He was the Dogme auteur who had the world at his feet, then it all fell apart. Thomas Vinterberg talks about hitting rock bottom, splitting up with Lars Von Trier – and what a ‘Danish handshake’ really means

Two decades ago, Thomas Vinterberg came roaring out of Denmark, a precocious, brilliant brat whose second feature, Festen, electrified audiences worldwide and put the Dogme movement on the map. But Festen is ancient history now – Vinterberg has since experienced the bitter taste of failure, both artistic and personal. But against all odds, he is returning as a confident, comfortable lion, with a big fat period adaptation under his belt. Far From the Madding Crowd, based on the Thomas Hardy novel – by way of a script by David Nicholls – stars Carey Mulligan and is produced by British film industry titans Andrew Macdonald and Allon Reich. Born and bred in Denmark, Vinterberg might be a little out of his comfort zone with rolling Dorset hill country, plaintive harvest songs and high Victorian collars, but he is clearly not someone lacking in self-belief.

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“You know,” he says, “I felt the relief of not having written it myself; of knowing I was doing a Thomas Hardy film, not a Thomas Vinterberg film. So I guess I allowed myself a moment of just being a director. I thought I deserved that.”

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Vinterberg can be permitted a small moment of self-congratulation. Now 45, he may no longer be the film-school rebel with male-model looks on a mission to upend the sonorous pieties of arthouse cinema; indeed, he has rather obviously been through his share of ups and downs. But taking on what he calls “a very traditional work-for-hire situation” is, the way he tells it, a breath of fresh air for someone who used to think of himself as a European auteur.

“It’s always been me-me-me-me all the way through my career. But in a studio movie like this, there’s a script, some executives – all very smart people – and as the director, you are not the king, you are a member of the board. I enjoyed that. I thought: let’s do this, as a commune, as a collective.”

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Communes, it turns out, are a bit of a preoccupation for Vinterberg. He spent part of his childhood in one: a very 70s-sounding place of open relationships and adolescent sexual curiosity. He recycled his memories into a play – and film, already in the can – called The Commune. He uses the term to characterise the Dogme movement, of which he was a key founding member in 1995, and of which Festen was proudly Dogme #1. (“I was the youngest, so I got to go first.”) Vinterberg seems to appreciate the sense of Scandinavian peculiarity the term brings with it, a sort of far-north exoticism; and it’s something he aimed to bring to bear on the niceties of the British literary movie. “I had the feeling the producers wanted me to dust off a genre, and the problem is, if you do that, you get a lot of dust on your own hands.”

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He cites a scene he invented in which the raffish Sergeant Troy, played by Tom Sturridge, clutches Bathsheba’s crotch – “the crew called it ‘the Danish handshake’” – but suggests he “would have gone much further if it had been a Danish film”. He might be the beneficiary of a current fad for bringing in Scandi directors to freshen up British period pieces – Swede Tomas Alfredson and Norwegian Morten Tyldum being the obvious examples, on Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Imitation Game respectively – but Vinterberg prefers to think there’s something more to it. “It’s not a very inspiring thought, just to be part of a silly trend. I was hoping it was something finer than that.”

Talking an inspirational game is, it would seem, a key attribute for a contemporary film-maker, and Vinterberg is something of a master at it. Festen, for example, he characterises as, “an attempt to make something truthful and honest, that was breathing in a naked way”. He uses similar language to describe his “mantra” for the way Far From the Madding Crowd was shot: “We wanted to be close to them, to feel them breathing.” He has a ready, full-throttle response to critical nitpicking over his casting of the decidedly non-Wessex Matthias Schoenaerts as Gabriel Oak. “I thought: here’s a guy who can listen to a woman, embrace a woman, even humble himself for a woman, and still be very much a man. In his quiet, calm, testosterone presence, I thought he was the perfect Oak.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Joaquin Phoenix and Claire Danes in Vinterberg’s ‘extravagant folly’ from 2003, It’s All About Love. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Zenith

That’ll tell ’em. Vinterberg gets a little more Danish when he describes getting Schoenaerts and Mulligan in a room together for the first time – “it was very sexy, very attractive” – and confesses to having been a bit mean to Mulligan during the final scene with Schoenaerts; apparently, she fell off her horse and came back from hospital, in his words, “shattered”, and he says he “took advantage of that, like the dark monster I am”. (Without wanting to give too much away, Vinterberg and Nicholls have given Madding Crowd a proper romantic ending, unlike the 1967 Julie Christie version, which hewed much closer to Hardy’s ambiguous original.)

Now he has made his putatively evergreen classic, Vinterberg can afford to be expansive and forgiving of his past difficulties. None of the three features he made after Festen came close to following up its success. It took five years to get the extravagant folly It’s All About Love into cinemas, with its high-profile cast and grand ambition; Vinterberg acknowledges that it is “dramatically dysfunctional” but that “it’s like my troubled child: it behaves really badly, but it’s the one I love very dearly.” He bounced from this bruising experience to another: Dear Wendy, an eccentric fable about teenage American kids who fall in love – literally – with their handguns, written by his former Dogme compadre Lars von Trier, who – notoriously – has never set foot in the US. Dear Wendy attracted derisive reviews, and Vinterberg admits that he reached rock bottom: “Everything had fallen apart – my career, my financial situation, my marriage. It was over, a full-on midlife crisis.”

Vinterberg’s solution was to strike out on his own, and to say goodbye to Von Trier. He talks about their decade-long closeness as if it were a marriage: “It felt natural to make the break after Dear Wendy. We couldn’t get any closer other than jumping in bed together. Now we’re just friends.” Having “found himself”, Vinterberg made the palate-cleansing junkie drama Submarino – “it looked like the films I made at film school” – though its drastically limited release suggested the world was not quite ready for the new Vinterberg.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘It felt natural to make the break after that film. We couldn’t get any closer other than jumping in bed together. Now we’re just friends’ … Lars von Trier (left) and Thomas Vinterberg on the set of Dear Wendy in 2005. Photograph: Alamy

All that changed in 2012, when Vinterberg brought The Hunt to Cannes; it knocked out the critics and won the best actor prize for its lead, Mads Mikkelsen. Vinterberg allows himself a touch of asperity when the word “comeback” is mentioned: “That implies I’ve been away. I wasn’t away; you guys were away. I was here all the time.”

He is also forthright on the subject of the negative reviews some of his work has received. “I don’t read reviews now, but I did once. When you get a bad review, you hate the writer. It’s very painful; whoever says the opposite lies. It’s humiliating. Sometimes it comes from an honest place, but most times it comes from a desire to trash someone. It’s never about the film; it’s very often about the reviewer himself, jerking off in front of everybody.”

Vinterberg finishes the interview by explaining what he learned about himself during his mid-career crack-up. “I found I am not an anarchistic form creator; I’m intuitive, and I’m trying to figure out a way to explore human fragility.” Far From the Madding Crowd is a solid step in that direction; The Commune, you suspect, will be even more so. “It’s All About Love and Dear Wendy were form experiments. Now it’s a different ballgame; I can look at what is really close to me.”

• Far From the Madding Crowd is in cinemas from Friday 1 May