Toronto Film Festival: Susanne Bier takes ‘A Second Chance’

Even as it has recently become apparent that mid-level adult-themed storytelling is now something of an endangered species in Hollywood, director Susanne Bier and her screenwriting collaborator Anders Thomas Jensen have consistently turned out the sort of intelligent, morally probing dramas that supposedly people don’t make anymore.

It’s just that they do it largely from Denmark.

Bier’s latest film, “A Second Chance,” is set to have its world premiere Tuesday night as part of the Toronto International Film Festival and enters the festival looking for U.S. distribution. Bier won the Academy Award for best foreign language film for 2010’s “In A Better World” and was also nominated for her 2006 film “After The Wedding.”

“A Second Chance” is a dense, dark and multi-layered tale that in some sense asks the question how many wrongs make a right. “Game of Thrones” star Nikolaj Coster-Waldau plays Andreas, a cop who has recently become a father. His wife Anne (Maria Bonnevie) seems to be struggling a bit adjusting to motherhood, but in many ways they are the picture of the perfect couple. Andreas is trying to keep his recently divorced partner Simon (Ulrich Thomson) from drinking too much.

Andreas and Simon come across a baby being neglected by a couple of junkies, one of whom, Tristan (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), has a long history of violent run-ins with Andreas. (Tristan’s girlfriend is played by model Lykke May Andersen in her acting debut.) When circumstances take a turn to the extreme, Andreas first tries to take advantage of Tristan, but then comes to realize they are not as different as they seem.

Though Bier and Jensen have collaborated on lighter films such as “Love Is All You Need,” the recent romantic comedy starring Pierce Brosnan, they keep coming back to the fierce and intense storytelling on display in “A Second Chance.”

“It always starts as something else,” Bier said just ahead of the festival, during a phone call from Barcelona, where she was on something of a working vacation by taking time with her family while preparing another project.

“We always kind of play around and have a few ideas and then there is one which keeps on and takes a different shape. I think for Anders Thomas, the whole notion of fatherhood and what that sort of implies, it has been very prominent to him. And for me too, it’s been something I’ve wanted to address for a while.”

Yet the movie is not simply about the sacrifices of parenting, but rather pushes to broader and more unusual moral territory by considering what happens when someone is doing the wrong thing for the right reasons.

“That is the center of the movie,” Bier said, “to get to the point of, ‘I know I should not be doing this, but I will be doing it.’ I think parenthood is one of the reasons for a decent human being to lose all boundaries. I don’t think the movie is about parenthood per se, but I think it’s a condition which enables you to act in a very extreme way, when you otherwise would not.”

Though Coster-Waldau hadn’t worked with Bier before, he went to drama school with Thomson and has worked previously with Kaas. So though Thomas and Kaas have worked with Bier numerous times before -- most notably in 2004’s “Brothers,” which was remade with Tobey Maguire and Jake Gyllenhaal -- is was not as if Coster-Waldau was left as odd man out.

Bier said she first spoke to him about the part and sent him the script while he was in New York filming “The Other Woman,” the Cameron Diaz comedy in which he played the selfish cad at the center of the film’s story.

“It was quite something coming from that world and then reading this script. It’s so far from that,” Coster-Waldau said during a recent interview while in Los Angeles. “I really enjoyed working on ‘The Other Woman,’ don’t get me wrong, but in my mind this was the perfect thing for what to do after.”

So following “The Other Woman” he first shot another season of “Games of Thrones” and then worked on Bier’s film toward the end of last year before restarting work on “Thrones.” It’s likely hard to think of shooting a film as demanding as “A Second Chance” as a vacation, but Coster-Waldau said he wanted to make time for it.

“‘Second Chance,’ that was tough,” he said. “It was probably one of the hardest, but most exciting things I’ve done. It was a really, really intense shoot.”

The story reaches its most complex place in a series of scenes between Andreas and Tristan, as the two men who seemed to have nothing in common and share a fierce hatred for one another come to realize that they face many of the same problems as fathers and partners.

“You can’t say one is supposed to be sympathetic and the other is supposed to be unsympathetic,” Bier said. “Realizing they were borderline, both of them, they are in similar situations that are also hugely, hugely different. And yet they are not as different as we think in the beginning of the movie.

“Part of the fun of the movie,” she added, “part of what we set out to do was to create something where you can’t completely anticipate it all the way through.”

Coster-Waldau said he found working with Bier to be a rewarding experience and that she allowed the actors to constantly be creative in their performances, all the while working to shape what they were doing. If she saw something she liked in a later set-up for a scene, she would go back and reshoot the master shot and anything else necessary to match, he said.

“She would never settle. She’s incredibly unafraid,” Coster-Waldau said. “She has a way of working where she keeps pushing the actors to search. It can be extremely time-consuming but also really liberating. The scene is never done.

“She’s so determined and so focused on not letting go until she feels something that surprised her, moved her. It was incredibly inspiring.”

With “A Second Chance” Bier continues her explorations of deep moral dilemmas. She said that though she knows there are other kinds of movies to make, these are the stories she finds herself drawn to again and again.

“I often feel the movies are a medium for emotions,” she said. “If one can talk about oneself as an artist, this is the kind of painting I keep coming back to.”

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