Susanne Bier directed the Oscar-nominated film After the Wedding.  She is currently working on her first English-language film, Things We Lost in the Fire for Dreamworks. She recently met with press to discuss her work. The discussion covered several topics including her recent Oscar experience, the difference in making a Hollywood film, and the influences of Dogme on her work.  Below are a few excerpts.

After the Wedding focuses on familial relationships.  One of the questions in a recent round table interview concerned her spotlight on families.  She responded:

All of my movies since I started have been about family somehow.  I think families are so much the makeup of who we are.  I’m very, very close to my own family; they’re very important to me.  Inside my broad family I talk to them, I see them.  It’s very important to me as a person.

You meet people and they say “I haven’t spoken to my father for fifteen years,” and I kind of go, “Oh, that must be awful.”  And even if you can make that kind of decision in your life, it’s bound to traumatize you.  It’s going to be a major thing.

And I think we are part of family.  And I think it’s very important and I think it’s very exciting.  I guess that for any director... you have your themes you keep coming back to, and for me family is one of them.

Within the family in After the Wedding, there is some serious manipulation taking place. How the viewer feels about that manipulation by vary.   When asked about how she approached that, she said:

Part of why I wanted to do the movie is that I wanted to deal with those prejudices which are: you think you know someone and then you find out that what you thought was very clear about this person isn’t at all the way it is.  And I like that.  I find it very exciting. 

And also, particularly in Scandinavia, there is a prejudice that all rich people are, per definition, bad human beings.  And like all prejudices, there is a grain of truth.  Like if someone has accumulated great wealth he has most likely stepped on someone or had to do something that hurt other people.  That is usually the case.  So, yes, there is some truth to it, but on the other hand...  So we start out trying to describe someone like that, but then we find out it just might not be the case.

And the same with your other main character, Jacob...  He’s an aid worker in India who is working in an orphanage and he’s actually taking care of small kids, and he does a lot of good stuff.  But as the movie proceeds, you also realize he might have escaped dealing with things in his own life. Which were of importance as well.

So you might ask, what is more important?  I’m not making any judgments.  I don’t think what is more important, because I don’t know.  Bit I think it’s relevant to ask those questions.

Later she added:

I don’t feel judgmental.  I have a hard time feeling judgmental about things...  In general, I think, when you get into this sort of thing, it’s hard to be judgmental. 

I think the whole judgmental thing is actually left over from a previous time when things were much more black and white, because the way the world is today is much more complicated.  [Now] we have multiculture.  We need to understand and we need to embrace things in a different way.  And we need to have a compassion for things which we might think are very different and very alien.