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Director's Statement
When you write fiction you are limited by your imagination and you often create likeable characters that are acceptable to the audience. The danger is that you distance your self from real life and create characters that are one-dimensional.
With the films CHILDREN and PARENTS I started from a theme. I felt what sort of things I wanted to explore in an instinctive way and I wanted to make films in close co-operation with the actors, working profoundly on character to achieve authenticity in the acting.
Inspired by the working methods of Leigh, Godard and Casavettes, I got the theatre group Vesturport to collaborate with me. The actors were given the assignment of presenting a character they know from their own lives or loosely based on real people. They were to undergo practical training and explore particular aspects of their characters, such as getting to know their characters' jobs.
The following months we spent on improvisation and research to build up the characters and develop the plot. During this I decided how the characters were to be linked then retired to write the outline, which was primarily to distill the improvisations to their essence, give them structure and develop the story. And then shooting began, with no written dialogue, but each actor with an extensive sense of his character. The thing was to be, not to act.
CHILDREN and PARENTS are films made with passion felt by all who took part. First and foremost we wanted to tell the stories that matter to us, and hopefully would affect our future audience.