Blazing a trail

Things We Lost in the Fire stars Halle Berry and Benicio del Toro as a widow and drug addict trying to overcome the death of her husband, David Duchovny. It's an assured US debut by Danish director Susanne Bier, who found Hollywood much less scary than expected. She talks to Michael Dwyer.

'THIS is my day for talking to Irishmen," Danish director Susanne Bier exclaims as we tuck into our sushi lunch at her London hotel. "Jim Sheridan called me today. It was nice of him to call."

The Irish director is filming the US remake of Bier's compelling 2004 moral drama, Brothers, which follows the triangular arrangement formed when an army officer joins a UN peace-keeping mission in Afghanistan, and his younger brother, an aimless drifter, becomes drawn to the officer's wife while he is away. Sheridan's version features Jake Gyllenhaal, Tobey Maguire and Natalie Portman.

Meanwhile, Bier has directed her first US movie, Things We Lost in the Fire, featuring Halle Berry as a woman grieving for her late husband (David Duchovny), who was shot while trying to save a woman from a violent attack. Benicio Del Toro co-stars as her husband's best friend since childhood, now living in squalor and fighting his heroin addiction.

Characters struggling to cope with trauma triggered by unexpected events have been a preoccupation of Bier's films. "I think that is my way of dealing with a personal fear of mine," she says. "Being Jewish, I have a strong feeling of the unexpected as a reality. By making movies, I can address my inner fear. However, all my movies, and particularly this one, have got a lot of hope in them. I want to deal with anxiety and grief, but I also want to make sure by the time the film ends that people know that there is hope, too."

Such is the universality of the themes she has treated that two of Bier's other recent movies, Open Hearts and After the Wedding, are also set to be remade in the US. "It's kind of funny," she says, "like having my kids adopted by strange parents."

Would she ever consider directing an English-language remake of one of her own films, as Austrian director Michael Haneke did recently with Funny Games?

"No," she says firmly and then pauses for thought. "There is one film of mine that I wouldn't mind doing again, and that would be my first film, Freud's Leaving Home. Although I would be scared of doing it because it might seem that the circle had ended. It would be quite a different movie if I did it again now."

Quite a few European directors have suffered nightmare experiences when working on a Hollywood studio film for the first time. "I heard that, but I was not frightened by it," Bier says. "It was not at all like that for me. DreamWorks were surprisingly supportive, and having Sam Mendes as a producer helped a great deal. They protected me very well."

A British film-maker better known as a director than a producer, Mendes was well used to dealing with US studios, having worked with them on his Oscar-winning debut film American Beauty, and on The Road to Perdition and Jarhead.

"He knows exactly what one needs - and what one does not need," Bier says. "He was always there when I needed him, but he was never imposing or intrusive when I didn't need him. That was a perfect arrangement for me."

Reading Allan Loeb's screenplay for Things We Lost in the Fire was enough to convince Bier that she should work on a US production for the first time. "I just felt compelled by the script," she says. I felt it described real characters, real human beings. I thought it was funny and touching. I was crying by the time I finished reading the script."

This is her 12th feature film in 16 years, and she had a larger budget than on any of her earlier movies.

"I expected the difference to be much greater than it actually was," she says. "I didn't want to let myself get carried away by having a bigger budget. I did not want to do things just because I could afford to do them. I made a conscious decision not to be misled in that respect. I wanted to maintain the scale of the movie at a very intimate level. In the end, I approached making the film in the same way as all the movies I made in Denmark."

Although she met a number of actors when she was casting her US film, Bier says that she had Berry and Del Toro in mind for the leading roles before she talked to either of them. "They might seem an unlikely couple, but I thought they would work very well together. Of course, their characters are not a likely couple in the film. It takes them a while before they get to know and understand each other."

Characteristically, Del Toro thoroughly immerses himself in his role, and never more effectively than in the character's cold turkey sequence.

"I think he's a fantastic actor," Bier says. "He's so magnetic and earnest at the same time, and he has got this weird, great sense of humour. I think he perceives the world as being kind of surreal. I get that sense from him that everything is kind of absurd in a way. I think that infuses everything he does. He squeezes so much comical essence into things that are not necessarily all that funny. You know the scene where he smokes a cigarette in the shower? When my editor saw that, she asked me if I was scared that the scene was just too funny. I said I was not; that odd sense of humour suited his character."

Bier prefers to have two editors working on her movies, and Pernell Bech Christensen has been editing her films since Bier made her feature debut with Freud's Leaving Home in 1991. "Having two editors makes it easier for me because I like to have a lot of material processed while I am shooting. It's a way for me to have a clearer view of what I've shot and what I'm missing. And it helps me to see things in actors that I normally wouldn't see. It's a very important tool for me."

The roots of any successful film are in the screenplay, she believes, and this was emphasised when she was studying at the National Film School in Denmark, where she graduated in 1987.

"Henning Camre, who was the head of the school, made a conscious choice to start a script department. He felt that we should not look to America for our inspiration for film-making, but that we should look at our roots in literature and painting. He was looking for students who were storytellers rather than technicians. But I'm concerned now because they have changed the funding system in Denmark and given a lot more power to the producers. I don't know if executives are the best readers of scripts."

She hopes that her next film will be a comedy, which will make quite a contrast after all the angst and inner turmoil expressed on screen in her most recent films. Her only previous venture into comedy, The One and Only (1999), observed the romantic complications of two couples in Copenhagen. It registered close to a million admissions in Denmark - a fifth of the country's population.

"That's my claim to fame in Denmark, actually," she says. "That was my biggest hit and I had such fun doing it. I didn't want to do another comedy because I wanted to keep challenging myself. But it's been a while now and I feel it's time for me to return to comedy." Will she make it in Denmark? She pauses before she replies, "I think I'd like to do it in English."

Things We Lost in the Fire will be released on February 1st