Black Crab Director Adam Berg On The State Of The Action-Thriller In Sweden [Interview]

How did you land on how much to reveal and not to reveal about the war?

I think there’s always a delicate balance between giving too much and giving too little, and we tried very hard throughout the film to not explain what has happened, not explain who’s fighting, who’s the enemy, all these kind of things that tend to be a bit boring, I think, when you explain too much. It was a dangerous choice in some ways, but not to give the characters too much backstory because they’re just people who’ve been thrown into this conflict and had to fight for their lives and that kind of evolves. I really like that character, Malik, he has some dreams when he talks about furniture. I think everyone has these little hopes for the future. I think hope is the last thing that we abandon in a way.

Was the novel like that, just giving the barest of essentials?

Yes and no. You know more about the characters in the novel because it’s a novel, so you have so much more time. There’s quite a lot of little backstories, and that’s really nice. I love the novel, but a lot of that stuff couldn’t really work in our film. It’s quite sparse as well. I would say in some instances you learn even less in the novel than you do in the film. It’s maybe because it’s also quite internalized, which we couldn’t really use for the film. The inner dialogue gets you more of the paranoia, maybe, and the fear in the book. But you know even less of the mission and why they’re doing it. It’s interesting in that aspect as well, but we couldn’t really make that work for us in the film. You need a bit more to drive it forward, I think.

I have no clue what the budget of this movie is, but it often plays as a big movie.

It wasn’t as big as any summer movie. It’s a Swedish movie. I think, in comparison, it would be a very small film. In a way some of it is, obviously, my experience from my background. I’ve done a lot of stuff like this before. I know how to do it.

We don’t have huge spaceships landing. There are big scenes, but a lot of them are big because nature is big. There’s a lot of scope in it that is just nature. We don’t have huge mass scenes with thousands of people on the battlefield because we just couldn’t. There was no way we could do that. We had to go big, but in a small way. I think sometimes that serves you quite well.

We have to adapt, try to fit the script to what we could do, but we try to be really clever about it. How do we make it feel big, but spending our energy and time and money on the few choice bits that’s like, “OK, this is going to make everything look big and feel big.” For the rest, we can be quite small. It was a matter of choice in some ways.

Speaking of your background, I just watched your Junkie XL music video.

How did you find that?

It’s on YouTube.

Holy crap. I haven’t seen that easily in 10 years.

What were the music videos and commercials, though, that made you feel prepared for “Black Crab”?

I’ve done a few things throughout my career that have a little bit of action sequences, the way you learn a little bit how to do that. I think music videos, somehow, are almost better because they are a little bit longer. They have a little bit more storytelling involved in them. It’s a little bit more flash. In some ways, there is always very little money in a music video. In a commercial, you normally have so much money or you have a lot of money for 60 seconds, whatever, so you can kind of solve every problem.

In a music video, you have to be clever. Doing films like this, even though we have this [substantial] budget for Sweden, for sure, we had to be almost thinking about it like it’s a music video. [Be] clever with how we actually tell this story and be economical in what we’re spending it on. I would say that my music video experience is almost what prepared me the most on how to attack it. Obviously, the big budget commercials also prepped me for the bigger scope of things, and knowing how to use all the tools that were at hand.

Any music videos of yours you’d recommend to our readers?

I think my favorite one is for a band called Happiness. It’s just an old couple dancing, but I think it’s really beautiful. It’s my favorite music video, for sure, that I’ve done. I would say that’s my best one.