Felix Van Groeningen, director of the Oscar nominated “The Broken Circle Breakdown,” hails from Denmark. The film is based on a stage play written by Johan Heldenbergh and Mikele Dobbels; which is equal parts a spiritual and musical journey, as well as a stunningly framed love story between a tattoo shop owner (Veerle Baetens, “The White Queen”) and a banjo player (Heldenbergh, ‘The Misfortunes”).
Groeningen took some time to chat about the film and his nomination for an Oscar with The Eagle’s David Kahen-Kashi.
Eagle: How did you initially conceive of the project?
Felix Van Groeningen: Well, it started with the play made by Johan [Heldenbergh] and that’s really the basis of it all. I saw it, I loved it and started thinking about it and it wasn’t that obvious a thing to adapt into a movie. So it took a while for me to decide and it kept coming back to me. It was just such a incredible experience that I had.
E: The film features a lot of bluegrass. How did you choose what kind of music you wanted for the film?
FVG: That was already in the theater play, I never questioned that there was any research to do that. What I did was a gateway, I questioned was this the best song to use in the movie. We had meetings with Johan and Veerle [Baetens] and we talked about how can we add songs to make it better. We just added songs while I was writing the script so it was pretty organic how it came together. The idea of how it works and the theatre play and the adaptation plays to that movie.
E: How did you and your co-writer [Carl Joos] adapt the stage play to make it fit for the screen?
FVG: This is my second adaptation of a stage play and I guess it comes down to the same thing. You love something and you want to turn it into a movie and the plot of the play was very close to the script. We realized very quickly that it’s not going to do it. It would be OK, but not great. At some point you have to work really hard and try out a lot of stuff to help it to find its own logic. So even at some point we have to create it to see what else this could be, and that takes a while to figure out. You have to always be connected to the , it had to be original to work like this and yeah, you just kind of do it.
E: The film is being represent at the 2014 Oscars in the Best Foreign Language category. What was it like to have it be announced as a nominee?
FVG: It was incredible. We had a lot of fun and we had a lot of screenings, we had landed on the shortlist. So it was a huge build up to that. I guess it was , but it was like OK this is what we have, it’s humbling and we’ll enjoy the ride.
“The Broken Circle Breakdown” is playing at the Avalon.
