Anders Thomas Jensen’s kids helped inspire black comedy Men & Chicken

Share

The Oscar-winning Danish director Anders Thomas Jensen's fourth film, Men & Chicken, has been a long time coming.

Among his three previous features, Jensen had actor Mads Mikkelsen playing a cannibal far before Hannibal – and he also wrote Mikkelsen's first screen role (in the 1996 short Café Hector). In the decade since his last feature, Adam's Apples, Jensen's regular lead has become a global star. But the delay in Men & Chicken wasn't a case of a director waiting for actors. Instead, Jensen's regular troupe – Mikkelsen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas and Ole Thestrup – had been pressuring him to make another film for years, even as he worked on screenplays and consulted on scripts for movies such as Antichrist, and continued his writing collaborations with fellow Danish director Susanne Bier (he's also worked on the upcoming adaptation of Stephen King's The Dark Tower).

"It's banal," Jensen explains about the lapsed decade. "I had four kids, got married. And having four kids, I made a choice because you're a master of your own time when you write. But when you direct a film, you lose everything for a year. It's like you go away. I do, anyway. So I chose to be part of my own life."

It's while "sitting watching those four kids and seeing how crazy it is, how they are with each other," that Jensen found the premise for Men & Chicken. Humankind can be as base as it is rational, nowhere more evident than the play of young children. "You discover how fragile human civilization is!" Jensen says with a laugh. "How humans have to learn everything from the beginning.

"There are so many edges on human beings that you have to cut off in order for society or a group of persons to not kill each other, and that's basically where I got the whole concept. Kids, if you have four, they keep fighting. There's a lot of personalities. Watching them I thought, what if I just left them like that and came back in 10 years? That's what the film is for me."

Thus, Men & Chicken examines what happens after five long-lost brothers meet on a remote island, cut off from normal civilization. On the one hand, they're awkwardly socialized and aggressively violent with one another, yet refined and hyper-intelligent on the other. Their hurt feelings are childlike, as are most of their preoccupations, such as their arbitrary hierarchy of preferred toys (in this case, dinnerware).

Adding to the atmosphere of depravity, Men & Chicken was filmed largely on location in the abandoned Beelitz sanatorium near Berlin, an eerie, sprawling estate that cinematographer Sebastian Blenkov had once visited.

"It's crazy that it exists – and it's exactly what we wanted," Jensen says of the decayed, peeling and thoroughly dilapidated site that was confirmed early enough in the process that "it became a player – the sixth character in the movie and also in the script."

But for its many grotesqueries and wickedly funny moments, the black comedy is profoundly tender. "A lot of times it goes to the edge, and sometimes beyond, but I try to keep and have a warmth in there," the director says. "We spent a lot of time grounding it in real emotions, because they are on the border of what is relatable to a normal audience."

For example, the brothers live with a menagerie of unusual animals. "The [trained] animals were more precise than the actors," Jensen says of the on-set zoo. "Never did we do a retake because of animals. It was always because the actors messed up." Each actor takes on the traits of what you might call his spirit animal. That aspect was born close to home, too.

Jensen explains how his wife, the actress Line Kruse, told him of the exercises in Danish theatre schools. "They will say like, 'Now you have to play Ibsen's A Doll's House as a giraffe,' which I always thought was insane," he says, laughing. "But then, the actors love it! When we sat down, they all really liked to do a character as an animal and it was just so fun. They kept throwing things in there, so many little details – like Nikolaj [as Gregor], he's a dog and he does these things with his head, tilts it like when a dog hears a certain word."

There are nods to The Island of Dr. Moreau and The Three Stooges, although they are, the filmmaker insists, unconscious ones. "I tried to grasp every genre from horror to slapstick, and there's a lot of themes – in that sense, I think it's my most messy film."

Add to that science fiction and romance, and so many so-called genres are in play simultaneously that Men & Chicken defies classification.

"That's the whole point. I like movies that play with genres. It's boring and in some ways ridiculous that we hold onto the idea that you need to tell the audience that they have to laugh or be scared," he says. "I really like films where it jumps between and I get surprised. I don't need to know what it is. That's just what you use to sell it, it's marketing, to assure that people know what they're getting. And I don't think people should always know what they're getting."