“No shit, Sherlock!”: the cinema movement Mads Mikkelsen considers “silly” over seminal
The cultural world we live in is a very different one to the decades gone by. For some reason, likely the internet, things have become entirely homogenised: people think, talk and act the same way, ‘movements’ are few and far between, the idea that you could tell what kind of music or movies people are into by the way they dress, for example, seems a long forgotten one.
But that wasn’t the case in the 1990s, when a group of Scandi filmmakers decided they were bored with the way movies were made and employed actors like Mads Mikkelsen to start what would become known as Dogme 95.
Those directors, like the divisive Danish auteur Lars Von Trier, began making films that were very DIY in feel, often using handheld cameras, often with controversial subject matter and on occasion seemingly made just to upset people. They also had a really very strange obsession with disability, which would sometimes cross the line into able-bodied producers simply making fun of those who didn’t have that luxury.
There was even a ten-point manifesto written out by Von Trier and his fellow director friend Thomas Vinterberg that attempted to ‘purify’ filmmaking; eschewing the use of special effects, or studio shoots or even the use of music, and thereby making the films ‘chaste’.
Mikkelsen, for his part, found fame at about the same time thanks to the Nicolas Winding Refn action thriller Pusher, and although he appeared in films by Vinterberg (but not Von Trier), he has strong thoughts on Dogme 95, once telling The Guardian, “To be frank, I just thought it was silly. Sitting down and writing down ten commandments of how to approach filmmaking? ‘The story is important’, no shit, Sherlock! Seriously? Do you have to write that down? Was it not important before you wrote it down? All these things were common fucking sense to me.”
Mikkelsen’s contribution to the movement was 2002’s Open Hearts, a Danish drama that (predictably) deals with disability, as a man causes another man to become tetraplegic in a car accident, but as though that weren’t enough, proceeds to fall in love with his fiancée as well.
Also sometimes referred to as Dogme #28, the film was very well received by critics on release, winning several industry awards, and was directed by Susanne Bier, who would go on to win ‘Best Foreign Language Film’ at the 2011 Oscars for In a Better World.
Open Hearts follows those rules set out, of handheld cameras and no music, but while Mikkelsen derided Dogme 95, he does appreciate the upside to the furore that it caused, adding, “Yeah, I had mixed emotions for it at that time. But we should be super-grateful for the movement. It was a fantastic way of placing Denmark on the map.”
This month will see his fantasy horror Dust Bunny hit HBO Max, the well-received movie that was director Bryan Fuller’s first feature-length film after building his career in television, including the serial killer hit Hannibal, which featured Mikkelsen in the lead role and ran between 2013 and 2015. Around that time, Mikkelsen also made a movie called The Hunt with Vinterberg, which proved hugely controversial due to its subject matter but brought him a ‘Best Actor’ award at the Cannes Film Festival.
