Your films are usually inspired by personal experiences or the people around you. Why is it important for you to frame your stories within your personal experience?

So far it has been about being able to recreate some emotional moments as authentic as possible. My fear has been that it gets hard to write something believable without having had experiences close enough to the story I’m telling. It also gives me a feeling of importance in portraying the story and the characters. But I’m slowly moving into working with more fictional stories, but where I try to use my own emotional experiences too.

Where did the idea for A Worthy Man come from?

On a thematic level, in the film I really wanted to explore loneliness within a family. I grew up in the countryside in Denmark and had a feeling that the grown-up men around me in my childhood, like my dad and my uncle, most of them were really challenged when it came to expressing their emotions. Me and my friends were always pretty good at that and spent a lot of time reflecting on life and expressing how we felt about the things happening in our lives. In A Worthy Man, I wanted to show that if you don’t learn how to express yourself,especially when you’re feeling bad, then you can very easily have a breakdown, as it’s portrayed in the film. So the goal for the film was that it should have the quality of being therapeutic for middle-aged men and help them to get better at talking with their family members.

The inspiration for the film came from my uncle, who was a baker. I grew up close to him and his family and spent most of my childhood at their house since his son was my best friend. Because of my uncle’s profession, he had a weird day routine where he would sleep most of the day and work during the night. Because of this, he didn’t have that much time with his family, which of course had a different daily routine. The result of this was that growing up as a kid, I had a hard time understanding and talking to my uncle — he felt absent. I thought that this dynamic was really interesting and wanted to explore it in the film.