SPOTLIGHT December 2023: SUSANNE BIER, Award-Winning, Pond-Hopping, Genre-Diverse Director

Susanne Bier is among Europe’s most prolific and honored female film and television writer-directors. Her career filmography spans formats, genres and countries. Originally from Denmark, some of Bier’s best-known works, at least for international audiences, include Hollywood productions like Bird Box and In A Better World, and the Hollywood remakes of her original films, like Brothers and After the Wedding.

Bier is said to be the first female director to win a Golden Globe (Best Picture, In A Better World), a Primetime Emmy (Directing, The Night Manager), a European Film Award (many, including Achievement in World Cinema in 2021) and an Oscar (Foreign Language Film, In a Better World). She currently co-chairs the Academy’s International Feature Film Executive Committee.

Now she’s back to television, with a star-studded, 6-episode series in the works for Netflix based on Elin Hilderbrand’s New York Times bestselling novel, The Perfect Couple. Starring Nicole Kidman, Liev Schreiber and Dakota Fanning, the shoot got shut down by the strikes and is waiting to resume, with four more weeks left of shooting time, Bier says.

AWFJ has interviewed Bier twice before, including in 2007 when she was in post-production on her very first American film, Things We Lost in the Fire. Since then, she has worked steadily on both continents.

FROM THE BEGINNING

Bier’s movies are often “infused with an intimate concern for family yet often play out on a global stage,” as a profile in the Los Angeles Times summarized. That sense of family, Bier told the LA Times, stemmed from her Jewish upbringing. Her father fled Germany in 1933 following the rise of Hitler, and her mother’s family emigrated from Russia. She was born in 1960 and raised in Copenhagen, and she has two children herself. She initially set out on a career in architecture, studying in Israel and London, but she found herself drawn to film. Bier graduated from Denmark’s National Film School in 1987 and released her first feature film in 1991.

Her career has run the gamut from being a part of the early Danish Dogme 95 movement, which eschewed the special effects and spectacle of Hollywood for a pared-down filmmaking aesthetic, with her film Open Hearts; to local romantic comedies like The One and Only and Love is All You Need; to helming blockbuster material for television and global streaming services like the BBC’s The Night Manager, HBO’s The Undoing and Showtime’s The First Lady.

RECOGNIZING EFFORT

Bier spoke to AWFJ on the eve of receiving the Evolution ICON Award for direction at the closing gala of the 12th edition of the Evolution Mallorca International Film Festival (EMIFF) in Spain. While she declined to talk about her role on the International Oscar Committee, she was forthcoming about the significance of awards like Oscars – or festival honors – for independent filmmakers.

“There’s no doubt that winning an Oscar for a foreign film is a huge, important thing in terms of career potential,” she says. “It opens a door where you can actually meet people, which is the first step, and it’s important. Then your work has to kind of live up to that because there are no guarantees, but it does actually matter.”

“In a deeper, more personal way, I think awards are a very joyful recognition of all the effort you’ve put in,” she adds. “It says, yes, you have been working hard and you have been trying and somehow, somehow, whatever you’ve been aiming at has hit some kind of goal.”

Professional recognition can also be crucial for attaching financing to future projects, especially for filmmakers working outside Hollywood. But, she adds, “certain awards can scare people because they think, does that mean that this movie or that this filmmaker is too sophisticated and too arthouse? I think it’s a weird cocktail of awards being very helpful, in conjunction with some version of commercial success. Then it kind of ticks a lot of boxes. I think one without the other can, on a personal level, be satisfying, but in a kind of career version of it, can also be much more dangerous in a way.”

ARTHOUSE GHETTO

Being seen as “too sophisticated” or “too arthouse” can limit a filmmaker’s potential, Bier notes. “Movies and television are meant for an audience. And then you can decide if you want to do something very narrow and do it very inexpensive, and that’s a conscious decision, which is fine. But essentially, you do need to address an audience for what you’re doing. And that’s why I think being seen as a narrow arthouse filmmaker is problematic, because it defies the core of what we’re doing.”

Her steady movement back and forth between Europe and Hollywood, as well as her sensitivity to what audiences want to watch, has helped her avoid the arthouse ghetto. “In Europe, I was always considered too mainstream to be arthouse. I was never really part of the festival scene because I was relatively mainstream, and I was always interested in this. Even when I did my first movies, I would have my own testing system and show them to the audience and have a little questionnaire that I made myself because I was keen for it to actually communicate.”

Hollywood has also remade Bier’s work. “Once I’m finished with a film, it’s done, and I’m letting it go, and I’m happy letting it go. I’m looking at it with huge pride, and that pride is not going to go away because somebody else is doing it.” Still, she admits, “I don’t feel possessive, I just feel slightly weird. It’s kind of intriguing and weird. I am wondering sometimes, can they do something, can they tell me something I haven’t solved? But then it’s quite hard for me to assess that.” What might stall the trend toward remakes is the fact, as Bier points out, that “movies in languages other than English have become much more popular.”

OPENING DOORS FOR WOMEN

And not just movies, but also series. For Bier, the streaming platforms and “television” offer a frontier of opportunities for storytellers, particularly women. “In a way, television at the moment enables us to watch and create sophisticated stories that still reach an audience because the audience is so big. It enables us to do both.”

She notes that though female directors have taken top awards at major international festivals in recent times, statistically they are still “lagging way behind” their male counterparts. “I still think, unfortunately, it’s hard for young female directors to kick in the door and get that opportunity that they really need to get.”

Scandinavia has led the charge for gender parity in the audiovisual sector, and Bier is cognizant of the cultural norms that allow for this. “We have a tradition of harmonized childcare. We have a tradition of actually enabling or, not just enabling, but easing the challenges that young women have in terms of how to have a life and have a career in this particular field, and I think it matters. And also, in general in society, in Denmark we have a female prime minister, we do traditionally enable women to have a life and have a career, and that obviously also has an impact on our industry.”

WHY WE CHOSE HER

Bier is that rare combination of a director with a sophisticated, arthouse style and simultaneously a commercial sensitivity. Her career shows a high level of independence in choosing source material, shooting locations and production sizes. She’s forged a successful path that is statistically and logistically complicated for female directors. She’s also rebounded from critical flops (2014’s Serena), and set records of her own (Netflix’s Bird Box). And through it all, she hasn’t lost sight of where she’s from or what makes her perspective unique. — Jennifer Green