I recently had the chance to interview Bendt “If” Bjornsen, the Danish wunderkind film director who just released his newest masterpiece, “A Wife in Trouble”. What follows is a transcript of our conversation, edited for brevity and clarity. I would like to extend my sincere thanks and gratitude to If Bjornsen for his insights and hospitality. Enjoy!
BBM: Thanks for agreeing to this interview, If. May I ask, first off, why your preferred name is “If”?
IB: Of course you may. Yes. Why accept the nickname if you cannot understand it? It is because I am, in some ways, almost a slave to possibility. I go to a party, and I ask him, I ask the host, “Where do I put my coat?” Right? And he says, “Oh, you may put it on the coat rack by the door,” so my mind, my thoughts say to him “But what if the coat rack was an alligator?” And he does this thing, I see it all the time. He scrunches up his eyebrows and he says “What?” And that is what I am subject to all the time. He is scrunching his eyebrows to me because he has no imagination.
BBM: Right, yes. Yes. Do you think-
IB: He is scrunching them like this! (He furrows his brow) It looks like, I am not sure, two worms, two…how you say…two worms mating, yes?
BBM: Well a furry worm is probably a caterpillar-
IB: Yes! Exactly. Yes.
BBM: Why do you think so many people find your films challenging?
IB: (Long pause) Stupid.
BBM: The audience is stupid, or my question is not-
IB: The people watching do not have a big enough brain to understand. Many people of course, they do the working from 10 AM to 3 PM, whatever, they go home and sex on their wife, they are watching football, they do not have a mind enough to imagine.
BBM: Right. A lot of people are so beaten down by the day-to-day drudgery that they can’t devote any mental energy to challenging art, and they end up making lowest-common-denominator bullshit like Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory hugely successful.
IB: Their faces look like two worms fucking. Or no, caper- caffa-
BBM: Caterpillars. “A Wife in Trouble” is a marvel. I loved it.
IB: Yes.
BBM: The movie just has a, I wanna say “texture”, that you just don’t find in other stuff. A lot of intense dialogue scenes filmed far away from the actors’ faces, a very rich color palette. It’s like every trend in the film industry was pulling the other way and you just bucked it all and made one hell of a film.
IB: I know, I know.
BBM: So what does the-
IB: I’m okay with it, yeah? I am saying that every person, a man or a woman, is doing the walk. They are, how you say…doing the thing in the…building?
BBM: Okay, yep. Your English is not as good as my producers lead me to belive but go on,
IB: And on the inside of that, there is room for problems. Noam Chomsky, an American, he said that “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” was an English sentence that made sensing out as far as laws of the language go, but it is silly and means nothing-
BBM: Yes, and gutentag-
IB: I am thinking this is in the language, but it is also in the life. You can be doing every things that make sensing, but it is not a thing that makes sense, yeah?
BBM: Let me try to think about that. You seem like, really perky compared to other stuff I’ve seen you in.
IB: Yeah, I’m having cocaine. Whatever. Faster is better, am I right? You can be doing every things that makes sensing, but-
BBM: But it doesn’t really-
IB: It doesn’t do the “if”. That is my name, that is what I’m all about. People forget, they forget all the time that I am 29 years old-
BBM: You are 44, your Wikipedia says-
IB: I may marry a young actress, yes? Have a good film, yes? Look at pictures of my father and not cry? But that is all up to the gods now, yes?
BBM: Uh, yeah. I suppose.
IB: I must retire now. I am feeling dizzied. Perhaps I worked too hard today.
BBM: Doubt it. But thank you for the film, thank you for the interview, If Bjornsen.
IB: Fuck you.
Leave a Reply