The Girl With The Needle tells the harrowing story of a woman struggling to survive in the WWI era in Denmark. A factory worker who loses everything while pregnant and abandoned, she takes a job with a woman running an adoption agency. For the rest, you need to experience the film.
The film premiered in competition at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and is the official Danish entry for Best International Feature at the 97th Academy Awards. It stars Vic Carmen Sonne in an unflinching performance, expertly directed by Magnus von Horn, with stark black-and-white cinematography by Michał Dymek PSC and a riveting score by Frederikke Hoffmeier (Puce Mary). Director von Horn recently spoke to Immersive via Zoom.
[This conversation has been edited for clarity and length]
How did this project first come about?
I was approached by the Danish producers and my co-writer Line Langebek Knudsen, who had the idea to make something inspired by these true crimes from a century ago in Copenhagen. I didn’t know about them before because I’m from Sweden. This story is not well known outside of Denmark.
What was it about this story that you found compelling?
It was a story that touched some deep fear in me. It touched the unimaginable. It touched, you know, the fear I have that something would happen to my children. I have two kids. That kind of parental protective, that fear that I’ve felt very present ever since I became a parent. I like to use my fears to fuel my creativity.
What is interesting about this story is that it works on an emotional and intellectual level. The crimes are horrible and unimaginable but when you examine the context of the time in history and the societal influences there is a strange logic there. It makes them not just isolated acts of evil, but part of an oppressive community. Then it starts becoming a story about all of us.
It is very much a period piece, but it’s timeless though. Our modern world is not geared towards children. It’s very hard to provide for a child in this world now. Everybody’s supposed to work. Daycare is expensive. The cost of everything has skyrocketed. I could almost see a return to the world presented here. It’s never really gone away…
I agree. I think it’s different in different parts of the world. It’s a reminder of where we come from or maybe how far we have come and how we need to be reminded of that too, and thankful for that. In other places, it’s this kind of horrific reminder that maybe we haven’t come as far as we’d like to think.
I think that there’s a timeless question, and there are unfortunately places where children are not being prioritized. It’s always gonna be an issue everywhere. How we tackle that and what our approach is going to be can be problematic and give rise to debate and discussions.
Tell me about the journey from script to screen…
It was a very long process. It took four years to write the script and to get the production going. This is a film made in Europe, so it’s financed slowly compared to like how to finance films in the US. But it’s also a theme and a story that I think requires time and was not an easy sell.
You guys get more interesting things made though…
It’s always problematic to get this kind of film made because people feel it’s a big risk. Now people are very happy about it and proud that they joined, but that was not always so obvious. I’ve done three feature films and I always thought it was gonna get easier but it never does. I liked Brady Corbet’s speech at The Golden Globes. It’s true, that it’s very difficult to predict what will work in advance and there are always surprises to what audiences want to see.
This film has a unique look that feels like a vein of films of the silent era like F.W. Murnau. How much was it inspired by those films and also books of the era?
We wanted to take the audience on a trip back in time that felt credible and inspiring. To create complex full images that make us believe we’re in the past. That world exists only in the images we know from that time, that represent that time. They’re all black and white. This world comes from black-and-white photography.
The film uses that visual language…
Like German expressionism because it came right after the First World War. So we wanted to be both playfully and seriously, just be inspired, uh, by all of that. We would use many different ways of adapting that to our film. Pay homage to those films and also Polish cinema from the 50s.
Talk a little bit about cinematographer Michał Dymek PSC…
He’s very talented. This is the second film I’ve made with him, we are good friends and are great collaborators. He is a serious cinematographer who loves his job and loves a challenge. I think he sees much further than the rest of us within his field of work, which I also like. When I feel we have a good idea, then I know it’ll even be better in his hands. He also has a complete idea of where this is going in the end, and what the grade should look like. He tirelessly works to get what we need and doesn’t give up. It’s inspiring to be around.
And what did you shoot on? What equipment did you use on this?
The ARRI Alexa… It’s digital so we were very focused on never shooting flat surfaces. We were very careful about the choices of color we used and how they affected the black-and-white result.
I think the lead performer is amazing. Talk a little bit about working with Vic Carmen Sonne…
I met her first time about two years before we started shooting. I was looking for actresses and I didn’t know Denmark or the Danish acting community. I was introduced to actresses through a casting agent.
I was looking for someone who comes from, you know, Denmark a hundred years ago, and Vic cast his quality… just the way she looks without any makeup or costumes is just very credible for me that she can be in that factory and she can have that struggle. It was that catching that credibility that was important to me.
She does that remarkably. Talk a little bit about working with your editor Agnieszka Glinska.
I work with the same editor over and over. I like her because she has a really strong vision of her own and she’s never just trying to please me for her, that she feels it. I need an editor that fights for the material and builds it up. When it feels like we’ve stalled, she finds different ways of telling the story.
We always return to the script structure of the story. That’s often the version of the film that works the best. The scriptwriting process takes such a long time that I feel we tried everything in that process.
Let’s talk about the music, I’m a fan of Puce Mary, who is credited here as Frederikke Hoffmeier. While I was watching the film, I thought the style sounded familiar. What was the eureka moment like when you thought like, wow, this is who I want to do this? ’cause I think it worked perfectly well.
I was listening to all kinds of electronic music when writing together with Lena. I knew I did not want to use classical music. The lead actress introduced me to Frederikke Hoffmeier and then we spoke about the film. I liked her noise music, it’s extreme.
I thought that would be very interesting to hear the contrast between her work and what we shot. How could she adapt that style to our storytelling and what would that mean? She also had a quality that I liked in her music that it felt like music that breaks. There are moments in this film when like, the human spirit breaks. I thought that was important.
What’s it like being on the other end of this now? This has played several festivals. I believe it’s won a few awards. It’s up for a bunch of awards…
It’s quite enjoyable. It was never obvious that the film would do this well as it’s doing now. I’m proud of the team that made the film. I’m proud of myself. It was a tough job and to have it pay off and to see audiences react to the film and people be moved by the film makes it all worth it and it gives you the energy to make another film.
The Girl with The Needle is now playing in select theaters.
