Ole Christian Madsen

Danish director Ole Christian Madsen cut his teeth in television in the era of Dogme, but it’s the most expensive production in the history of Danish cinema that has brought him international attention. Flame & Citron is the story of two Resistance fighters sinking in the moral quicksand of occupied Denmark during the Second World War. Rather than attack German targets directly (because the reprisal might mean the massacre of an entire town) , the Danish Resistance turned on its own people – the ‘traitors’ and ‘collaborators’ in their mix. But the question that Madsen has asked – one that many people don’t want to hear – is whether the Resistance was really the force for justice that history would like to remember.

LWLies: How much did you know about Flame and Citron before you started work on the film?

Madsen: Nobody knew about them, not even in Denmark. Now they do because of the film. When I was 12-years-old my dad gave me a book about the occupation. It had portraits of people who were invested in the freedom fight or people who did something unusual, and in the middle of the book there were these two guys Flame and Citron. Every time I came to those pages I couldn’t get further. I was always stopping there because I was so fascinated by the photographs and by this strange story and I had this intuition that there was something more to the story than just the official history. My Dad was a colonel in the army and he was always telling me that the official story writing was wrong. Denmark was really a Nazi ally for three years of the war. The army felt very let down by the official policy during World War II that Denmark led. So he was kind of that old school guy and he said, “We were cowards, but these guys were heroes.”

LWLies: What kind of research did you do?

Madsen: We did a lot of groundwork, interviewing all the survivors from the Resistance, going through archives, not only in Denmark, but also in Holland, Norway, Sweden, and England and getting contacts in the CIA and MI6 because they were in Copenhagen during the war and took important documents. They took a lot of the Gestapo papers, especially.

LWLies: Did your opinions of these two men change a lot over the research process and during production?

Madsen: Well it did, yeah, because it was so long. Nobody wanted to fund the film, nobody wanted to finance the film, we couldn’t find investors, so we just kept researching and doing other films. It changed. In the beginning I was more into the traditional interpretation of them as war heroes. During the work, I could see that the guys they had been hanging out with were really bad guys and that the truth about this side of the resistance is not very pretty. It’s grey. They are doing both the right thing and the wrong thing. So I decided at one stage that the film should be about that, about how difficult it is to do the right thing.

LWLies: Have any of the Resistance survivors that you talked to seen the film? What did they think of if?

Madsen: Well yeah, they saw it and the guys I’ve been talking to, they liked it, but the film has split opinion in Denmark. It’s a big success in Denmark, very well-reviewed and blah, blah, but it’s split. A lot of angry reviews and debates also came out of this. Some were very offended.

LWLies: What did they find offensive?

Madsen: The fact that the film says that the Resistance did shoot a lot of the wrong people, who weren’t traitors, and the idea that on the leading level of the Resistance you have guys who only want to make money and advance their careers. Those statements were not very popular. But on the other hand it was a good debate and it shows that even 65 years later you still have to deal with these questions, because it’s a huge story. Really what we have in common in Europe is not only the continent, but this story. It’s a huge story and with a huge story you open one door and you find three more and you open them and you find three more.

LWLies: I think one of the things that people of our generation find compelling about war stories is how people of that generation had much more extreme ethical dilemmas and tragedies to deal with on a much more regular basis. Did you find yourself reflecting on how you would have behaved in those times? Do you think you would have been a Resistance fighter?

Madsen: Yeah. That’s a super-relevant question because it’s what we talked about all the way through shooting. It’s impossible to say what you would have done. I have kids, so I probably would have thought about it twice. If I didn’t have kids I would have certainly done it. I think.

LWLies: Do you think of Flame and Citron as extraordinary men or ordinary men in an extraordinary situation?

Madsen: I think they are extraordinary men in an extraordinary situation. They are like an example of the thesis that war makes young men do things that they would never do in peacetime. They wouldn’t stand a chance in peacetime. It would be horrible for them, especially for Flame. My grandfather for instance was in the Resistance for a short time, but he had kids so he left. His friends who continued in the Resistance went into a group that was the only Resistance group to be prosecuted during the war because they killed too many people. I grew up with these guys – when I was a kid, at family dinners, they were there, these killers who’d been to prison for what they did.

LWLies: Was the war something that was discussed in your family?

Madsen: [SPOILERS] No, never. And one thing that is not correct in my film is that Citron at one point he shoots the Gilbert character and actually he didn’t. He almost did, but he didn’t. Actually it was one of my grandfather’s friends that did it. But none of these characters are normal. They’re all very special. It’s the kind of character that comes out when there’s a war. You can start with Ketty Selmer. She’s having a love affair with Flame, she’s working for the Resistance and she’s working for the Gestapo and having a love affair with the Gestapo chief and she’s working for Gilbert, the Abwehr officer, and she was also strongly bisexual and had as many relationships with women as she did with men.

LWLies: That bit wasn’t in the film.

Madsen: No I had to take that out because nobody would have believed this character.

LWLies: How important was it to you that you were faithful to the actual events?

Madsen: It was important and not important. It was important that none of the events in the film were taken out of the blue. It needed to be anchored to real events and there’s nothing in the film that’s not anchored to real events. But it’s also important to make a film that’s watchable.

LWLies: Your film is very visually striking as well, not least because of Flame’s red hair and how stylish and well-dressed he and Citron are. Was that something you thought about?

Madsen: Well actually it’s taken from real life. Flame was very vain. He wore a fresh shirt every day, wherever he lived, even when he was in hiding, fresh shirts, elegance, fine red wine, the good food, he wanted that, and you know the actors are good-looking people, so what can I say? But it was more about getting the clothes of the time and the clothes of the time were very elegant. People were very elegant. If you didn’t have money, you wore an old trashy suit, but you would still wear a suit. So it came from that.

LWLies: You’ve made a low-budget film as part of the Dogme ’95 movement and now you’ve made what is supposed to be the most expensive Danish film ever. How has your experience of filmmaking changed?

Madsen: I don’t know. We talk about this Dogme thing as being something really, really special. It’s not really. You do the same thing as a director. You make the scenes, you make the story work, you try to get the actors to gain from the intensity of the set and do the right thing for them. To make a film like Flame & Citron, that’s still the most important part of directing. We had 32 international investors, it’s crazy, but I didn’t feel any pressure at all. I was just doing what I did. I’ve made 6 films now and big budget or small budget, it’s fundamentally the same.

LWLies: You’ve mentioned before that there’s a film noir feel to Flame & Citron. Were there any particular films you were thinking of or referencing?

Madsen: Well, the cinematographer and I were actually kind of self-referencing a film we did called The Spider just before starting work on this one. It was very stylised, very film noir and about the black market in post-war Copenhagen. So we were trying to combine this very stylised universe with the more handheld, more loose, more realistic way of portraying people. That was the experiment. One French film I was really influenced by was Army of Shadows by Jean-Pierre Melville, it’s a film from ’68 and it’s the best film about resistance ever made. It’s one fantastic movie, so you can say those are the influences.