MONTHLY GUIDE APRIL 2017 | ISSUE 93 | EASTERN DANISH STYLE! Simon’s Law EUROCHANNEL GUIDE | APRIL 2017 | 1 2 | EUROCHANNEL GUIDE | APRIL 2017 | MONTHLY GUIDE | APRIL 2017 | ISSUE 93 MADS MIKKELSEN DANISH STYLE! Simon’s Law At Eurochannel, we are proud to offer the finest in European audiovisual productions through an exciting selection of exclusive films and series every month. In April, we present you with two of the most entertaining productions from Denmark, featuring one of the country’s most beloved and famous figures:Mads Mikkelsen. Black Widows April takes us to Denmark, France, and Scandinavia to enjoy their best audiovisual endeavors. From Denmark, The Green Butchers presents us with a hilarious story about success and cannibalism. In TABLE OF the movie, two butchers decide to open their own shop but events CONTENTS take a dark turn they are never able to come back from. In Flickering Lights, a gang of petty but hardened criminals try to come to terms with their violent pasts by setting up in a cottage. Both of these films 4 Highlights include the outstanding performances of the one and only Mads 16 Week 1 Mikkelsen, who shows why he is now one of Hollywood’s favorites. 18 Week 2 20 Week 3 Our TV series continue with their surprising twists. InBlack Widows, keep enjoying how the darkest women of Scandinavia evade justice, 22 Week 4 and in Struggle for Life, accompany Tomasz on his quest to find his roots. EUROCHANNEL GUIDE PUBLISHED BY Eurochannel, Inc. EDITOR IN CHIEF Javier Pardo EDITORS Anna Oboza, Marc Boisban, Cristina Silva & Zheljko Kojchic. ARTWORK Cristina Tejada EUROCHANNEL, INC. 235 Lincoln Road # 201 | Miami Beach, FL 33139 Gustavo Vainstein +1-(305)-531-1315 | www.eurochannel.com Eurochannel’s CEO ©2017 | All pictures rights are reserved. Premiere: CINEMA April 14th at 09:00 PM Denmark You never forget the taste of human flesh When two butchers with low self-esteem are pushed to a horrific ingredient. The Green Butchers stars the great their limits, terrible things are sure to happen. Eurochannel Danish star, Mads Mikkelsen, before his fame in Hollywood. premieres a riveting comedy with the greatest talent of In this production, which preceded his performances in Danish cinema, Mads Mikkelsen. In The Green Butchers, Casino Royale (2006), The Hunt (2012), Hannibal (2013) what seems to be the recipe for long-awaited success hides and Doctor Strange (2016), Mikkelsen is Svend, a grim but a horrible truth ― come discover it! obscure character who stops at nothing to gain a single bit of respect. Directed by one of Denmark’s most prolific screenwriters and filmmakers, Anders Thomas Jensen, The Green Combining the trite, the morbid and the amusing, The Butchers proposes a one-of-a-kind comedy for Danish Green Butchers is surreal in every sense. The green palette standards. In the movie, Bjarne and Svend have a strange of the cinematography matches the film’s name but also friendship. Svend has great ambition driven by an equally digs inside the minds of those fond of Jean Pierre Jeunet. great inferiority complex, while Bjarne hardly cares about The resemblance is undeniable and those who love anything at all except for his girlfriend, Astrid. Starting provoking European comedies will appreciate the art in their own butcher’s shop enables them to escape from this movie. Welcome to a surrealist reality where extreme their vicious boss, but it doesn’t go well until a bizarre narcissism unleashes torrents of ill-considered actions in coincidence leads Svend to create a new secret dish with what becomes the most cannibal business in town! 4 | EUROCHANNEL GUIDE | APRIL 2017 | Svend (Mads Mikkelsen) and Bjarne (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) work for DIRECTOR Anders Thomas Jensen CAST Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Mads Mikkelsen, a butcher in a small Danish town. Unhappy with their boss’ Line Kruse arrogance, they decide to open their own shop. After a dismal GENRE Comedy, drama beginning, an unfortunate accident happens which coincides ORIGINAL TITLE De grønne slagtere with a large order of meat. One hasty decision leads to another YEAR 2003 and soon the business thrives. But will they still be able to obtain the ingredients for this special dish? Interview with MADS MIKKELSEN (Actor) It’s been almost 15 years since this movie. How do you think your acting has evolved since then? I don’t know. I remember it was a very risky thing we did. Even though this was a comedy like Flickering Lights, the characters were more extreme. It was almost like putting theatre on film. We were all very nervous but we loved the story and the characters so You never forget the taste of human flesh much that we kept on doing it. This is one of the films I’m most proud of doing in my entire career! We did it and we got away with it. My character is a fantastic, pathetic, egomaniac narcissist that is so hard not to like. It’s an achievement for this story. How did you prepare for such a complex character? It’s always in Anders Thomas’ stories. The script is there and then we work a little more on it. I tend to go also a little more extreme than the script sometimes does. So if there’s any line where somebody could say what he’s saying, I don’t find it interesting. It has to be very specific in his way of saying things. Then we work on his manners. He was a martyr, always offended by anything that happened. Physically, we cut my hair in a completely stupid way. I remember Anders Thomas was there. So you actually cut your hair in that silly way? It wasn’t a prosthetic forehead or a wig? Yes. We cut it because I found it difficult. First of all, I hate wearing wigs ― it’s always annoying. They are very difficult to wear. You would always have to stop; something is wrong, the wig is not sitting in the right way and so on. I just decided let’s cut it off because it’s much easier to handle.Then I had to wear hats for like three months because I looked like an idiot. When the film was finished, I had to take down all the hair. This character somehow links to your Hannibal in the terms of cannibalism; did you use some of your experience of this character for Hannibal? You can always find a link. It’s a total coincidence I never thought about. Hannibal is obviously doing it for other reasons; he’s twisted the world upside down ― he sees beauty where the rest of us see horror. Instead, Svend has no craving for human flesh at all. He’s not a killer but sees success coming and that’s his egomaniac side coming. EUROCHANNEL GUIDE | APRIL 2017 | 5 How do you make the jump from these local films to Casino Royale and now Hollywood? It was always my choice. Before Hollywood called me, I did not have a choice ― it was just me working in Denmark. And mine is a small country; if you do a film a year, people start getting tired of watching you. So it was a lucky break that I got a chance in Hollywood and no, I can go back and forth. I can still pick the stuff I find interesting. It’s always very important that you like what you do, whether it’s a small or big film. And how did you get the part in Casino Royale, a role that changed your career internationally? I was not expecting it at all. I got a phone call about an audition and I couldn’t make it because I had a meeting and so on. But eventually I got the job because one of the producers, Barbara Broccoli, loved the film Susanne Bier’s Open Hearts and she would love to have me on Casino Royale. It has been my Danish work that opened the doors in Hollywood. I hadn’t been there knocking on doors. When you first had this experience in a big production, what did you think were the main differences between those and that local Danish productions you took part in before? I think the biggest difference is the enormous budget. And when you have that budget, you have many producers, many chefs that want to cook the film. So the process when you and the director come up with ideas to make the film better is not as fast as in Danish productions because it has to go around a lot of important people. But having said that, I was still surprised that even though there are 500 people on set, we would still sit down in a small group ― maybe me and Daniel (Craig) and the director ― to discuss the scene to make it work. Did you feel more pressure when filming Casino Royale? This was a time of changing the face of James Bond and Daniel Craig’s first as the agent, which received plenty of critiques before filming started. I always feel pressure. I want to do the best I can do ― the best film in the world. But I didn’t feel it was bigger in Casino Royale. I actually think that there was much more pressure in The Green Butchers because we were out on a limb. I’m sure Daniel felt a lot of pressure because he was the new Bond and he would always be judged for it. He did the only right thing ― he dug into the work and concentrated to do as best as he could.