How the Swedes tried to bury Let The Right One In

There's a terrific interview with Swedish director Tomas Alfredson on Rotten Tomatoes I urge everyone to read in full. Two extracts are worth sharing here.

Director Tomas Alfredson

The first concerns his startlingly good vampire film Let The Right One In, the veteran filmmaker's first international hit after it became a succes d'estime on the global film festival circuit. I can't think of a better illustration of screenwriter William Goldman's catchphrase about the industry side of the  biz: Nobody Knows Anything. Nor a more vivid tribute to the important role still played by film festivals.

"The making of Let the Right One In was very demanding, and in many ways very unhappy, because back home it was a film that nobody would touch when it was finalised," says Alfredson. "The distributor wasn't interested; the theatre owners didn't believe in it; the financiers disappeared. It was sort of put away in a cupboard for 10 months, so it was like... I thought I did a flop. And I loved it; I had invested so much time and love into it, so I was so disappointed about that. And then it started -- before it actually opened in Sweden -- it was shown in festivals here and there, and the success story of it started."

(See here for the piece I wrote the film for the SBS website ahead of its screening on the channel earlier this year.)

The second quote concerns Alfredson's follow-up to that success, a new adaptation of John le Carre's espionage novel, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, set mainly in a spectacularly drab Britain in the 1970s (it's to be released in Australia on January 19).

Alfredson's comments on how to capture the essence of a period in a way that makes it look lived in should be pinned on the fridge door of every director and production designer planning to make a screen drama set in an earlier era: 

Benedict Cumberbatch in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

 "It's too easy to put sideburns on everyone and play hit records, you know -- all those cheap ways into the hearts of people," says the director. "I think the period was so much about, not '73, as this is set in, it's about the '60s and '50s and '40s -- all the periods before that. Because if you would visit someone in a home in 1973 there would be one chair that was bought last year and the rest would be stuff from the '40s or the '50s. Too often people always sort of push the volume to 10 when they're doing period stuff."