‘The Promised Land’ Director on Taming the Wild With Mads Mikkelsen

The Promised Land, from Danish director Nikolaj Arcel, is a story of ambition. Set in 1755, it follows Captain Ludvig Kahlen (Mads Mikkelsen), a bankrupt former soldier determined to secure the royal title denied him by birth — the film’s Danish title, Bastarden, is a reference to Kahlen’s origins as the illegitimate son of a rich landowner and his housemaid. He aims to achieve his goal by building a colony for the Danish king in the hinterlands of the heath, at the time a lawless and untamed wilderness. In addition to the unforgiving climate and hardscrabble, crop-resistant soil, Kahlen has to battle with Frederik de Schinkel (Simon Bennebjerg), a brutal and arrogant land baron determined to claim Kahlen’s land for his own.

The premise has the makings of a classic Western: the story of one man taming the frontier. But Arcel, who co-wrote the film with his frequent collaborator Anders Thomas Jensen, takes a very different direction. Adapting Ida Jessen’s Danish best-seller The Captain and Ann Barbara, they turn the character of Kahlen into a more fragile figure, a man who begins to question the purpose and value of his single-minded drive.

On a tight European budget, Arcel has delivered a sweeping, rip-roaring historical epic with grand set pieces and widescreen imagery worthy of John Ford — the kind of big movie almost impossible to finance out of tiny Denmark. 

This is your first Danish film since your Hollywood debut, The Dark Tower. How does working in the European system compare?

My studio system experience left me a little scarred. It wasn’t that much fun. I think most people on that film really wanted to make something great. The problem was that every single person on that project wanted to make something different. There was this constant clash over what kind of film it was supposed to be. In Denmark, for better or worse, it’s your movie — nobody really interferes until you’re done and it’s over. And then if you fail, it’s on your terms. And if you succeed, it’s on your terms. It’s very different. The U.S. is more … “corporate” is probably the right word. A lot more people with a lot more voices. I felt like, “What am I even doing here? If my voice is just one out of 80 different people who have the same say that I have, what am I doing here as a director?” 

There was a vast difference [making] this film, coming back home, working with my friends, my old collaborators, having control of a movie again. When you make a Danish film, nobody expects it to be this huge blockbuster, so there’s not so much fear involved. We don’t have to “win the year” or anything, which allowed a lot more leeway to do the things we want to do.

This film is based on a novel, but the story is inspired by a real person: Captain Ludvig Kahlen, and his real attempts to tame the Danish heath. How much did you feel bound to the actual history in making the movie?

Very little is known about Ludvig Kahlen after he goes off to the heath, so there is very little information about him in the period of our film. I was adapting a work of fiction based on true events, so I was loyal to the book first and to Ida Jessen’s vision. Ludvig is real. Frederik de Schinkel is real. And he really was this kind of a crazy maniac. Those things are documented. But some of the characters she made up completely.

In a lot of his Danish roles, Mads Mikkelsen plays a quite vulnerable character, while in his Hollywood roles, he tends to be cast as the ruthless, hard man. It’s rare to see him combine the two. But he does in this film.

It was a very challenging thing for me to write. Mads really helped me with this. Mads is a brave actor. And every time he and Thomas and I sat down in a room together, it was Mads, especially, who was very adamant that we create a character that was very real in terms of his own psychology. We thought at the beginning we should show him to be a bit more caring. But Mads said, “No, he has to be tough, unfeeling.” He really helped me shape the character in the script. In the first half of the movie, you think, “What an asshole.” Only slowly do you come to understand who he is and why he does what he does. Ludvig is almost like a man who hasn’t had emotions his entire life. And on the heath, in this promised land, he slowly learns what emotion is, and what there is to life besides ambition and drive.

This is in part the story of a driven man who questions his own ambition. Was that also your journey in making the film?

In part, yeah. But it was already happening while I was making it. As every parent knows, as soon as you have a child, your whole outlook changes, your whole life changes. I just had my first one three years ago, as I was about to start writing this film. And now my second son has arrived. The big difference between making this film and every other film I’ve done is that this time, I was longing to get back home. Now I’m more wary of taking on something that might require me to travel overseas or go away from the family. I don’t want to travel too far or for too long. No matter what I do in the near future, or the distant future, I want to be close to my family. I wasn’t thinking about that 10 years ago. Then I thought, “I’m my own man, I can do whatever I want.” It’s not that I’m less ambitious now, but the frame in which I can make the stuff I want to make has changed. Now I have this frame of the family, of home, and anything I want to do has to fit into that. 

This story first appeared in a January standalone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.