By Dov Kornits
Baltasar Kormákur has become a name to watch over the past few years. The Icelandic director has made the leap from well-regarded festival fare such as 101 Reykjavik and The Deep to calling the shots on Hollywood films like 2 Guns and Everest. His latest project sees him back in his home country and operating on the small screen: Trapped is a gritty mystery that sees a small town cop (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) investigating a murder in a remote Icelandic community. Kormákur was good enough to give us some insight into how the series came about.
Kormákur describes the show as “…a bit of a crossbreed between Scandi-noir and Agatha Christie, like a modern version of Agatha Christie.” Released in Iceland on December 27th, 2015, Trapped immediately became the biggest television program ever produced in the tiny nation.
“It was beyond everyone’s expectations,” Kormákur muses. “Because back in the day there was only one television station in Iceland, it was a little bit like a Russian outpost, and now we have loads of television stations, Netflix and all that is accessible here now. So being able to break those old records was a surprise to everyone. I think we had a 96% viewership when we were screening it, and we even got it, there was an article on the internet, you know, saying that a water company put out a report saying that the usage of water in Iceland dropped by half during the screening of the show, so basically no one was going to the toilet, taking a piss.”
According to Kormákur, this is the first time an Icelandic television show has made a significant impact in foreign markets. “We’ve done a lot of series but they’ve never traveled before, and of course, we don’t have the same budget as our Scandinavian friends. But I managed to get a television station from Germany, and the BBC, and France TV, to support it and co-produce it with me, and therefore we could get a decent budget to build this one.” The show became a phenomenon not only in Iceland but also on the contienent. “We had six million viewers in France, we had 20 % of the country watching it, so we had never heard numbers like that.”
Although parallels have been drawn with recent trends in Scandinavian crime drama, the filmmaker was determined to craft something which stood apart from the pack – something distinctly Icelandic. “My kind of dream was to make an Icelandic television show that people would always distinguish it with Iceland, like ‘You hear about Iceland?’ ‘Yeah I saw that TV show’. With the Swedish and the Danish you might kind of mix them up, because the cities aren’t that different, like Stockholm and Copenhagen, but I can promise you that no one is going to mix up Iceland with anything, and that was important to me.”
It might seem odd that Kormákur has returned to his homeland after having built a respected career in the American film industry, but he avers that he never really wanted to go Hollywood. “When I started I never wanted to leave the country to try to make it in Hollywood. I have a family, five children, 100 horses with my wife, so when people thought I was going to move to Hollywood, we’d actually built a farm north of Iceland, to breed horses and be more here, so I never really left the country, I just went out to work,” he says. “During these years I’ve been working in Hollywood I’ve built up an Icelandic company, which is now the biggest production company in Iceland, and we just made a deal with the city to make a major studio inside Reykjavik, and so I’ve basically used all the money I made in Hollywood to build up the business in Iceland.”
His success in America also made European companies more receptive to his proposals. “I’ve been quite successful in Europe in filmmaking, but once you go to Hollywood, European companies are more open to you, so they say ‘what the hell are you doing in Hollywood, why did you leave our business’, but at the same time they are ready to offer you better deals and more money to make your European stuff if you’ve done your Hollywood stuff. Suddenly they have more trust in you because someone else bet on you. So anyway, I came back home to Iceland, and have done it to, you know, be a man of my word and create something where I could take Icelandic actors around the world and show the world the kind of talent we have.”
Indeed, when it comes to the Icelandic film industry, Kormákur isvery much playing the long game. “I’ve been pulling Hollywood to come to Iceland to try and build up something here and that’s my aim. It doesn’t mean I won’t go abroad and make films, but it’s always, with the kind of larger picture. It’s not because I’m here trying to save the country, I don’t want to be looked at like that, but it means more to me, it means I can build up something that will last, so I don’t have to be in a hotel when I’m 80 years old.”
Trapped is available on SBS On Demand now.
