Kristoffer Nyholm Interview

Sky’s reputation as a programme-maker has gone up another couple of notches thanks to The Enfield Haunting, a Poltergeist-meets-Life On Mars three-parter which doesn’t so much chill the blood as freeze the marrow in your bones.
The slow-burning pace and high tension levels are largely down to Kristoffer Nyholm, the Danish director who oversaw a sizeable chunk of Forbrydelsen, AKA the chunky sweater-wearing The Killing.
The 63-year-old has worked on British TV before but not with anybody of the calibre of Timothy Spall who plays rookie ghostbuster Maurice Grosse. What was the much-garlanded London actor like to be on set with?
“He’s passionate, unpredictable and quick to stop and say, ‘What are we doing here?’ if he doesn’t think things are quite right,” Nyholm says perched in a cosy armchair in his Copenhagen home. “Timothy’s not a passive actor; he suggests improvements to the script and generally gets involved in the creative process, which I didn’t mind because it was coming from the right place. You can’t criticise someone for being a perfectionist.
“I think Timothy found me a bit of a challenge too because English isn’t my first language and sometimes my directions were a bit primeval and direct compared to what he’s used to. We got on great, though.”
Did Kristoffer know that Spall was playing the lead when he accepted Sky’s offer to come to London?
“No, he wasn’t attached when I read the first part of the script, but with it being so strong I knew somebody good would want the part, and so it proved.
“It’s a true story, but not one that had made it to Denmark,” he continues. “I met the son of the character Timothy plays, Maurice, who was in the house where it all happened in the 1970s and he said, ‘It looks and feels exactly the same as I remember it’, so I knew we were on the right track. It was a tough memory for him to relive, but he was pleased his father’s story was being told.”
Asked whether he believes in the supernatural himself, Nyholm somewhat diplomatically replies: “I believe that they believed. For Maurice and the family it seemed a genuine experience. His son, who’s a successful lawyer and very down to earth, says it affected his father very deeply. He visited the house in Enfield and never doubted what went on there, so that made me feel we were dealing with fact rather than fiction.”
Did Kristoffer ever think starting off in Danish TV in 1991 that he’d one day be talking to a Dublin journalist about a big budget show he’d made in the UK?
“No, back then I think we felt a bit culturally isolated,” he notes. “The success abroad of Danish shows like Borgen and The Killing has definitely changed the mentality at home.
I had a feeling with The Killing that we were doing something very good; the script and the actors were great, but at no point did I think it would become an international phenomenon. When BBC4 bought it and it did so well in the ratings, I was very suprised. Importantly for me, the success has happened naturally. There was no master plan to start appealing to people outside of Scandinavia.”
I imagine it’s a bit like how the Irish felt when U2 started racking up international number ones. The perennial underdog mentality here suddenly changed.
“Young Danish directors and actors see the likes of myself and Mads Mikkelsen, Viggo Mortensen and Sofie Gråbøl managing to work both at home and in the UK and US and think, ‘I can do that too.’ Having read James Joyce growing up and being a big U2 fan, I’d love to tap into the Irish way of storytelling one day, which like in every country is unique.”
It must be surreal watching the often frame- by-frame American re-creations of episodes of The Killing that he directed.
“To be honest, I’ve had to stop watching the US series because to make it work for the audience there they’ve made some changes that I don’t agree with,” Kristoffer confesses. “Rather than being better or worse, it’s become something different, which I’m sure would be the case if I was asked to remake an American show for the Danish market. As I said earlier, we all have different ways of telling stories.”
Programme-makers in Israel, where the likes of The Ex List, Homeland and In Treatment originated, have been accused of prioritising the lucrative overseas remake market over domestic viewers who feel they’re being fed increasingly formulaic fare. Is there a danger of that happening in Nordic Noir countries?
“No, we’re not making programmes just so they can be exported,” Nyholm insists. “If they weren’t different and original, other countries wouldn’t want to watch them. The appeal lies in their uniqueness.”