Wolf man
Vargasommar (Cry Wolf) director Jesper Ganslandt tells DQ about bringing Hans Rosenfeldt’s novel to television, finding the right tone for this darkly comedic crime thriller and how he was inspired by Steven Spielberg.
In Vargasommar (Cry Wolf), the creative team behind Netflix’s Swedish drama Snabba Cash have reunited to bring The Bridge creator Hans Rosenfeldt’s debut novel to the screen.
Jesper Ganslandt directs the six-part series, which is written by Oskar Söderlund. It stars Eva Melander as Haparanda police officer Hannah Wester, who makes the macabre discovery of a dead wolf with human remains in its stomach. The case can be linked to a bloody drug deal that took place the other side of the border in Finland. At the same time, odd couple Sandra and Kenneth happen to collide with a car that turns out to contain a murdered man and three valuable bags that could mean an opportunity for a new life.
But what Hannah and the others don’t know is that professional killer Kat is heading to Haparanda, a small town in northern Sweden a stone’s throw from the eastern border with Finland, to recover the missing bags – triggering a brutal chain of violence that turns out to have connections to Hannah’s dark, tormenting past.
Produced by Nordic Drama Queens for TV4, this series isn’t just a nerve-wracking thriller. It is also full of mystery – and a large dose of dark comedy that sets the show apart from other Swedish crime dramas.
“I’m excited for it to be released,” Ganslandt tells DQ ahead of the drama’s local premiere on December 25. “I’m very proud of what we’ve done with it, keeping the thriller crime at the core but delving into more of a darkly comedic twist of fate, which is a different thing for a show like this, and I’m really excited about that.
“I’ve never seen or even heard about [another series] where all the characters are in over their heads, even the police and even the bad guy in a sense, and it becomes comedic and darkly funny through that. That’s what drew me [to the project]. That was something me and Oskar worked a lot with.”
Ganslandt joined the project at an early stage when Rosenfeldt and The Bridge writer Camilla Ahlgren were working together on the script. When they stepped away from the project, he then invited Söderlund to partner with him on a series with a tone that was markedly different from their previous collaboration.
“We just started rewriting it from page one, but still going back to the [original] scripts and the book all the time,” he recalls. “To the producers’ credit, that was a big risk but it’s something I felt like they really wanted to do. They wanted it to be special and what I was trying to do with it was in line with that.”
That ambition wasn’t related to just the script, but also the way Ganslandt wanted to film the series, which stars Melander (Codename: Annika, Rebecka Martinsson) alongside Eliot Sumner (Ripley) as Kat, Amed Bozan as Kenneth and Nora Bredefeldt as Sandra, plus Henrik Dorsin, Hannes Fohlin, Albin Grenholm, Olle Sarri and Eero Milonoff.
A crime drama set in Stockholm’s criminal underworld, Snabba Cash was shot in a “very intense” way, with a handheld camera and combining the script with improvisation that made for an “intentionally very chaotic process.” Here, Ganslandt wanted to work in a different way that reflected the show’s “neo-western storytelling.”
“It just felt like more classical storytelling in that sense,” he notes, “so I started working in a way I hadn’t worked that much before with pretty distinct blocking and shooting it in a style where we were not moving the camera unless the characters are moving.
“Then the script becomes very important too. I wanted to be in sync with the actors as to what the scene is about and where they are going to be when they say this line. So it was, in a sense, much more a controlled vision. That made it different in almost every sense.”
In fact, the director was particularly inspired by YouTube clips celebrating Steven Spielberg’s “excellence in blocking” and looking at how the acclaimed filmmaker tries to map out an actor’s movements in relation to the camera position in his movies.
“I’d done blocking before, but I was fascinated by a lot of the shots I’ve seen in Saving Private Ryan or Indiana Jones, where the camera is not doing anything, but it feels very dynamic because the actors are moving from a total wide shot to a medium and then a pan right and you’re into a close-up,” Ganslandt continues. “I thought, ‘That’s going to work perfectly here,’ because it’s all about tension. I want the audience to be on pins and needles, so it helped with the tone. It’s all filmmaking and cinema to me – I don’t think one is superior to another, but this method suited this project very well.”
Working with more blocking means Ganslandt also knows going into a scene what he wants to achieve, and how much time he has to play with before moving on. “As long as we trust each other in the here and now, it’s going to be fine,” he says. “It’s also supposed to be a lot more about having fun within that space and not coming from a place of fear and worrying. It’s meant to be playful when all that is set up.”
That spirited energy was certainly felt on set. “We had a lot of bloopers. We could have put together a pretty long gag reel,” reveals Ganslandt, who says that despite some of the dark subject matter, misunderstandings between characters and the fact the police have few clues to go on means “it ended up being very funny a lot of times.”
The sense of play on and off screen leads Ganslandt to compare Vargasommar to US series Fargo, which was inspired by the 1996 film of the same name. “There is crime and punishment. There is a gravity of the situation, but there’s also just people in the centre of it not really knowing how to handle all this. There are no real heroes in it. It’s just human beings trying to make sense of things.”
A coproduction between TV4 Drama, distributor Fifth Season, ZDF and Filmpool Nord, half the series was shot on location Harparanda, where most of the exteriors were captured, and the rest in Lithuania.
“It’s very flat and open country. There are no mountains there. It’s just plains and these small, low buildings, so it has that western aesthetic that I was looking for,” the director says of the show’s central location. “And it was great working there. Practically, if we needed something, it was a little tougher, but that’s how it is.”
One challenge on set came when the production crossed the border into Finland and shot an entire sequence on a mountain that involves three characters evading capture by bunking down in a cabin. “It was really good,” he says, “but it meant carrying everything up to the peak, which is like a Werner Herzog move to do. But it really worked, and it shows. The views are spectacular.”
Those views, as well as the show’s touches of humour and its protagonist, mean Vargasommar is a “unique proposition” for viewers in Sweden and abroad, Ganslandt says. Hannah is “a woman in her 50s who obviously doesn’t really care what anybody thinks about her or about anything, and to me, that’s refreshing.
“She goes from being this talented police officer in a very small town where nothing happens to suddenly finding a lot of things are happening, and there is violence and death and things to investigate – and she’s pretty good at it,” he says.
“When we go deeper into the story, it turns super personal for her. It’s almost like she’s departing from the case and doing an investigation on her own, which is a very personal journey. It starts to affect the case and everything that’s been going on. She’s a really cool character and Eva is amazing doing it. I couldn’t picture anybody else doing that role.”
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tagged in: Cry Wolf, Fifth Season, Filmpool Nord, Jesper Ganslandt, Nordic Drama Queens, TV4, TV4 Drama, Vargasommar, ZDF