Out in theaters today is Danish director Tobias Lindholm’s (A Hijacking) latest film, A War, a humanistic exploration of the personal and psychological struggles of soldiers. Set in Denmark and Afghanistan, the film stars Pilou Asbæk as a company commander accused of committing a war crime under duress. The consequences of his actions in the field are felt not just by him, but by his wife and kids back home. War movie sensationalism is cast aside in favor of introspective complexity in this unique, exceptional take on a Hollywood genre that’s run cold as of late. Lindholm’s use of real veterans gives his film a layer of realism that heightens the drama in a powerful, sobering way.

I spoke to Lindholm about the film and his experience making it, which is out in theaters now.

There’s a lot of moral and emotional complexity to your movie. It’s a bit challenging in that way, and it’s also about war, which makes it even trickier to market to big audiences. That being said, how does it feel to be nominated for an Oscar? That recognition will obviously garner the film a considerable amount of attention and ensure an international audience.
I mean, we are enjoying every second of it. This movie started out with me writing the first word in a blank document, then reaching out and meeting all these Danish veterans that served in Afghanistan and meeting Afghan refugees. It was never the aim to have international success and actually be nominated for an Oscar and reach this large an audience. But nevertheless, we’re here now. For me to make those phone calls to the refugees, to the veterans, telling them, “You didn’t know whether I was going to do a good film or a bad film. You had no idea. But you all were loyal and shared bravely your experiences with me. To be able to share this with them is just amazing. A lot of the soldiers who were in the film are flying out here to party with me after the Oscars. That’s basically what I’m looking forward to. [laughs]

The film will be reaching a worldwide audience now with the Oscar recognition. But as you eluded to, the most important audience, perhaps, are the veterans who were brave enough to work with you on this movie and share their stories. What was it like screening the movie for them?
Oh, that’s always the most scary part, you know? I’ve made films now for ten years and I’m kind of getting used to the fact that it’s nerve-racking to know the critics are going to watch it and that the reviews are coming out and all that. But in this case it’s even harder because the witnesses are the men and women, the soldiers. To have them view it…I can’t describe how nervous [I was]. I was walking around for two hours not knowing where to go. Luckily, in this case, everybody was very pleased. We see now that the movie also translates well to the international veterans community. In that way, we feel great that we’ve been able to be loyal to the reality we’ve portrayed.

Most of the veterans I’ve met are very humble, almost shy to share their wartime stories. For you to find this group of soldiers who were so open about their experiences is incredible.
I never asked them any questions. I sat down and listened. When I start a conversation with one of these soldiers, I’d never ask, “How was it?” and so on. It’s technical questions, like “Why do you enter a compoound like that?” To get them speaking about it from a professional point of view. It’s their pride. They know this. They’ve rehearsed it so many times. By being loyal to that and wanting to understand I guess opened them up to understand that I was not there to be a parasite. I actually wanted to understand the reality. Slowly, when everybody starts to feel comfortable, they will start to share. Then it’s my job to be the editor and find the bits and pieces I can use. But I never sit down and ask emotional questions about the war. I know that if anyone came in and asked me about the most vulnerable place in me, I would shut down and not talk about it. If that’s where the conversation ends with them, that’s okay becasue I can use the technical stuff the film. How do you handle a gun? How do you talk to the locals? Understanding that will help me portray it.

I met the first soldier at a wedding and, as we know, magical things can happen when you’re a little drunk. Not too drunk, but just a little. At this wedding I had had a couple of drinks and I ended up at the bar with another man who had been in Iraq three times and once in Afghanistan. He just started to talk about how it was to be home and wanting to raise a family. He was the first generation of being a professional soldier in Denmark ever. That opened up a conversation we continued throughout the next few years. He invited in people he served with. Him giving approval to me helped the other guys open up as well.

I have a certain reverence and respect for soldiers when I’m around them. They’ve done things I can’t imagine. There must be a great pressure to tell their stories authentically but does that impede on the artistic process in any way? You are a storyteller with a vision at the end of the day.
The reason I do these stories, is because I want to show these stories we often see in the news from a human point of view. I don’t want to be political, I don’t want to be judgmental. I just want to understand what it is to be human in that situation. The film I did before this one is called A Hijacking, about Danish sailors being captured by Somali pirates. I don’t meet these people as me being a civilian and them being soldiers. Me being a civilian and them being heroes. I always just try to meet them as human beings and try to relate to what they’re going through. This is where we’re equal. I think this is the most important thing we can do as human beings. There are a lot of points where we’re different. All of us. But where we’re the same is the most important. That’s where the audience can relate to these guys. Even though it’s not comparable, I live a life as a filmmaker where I have to leave my kids and my wife for a long time sometimes to do my films. I know the feeling of not being able to connect with them on a proper phone line. Then I can chip in, and the soldiers will be able to relate to that. It’s not a consequence of being a soldier; it’s a consequence of being away from your family. My point of view as an artist is to make a film about human beings in a conflict instead of making a film about a conflict.

What’s unique about the Danish perspective on war?
The unique thing about our perspective on the war in Iraq and, in this case, Afghanistan, is that it’s the first war we’ve fought since the second World War. In the second World War, we fought for five hours and then gave up. As you can imagine, it has defined my generation in that we’re very new to this. In many ways, we are in a post-Vietnam phase in our country right now. We are not used to being a warfaring country yet. I guess that gives us a naive perspective of what’s going on. I still feel I need to confront stuff that a lot of other nations have accepted. I think the Danish perspective is that we’re new at this. We’re still learning. Therefore, we may be asking questions other nations have started to forget to ask.

There’s a pursuit of authentic truth in your productions. I like that you wanted to reference reality in your work, not other war movies. What are the benefits of this approach to storytelling?
There’s a contradiction here. I’m an educated screenwriter. I realized quite fast that I’m not amused by my own imagination. I find it boring. If I have to sit for two hours and make stuff up, I’m like, “I can’t do this.” But if I connect with the world, that’s interesting. I love to connect with these people. One of the big benefits is to share this and try to understand the world. It helps me on a personal level to constantly confront my perspective of the world. At the same time, you can say that, by sharing, this is not my project in the world but our project, all the people who have chipped in to make this film possible. I’m a team player. I’m a soccer player from childhood. I love to be on a team. I feel the most creative and most energized when I’m surrounded by people who want the same thing as me, whatever we’re doing.

This might be a little complex, but every human being in this world is trained from the day we are born and on to understand the world around us. We all enter new rooms every day. We all always spend a second when we meet a stranger to feel if this person is sad or angry or depressed or whatever. We don’t need any time to actually relate to other people. With moviemaking, it seems we think the audience has left that ability outside the cinema. We tell them all kinds of information to make them understand who we’re dealing with. I often get frustrated with being over-informed by all kinds of details about characters in films. I just want to watch a film where I can relate to people on a human level like I relate to people on a human level on the streets or in a restaurant. I remember watching the American documentary Restrepo and suddenly relating to these guys on a human level. I especially remember the scene where one of the soldiers has an anxiety attack because one of the other soldiers is shot and killed. In the middle of the firefight, he breaks down. For me, that’s proof of human life in war. I wanted to portray that and not just make references to other films. When I’m seeing explosions in war films, they’re always way too big. When I’m watching explosion

When I’m seeing explosions in war films, they’re always way too big. When I’m watching explosions from a helmet cam, I see a lot of dirt and sand in the air. And then silence. And then the screaming starts. The timing of reality is slightly different. I found it more interesting and more beneficial to try to approach the reality of it. I think our human ear and human eye is somehow educated to understand what is real and what is not real. I want to invite people into a natural portrayal of war instead of being another fascinated film about war.

In light of Paul Greengrass’ Captain Phillips — in which Tom Hanks’ performance is the tip of an iceberg of Oscar winning collaborators involved in a terse, modern-day piracy movie — the far fewer-studded Danish thriller A Hijacking (Kapringen) has likely fallen by the wayside. My respect for Greengrass (despite Green Zone) aside, Captain Phillips draws few similarities to A Hijacking, even given the shared dramatic premise: white man’s (Danish, American) ship is hijacked by Somali pirates demanding obscene sums of money for hostages. Rather, what director Tobias Lindholm has achieved with A Hijacking seems counter to every trope from which more conventional Hollywood-backed thrillers (among which we can count Captain Phillips) are made.

Yet here are two remarkably gripping and effective movies that are unlikely to escape comparisons to one another, in spite of their vastly different formal and performative sensibilities. This is not a think-piece espousing upon a pious white hat-black hat division with regard to correct or incorrect filmmaking styles. I’m hoping instead to look at their differences as contributing factors to similarly white-knuckle viewing experiences: both have in common highly contemporary presentations of the medium, but in many respects the ways in which the stories are told form a kind of unmissable and inherent flag-waving for the aesthetic, moral and emotional values of their makers and subjects.

We can’t rush these people. Time is a Western thing. It means nothing to them.

A Hijacking

The titular act of hijacking in A Hijacking is never shown: the first clue that director Lindholm has other priorities. The importance is not in reliving the ordeal that young father and Cook Mikkel (Pilou Asbaek) and crew endured when their cargo ship was taken upon, but the fact that—cut—here they are, suddenly in a situation nobody expected and fewer are prepared for.

Back home in Copenhagen, CEO Peter Ludvigsen (Søren Malling) is busy caught between expert hostage-scenario negotiators, headed by frankly-speaking Brit Connor Julian (Gary Skjoldmose Porter), and a board of advisors within the company growing increasingly finicky about the political ramifications for their business as the situation grows increasingly — and unapologetically, with Lindholm’s dispassive tally of chronological title-carding through not days, but weeks and months — drawn out.

With a stoic, subdued but no less impressive performance for its restraint, Malling plays a man-in-charge in too far above his head, incapable and unwilling to let anyone see it. Advised by the experts to let the experts do the talking, Peter insists on negotiating with the pirates personally, feeling a responsibility and accountability for his men that is both heroic and, in a moment of both knowing and dread for the audience, foolhardy.

In extraordinary circumstances where human lives — their families and livelihoods — are reduced to seemingly meaningless numbers of dollars, the common gut reaction is to just give them what they want. That the expert negotiators insist on playing the riskiest hardball (a figure of millions demanded by the pirates is retorted by a nominal increase of tens of thousands to a base of mere hundreds of thousands, for example) is not a tactic driven by profits or money-saving, but a strategy of psychological chess-boarding that more emotionally-attached men like Peter struggle with. In numerous instances, Peter must hang up on a member of his crew begging for their life, offering a curt, dismissive “I will not discuss this with you,” when we can feel he is seeking nothing more than his own redemption through their safe release. Scenes showing Peter alone, before and after these calls, highlight the incredible toll they take and elicit genuine sympathy for the corporate bigwig in a suit. Lindholm understands, and makes us understand, that negotiations of this sort benefit little from bombastic threats or rash decisions: that sometimes silence speaks louder than words, even in the most extraordinary cases.

Onboard, the bargaining on behalf of the Somali pirates falls to interpretor Omar, in a chilling and terrific turn by Abdihakin Asgar both sympathetic and, on a whim, frightening. Omar insists, persistently, to Mikkel and crew that though he speaks their language and speaks for them, he is not one of them. In one scene in particular Mikkel crosses this line, a phone call to his wife dramatically turning into perhaps the most psychologically harrowing moment of the picture. It’s a reminder from Lindholm that regardless of the surface-level formality and sense of ordered, polite transactions he so effectively and unflashily portrays, A Hijacking is dealing with complex, subtextual exchanges of power; where every word selection, every second delayed in response, carries with it communicative consequences that impact the final negotiation.

The turn of events that lead to the resolution of conflicts may well be hardwired into the fact that the pirates understand humanity. But the undercutting of this moment, the closest A Hijacking comes to traditional sentimentality, in the coda brilliantly and daringly underscores that this is a film that remains attuned to the immeasurable and finally unpredictable chaos of the modern world.

If they find you, remember—you know this ship, they don’t.

Captain Phillips

For a director known for his ability to bring a frenetic urgency to action filmmaking, yet do so in a way that the viewer remains oriented and aware of the stakes, Captain Phillips must rate as one of Paul Greengrass’ most accomplished achievements. He showed with the cathartically powerful United 93 (2006) and in the more conventionally thrilling The Bourne Ultimatum (2007’s franchise high) a brand of you-are-there cinematography and rapid-fire editing that has become his signature, but equally found him detractors.

Greengrass’ is a cinema of seemingly mundane scenarios repeatedly revisited and cross-cut amidst a melange of other mundane scenarios, acutely aware and across all the tiny little details that are unraveling a greater narrative tension slowly building. It’s not everybody’s cup of tea, but regardless of whether you want to allow it to, it works. No filmmaker is better at depicting a good day gone bad than Greengrass, and Captain Phillips captures a good day gone particularly bad indeed for Richard Phillips (the inimitable Tom Hanks).

Working from a script by Billy Ray from Phillips’ own memoir, the witnessing of the buildup and inevitable hijacking of Maersk Alabama, the US Cargo ship sailing the Somali Coast, is paramount. It’s a partly dramatic and partly political directorial decision to provide such emphasis on the event: two skiffs approaching fast, one with a more motivated band of pirates than the other, dissuaded as the latter are by the perimeter of high-speed water jets brought up to defend the oncoming attack. Where the Europeans were content with a mere smash-cut to the sticky situation, Greengrass is here purposefully trying to provide an elongated context for Phillips’ heroism beyond whatever even he deemed himself capable: that here is a man who has worked his way to the top through a disciplined study of process and protocol, but that despite his best preparations the ship’s resources — and by extension the institutions that provided them — have failed him; that here is an instance where a man should be able to just reach for a fucking gun. But as marine regulations of the time (circa 2009) dictated all Cargo ships were to sail unarmed, Phillips is left to rely on his own resourcefulness and personality to try and reach a resolution in his interactions with Muse (impressive first-timer Barkhad Adbi), his Somali counterpart.

There is a gleeful sense of schadenfreude when Muse and his crew learn they’ve boarded an American ship, as if they’ve struck some kind of moral jackpot in doing so. Muse makes a habit of mocking Phillips’ Irish heritage, even as they grow to understand each other over the standoff; one of many knowingly cynical jabs at the status of the United States as a much-touted land of opportunity. When things invariably escalate to a point where both Phillips and Muse are backed into their corners, a desperation emerges in each that takes remarkably different forms. Muse finds himself in a life or death scenario: literally on a sinking, claustrophobic lifeboat, his hostage his only bargaining chip, his rag-tag band of pirates variously injured or frustratingly inept, losing hope but seeing no way forward but to commit to a fight he can’t win. Across the boat, we see in Phillips’ eyes the startling realisation that Muse is realising exactly this. As the almost cartoonishly Yankee-sounding S.E.A.L ‘negotiator’ cooly disseminates radio instruction with unfailingly exact protocol, syntax and procedure, we feel the weight of a land with seemingly infinite resources flexing its muscle, but doing so only as and when provoked in the appropriate manner. If the Somalis question the American Dream for non-Americans, there is no questioning this—the finality of the end, and the restoration, however momentary, of order to the modern world.

That we have so deeply related to Phillips is testament to the effortless niceness and rounded comprehensibility of Hanks as a presence and a performer. For all his brave and Big (pun intended) performances in the past, his Phillips resonates because he seems, this time, to be trying so very little; and similarly for all the prevailing America, Fuck Yeah! that can be felt in the inevitable third act, Greengrass too manages to make something subversive by dialing back the largess of the patriotic sentiment. Are our emphatic responses to the clinical efficiency of the Marines not motivated by the same impulses that caused a cackle when the Somalis realised they’d jumped an American ship? In Captain Phillips‘ understated, but unexpectedly moving final scene, Hanks unravels with a kind of ‘un’-acting acting that brandishes any semblance of method, technique, or studied process, and which brings the film to a thematic and experiential converging: we are right there, with him, like him, not knowing where we are — or where we stand.