This is a very adult film about children and childhood. What were your inspirations for the story? Which may give you the wrong idea about my kids! I was very happy to finally grow up and become an adult; I never looked back… until I had kids of my own. And then suddenly, I was reminded…looking at them…I had childhood memories that were triggered for me. And I just realized how differently you perceive the world as a child. How they live in kind of a parallel universe. And I just became curious about that secret world of childhood.
And you would assume that it had been their imagination. But I thought maybe it would be interesting to make a film where that magic was for real. So I think that was the very first idea I had.
Trying to make scenes featuring two people talking more cinematic and interesting. We love those movies! And we wanted to make one of those to see what happened.
This time it came back to me afterwards, however. And I started to work on it on my own. The four main child actors give incredible performances. Can you discuss your casting process? EV: When I write, with Joachim or alone, I have this rule of not thinking of the practical concerns of shooting a film as I work. And I ended up writing a movie with four young kids and a cat! So we used quite a lot of the budget to have time for casting. We spent about a year finding the kids and a little bit more time training with them, and getting them ready for the shoot.
And I think also one of the keys to finding good child actors was to have an open mind about the characters. The casting director [Kjersti Paulsen] made me aware of how the underlying reason you see so much bad child acting in films and television is often because you start with the adults.
