tough” towards Asbæk. “But it worked really nicely,” he says. “I found it very interesting in their approaches and the difference in the way they act, but that just suited [Hjejle’s] character so well, because she is just trying to be in control.”
Munk also wanted the show to feature some really long scenes, sometimes stretching up to nine pages, and the fact he wrote the series allowed him to insert those scenes into the scripts. On set, these scenes would then play out in a way similar to a theatre production as the actors fell deeper into their characters.
“We talked a lot about it, and when we had the schedule, we made space for doing that, so we had good time,” he says. “The difference there and the contrast of the scenes was really nice. It gave it more dynamic expression.
“Sometimes we were just running around the apartment with them, and other times we had really controlled scenes where light and camera dictated the positions and the blocking. But I really like to let them control and lead the camera once in a while, and usually you also get a lot from an actor if they can feel that they get that kind of responsibility.”
Originally commissioned by Viaplay, the series is currently without a home in Denmark after the streamer pulled back on its scripted output. Meanwhile, it will land on Viaplay in the UK on October 21 and the US on October 22. Furthermore, it has already launched on SBS in Australia, and Viaplay Content Distribution has also secured sales to Pickbox in Bulgaria and the Balkans, EITB in Spain, Vodafone Greece and Mola in Indonesia.
Considering his multiple roles on the show, Munk says he would love to do it all again if it proves successful enough to return. In any case, he hopes Secrets is reflective of the kinds of “internal stories” Scandinavia can produce that focus on character, not genre.
“I still believe there is room for stories like this about all of us,” he says. “It’s also a show that is not trying to be very ‘modern,’ but these stories are still important for us to mirror ourselves. The approach is always about finding the internal story of the characters and believing that they would resonate with the audience as well.”
tagged in: Kaspar Munk, Monday Scripted, Secrets, Viaplay, Viaplay Content Distribution