Why didn't Thomas Vinterberg make a film with Families Like Ours?

The Danish director is trying his hand at TV series for the first time, at the age of 55. He explains why.

After 30 years of career and around twenty feature films, Thomas Vinterberg takes on the small screen! With Families Like Ourscurrently broadcast on Canal + and co-produced by Studio Canal, the 55-year-old filmmaker is making his first series, six years after his last film, Drunk. Thomas Vinterberg then won the prize with an Oscar and a César for Best Foreign Film and even a nomination for an Oscar for Best Director. So why did you decide to change media? For what Thomas Vinterberg did not make a film with Families Like Ours ? He responds to Première:

“The content gives its shape to the project. And the story of Families Like Ours required us to establish gravity, it took time for that. I wanted us to go and visit these families, their homes, every week , in a new episode This is also why we did not make the series with a streaming platform, which tends to broadcast the series in a single block.

Before him, other major directors of the Danish 7th art experimented with the serial format, with varying degrees of success. Lars von Trierin the 1990s, signed The Hospital and its Ghosts (The Kingdom) while Nicolas Winding Refn imagined Too Old to Die Young for Prime Video from the platform's inception in 2019.

But Thomas Vinterberghe did not give in to the sirens of the small screen in the middle of the era of peak tv, favoring cinema. Even if he admits to having “always wanted to try the series, since I made Festen in 1998. But I had not yet managed to make this desire a reality. And then it became very trendy over time to make series, so it became a less exciting idea for me“, he smiled. “And now that the golden age of series is fading somewhat, that’s where I want to come!”