Danish director Thomas Vinterberg’s newest film, Another Round, explores the grand romance of getting shit-faced. But it’s not a simple film, neither in its jubilation nor its melancholy. A peculiar energy animates the director’s 11th feature, written with Tobias Lindholm, allowing the story to resist both pedantry and aloofness. Beloved by Danish audiences both young and older, the film has scored a Golden Globe nomination for best foreign language film as well as a spot on the Oscar short list for best international feature. If selected, this will be Vinterberg’s second Oscar nomination, after The Hunt.
Starring Vinterberg’s frequent collaborators Mads Mikkelsen, Thomas Bo Larsen, and Lars Ranthe, as well as Danish writer and actor Magnus Millang, Another Round focuses on a group of educators who have reached turning points in their respective midlife crises. Rather than buying classic cars, having affairs, or going to therapy, they’ve decided to run an experiment: They’ll maintain a functional level of drunkenness each day during work, stopping in the evening, and record their findings. What happens is, of course, inevitably uncontrolled.
For the director, casting his friends in the film was always a given. But he had no way to foresee how he’d come to rely not only on their skill, but also on their brotherhood. A few days into production, Vinterberg tragically lost his daughter Ida in a car accident. She had originally been set to costar as Mikkelsen’s daughter in the film, and several of her classmates appear as students. The film, literally and—you’ll be able to tell when watching—spiritually, is dedicated to her.
Vanity Fair spoke to Vinterberg over Zoom about the sources of his inspiration, the difference between Europe’s film industry and Hollywood, and how the cast brought about the indescribable energy that courses through each scene.
Vanity Fair: When you’re depicting a controversial issue like the central premise of Another Round, how do you approach it from the right angle—one that engages with the issue on an earnest level?
Thomas Vinterberg: Well, it’s about what angle, what perspective you embark on this journey with. As a writer, as an author, from my side, I consider this an investigation. I’m driven by curiosity, and I’m not trying to tell anyone anything. I’m just trying to figure out things, together with the audience. And I’m deliberately trying to be inconclusive.
I would say we are because it’s the writer, Tobias Lindholm, and myself in a collaboration. We insisted on not concluding anything. I don’t know how much people should drink, or not drink. I don’t know how people should live their lives. I’m just looking into these people’s lives, and seeing if I can learn something.
It’s pretty easy to make comparisons between Another Round and John Cassavetes’s Husbands—and you’ve called Cassavetes an American filmmaker you admire. To me, the most Cassavetes part of your film is that rather than trying to impose a pedantic vision—“this is how someone should face the consequences of their actions”—Another Round asks how people can be driving forces in their own lives.
Right. Well, the film for us had to be about more than drinking, of course. And it had to be about inspiration, and had to be about life. It had to be a life-affirming film. And the film is, in many perspectives, about putting yourself at risk. Avoiding your safe zone and the repetitiousness of life, and putting yourself on thin ice, where you have to be awake, and you have to look at the world, and where there’s a great deal of self. You lose your self-awareness when you are in the element of risk. And that’s inspiring. You open up, basically. And that’s what they try to do.
Filmmaking is very collaborative, but you’re also someone whose films are unmistakably yours. What are the challenges of making these kinds of films? What aspects of making them may be easier for someone who isn’t working in Hollywood?
Well, our system here in Europe is so different from the Hollywood system, in the sense that it’s driven by state funding. And for that reason, it’s considered an art form, meaning that I can come over…you’ve seen The Hunt, okay? I called my agent and I said, “I want to make this an American TV series.” And he said, “Forget about it.” That was before I made the movie. “You’re not going to raise a nickel for this. A guy being innocently accused for this kind of topic [sexually abusing a child], how will you convince a banker to do this?”
And then he said, “But make the movie, and make it great. And then some people will want you to make the series,” which is exactly what happened. So in our part of the world, we’re appreciated for this. We are very lucky. And yet still we’ve always been dreaming about going to Hollywood, which then represents a challenge, because when going to Hollywood, do you then lose yourself? Do you lose your thing? Does that make sense?
