A bridge over dark secrets

This special interview should best begin with its geographical location: the Oresund Bridge that links Copenhagen in Denmark to Malmo in Sweden. It's a wonder of engineering and aesthetics that arches elegantly over the blue strait below it, connecting the two Scandinavian countries. On the Danish coast lies wonderful Copenhagen, and on the Swedish side is Malmo, the third largest city in the country, which in recent years has become a center of immigration and a headache for the Swedish authorities.

From Malmo, the bridge stretches for 5 miles before plunging below the water to become a 2.5 mile-long tunnel that terminates at the Copenhagen airport. The bridge also boasts a highway and rail tracks, and the border between Denmark and Sweden crosses the middle. Opened to traffic in 2000, it's the longest combined road-and-rail bridge in Europe.

The bridge serves as the backbone for the story in the detective series "The Bridge ("Bron" in Swedish and "Broen" in Danish), a bilingual co-production that takes place on the bridge and on both sides of it. The bridge connects and divides the heroes and the villains, led by Swedish detective Saga Noren. Saga, played brilliantly by actress Sofia Helin, is a character the likes of whom we haven't seen on screen before: a brilliant, gifted detective lacking any social skills. The creators of the series have purposely refrained from defining her as being on the autism spectrum, but after watching a few episodes, one understands that she has Asperger's Syndrome. The courage it takes to make a character with limitations like that the lead in a police series is enough to warrant her creators with a mark of honor.

It's hard to believe, but "The Bridge" -- which has been broadcast in no fewer than 174 countries, including Israel, and has been remade in a headline-grabbing American version that takes place on the U.S.-Mexico border, as well as an Anglo-French version titled "The Tunnel," after the English Channel tunnel between England and France -- started out as marketing material.

"The series was born because the southern part of Sweden, the maritime border with Denmark, wanted to market itself," series creator and lead writer Hans Rosenfeldt tells Israel Hayom. "The local community leaders thought the best way to do so would be to produce a bilingual Swedish-Danish TV series. They allocated funds and that was how 'The Bridge' came into being."

The conversation with Rosenfeldt takes place in the chic offices of the Salomonsson literary agency in honor of another of his initiatives, this time with his writing partner, Michael Hjorth: a thriller series starring police psychologist Sebastian Bergman. The five books in the series have already been published in 34 countries and sold some 3 million copies, and the sixth is on the way. The first book, "Dark Secrets," has been translated into Hebrew by Assaf Shor and is about to be published by Kinneret Zmora-Bitan Dvir.

In recent years, Scandinavia has become an international powerhouse of the thriller genre. Each of its nations has played a part: Sweden leads with Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson ("The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"); Norway has Jo Nesbo; and Denmark boasts Jussi Adler-Olsen. Nevertheless, Hjorth and Rosenfeldt argue that thrillers are not taken seriously in Sweden.

"The minute money comes into the picture, and the more popular a book becomes, its literary value drops," Hjorth says. "If so many people are reading and liking it, it can't really be good."

And Rosenfeldt says, "Here, people tend to value foreign things more. Even writers from other Scandinavian countries are valued much more than local writers. I think Henig Menkel was the only Swedish thriller writer who was appreciated, and that's because he did other things. He's considered a cultural hero who also wrote suspense novels. I'll give you an example: When the first season of ‘The Bridge' aired, one of the critics wrote that it was lucky the series had a Danish director and good Danish actors to make up for the poor Swedish script. … Later on, excellent criticism from other countries started to flow: Germany, Spain, and Israel (one of the countries that most praised the series). All of a sudden, things turned around. The second season was hailed as the best thing to come out of Sweden, ever."

Rosenfeldt and Hjorth met while working as TV writers in 1993. Rosenfeldt was writing a soap opera, and Hjorth a sitcom.

"We heard that Hans was a talented writer, so we invited him to write an episode for the sitcom. And he wrote the best joke of the season. We started talking about working together, but we only really started to collaborate in 2006," Hjorth says.

Rosenfeldt says, "Because of the experience we both had writing for TV and movies, that's how we write books. We sit together at the start of each book and plan out the story's timeline. Of course, there are a lot of scenes you can't plan ahead of time and occur during the writing. Then we go back home and write separately, each one doing his part. But then we start phoning each other with new ideas. I would say that I'm more interested in the plot, and Michael in the characters' internal voices."

'We don't believe in research'

This is how "Dark Secrets" opens: "The man was not a murderer. He repeated this to himself as he dragged the dead boy down the slope: I am not a murderer."

Like the rest of the better Scandinavian suspense novels we've gotten used to these past few years, "Dark Secrets" is full of surprises and twists. It doesn't drop blood. The opposite. There are few murders, and the ones that exist are almost vital to the internal logic of the book. The detectives' struggle to discover the murderer takes place mainly on the psychological level, which is why the character Sebastian Bergman plays so central a role. However, he is a hard character to like: He hurts everyone around him without mercy and is addicted to casual, patently unpleasant sex.

Q: There is an expression in Hebrew that refers to sticking to rules without compromise or mercy. It seems Sebastian Bergman was created in this spirit.

Hjorth: "It's true that he doesn't care whether he hurts others and he doesn't care about bending the law, but I don't think he pursues justice. He only wants to win and prove that he's the best. When we were starting out, we discussed his character a lot, and we wanted to create an interesting character, someone who is brilliant in his field, but still an asshole. Especially when it comes to social interactions. He'll always opt to act in the wrong way."

Rosenfeldt: "Because he's in bad shape after losing his wife and daughter in the 2004 tsunami, he's headed down a path of self-destruction. He is true to himself and sticks to the one thing he knows he's good at -- solving crimes -- because he's been a failure at everything else. The beauty in the character is that he knows human nature inside and out, but can't use his knowledge on himself."

Q: The book makes an unusual comparison between sex addiction and serial murders.

Rosenfeldt: "Michael made that comparison. The parallel is on the level of fantasy. In both cases there is an urge to create a fantasy and act it out, and when you do that, you don't feel the relief that it was supposed to give you, just feelings of guilt and restlessness. So then you want to do it again, in the hope that this time you'll find satisfaction. But if you do it again, you'll wind up at the same point of guilt and dissatisfaction, and back to the beginning. The same mechanism is at work in both cases and causes the same cycle: guilt, relief, fantasy, and execution. So our Sebastian is always pursuing meaningless sex, and a serial killer is always pursuing his next victim."

Hjorth: "This is just our observation. We don't really believe in research."

Q: Why not?

Hjorth: "We're not writing nonfiction. This is fiction. If you put too much effort into research, you'll wind up saying, 'Wait, this isn't possible because that's what it says in your sources.' It doesn't matter to me: I need a good story. It needs to appear plausible, to sound logical -- but it's a separate world. It's not reality. Research should be a small part of the story."

Rosenfeldt: "The real test is if I as a reader believe that what is written could happen. If so, it's not important if it's factual. I've read plenty of books where you could see that the writer really did his homework and has to prove to the reader that he knows a lot. If the research gets in the way of the story, toss out the research and keep the story. The story always comes first. You build a world, and as long as you stick to the rules you created for it, everything's fine."

Q: Isn't that a slightly childish approach?

Rosenfeldt: "Definitely! The story is our playground and Sebastian Bergman is a toy. We move him here or there, let him do all sorts of things. It's fun."

'Dark, gray countries'

The meeting with the creators of "The Bridge" offers a glimpse into the next intriguing season. Fans of crime drama will be happy to hear that the fourth season of the show is already under way, and about half the episodes have already been shot. The season is scheduled to be broadcast in late 2017 or early 2018. Sorry to disappoint any fans, but Martin Rohde (the terrific Kim Bodnia), Saga's Danish partner in the first two seasons, will not be appearing this time around. On the other hand, Henrik Sabroe, her new and hesitant partner, will co-star, and the season will focus on the search for Henrik's children that started in the previous season.

Q: How did you come up with the idea that launched the series? Did you look at this stunning bridge and think to yourself, 'Hey, what's missing here is a body chopped in half-'

Rosenfeldt: "We looked for a natural reason why the Danish and Swedish police would cooperate, and the only solution was to put a body exactly in the middle of the bridge, which is the only dry border between Sweden and Denmark. Then we realized that if it was a Swedish body, even if it was placed on the border, it would be a case that only the Swedish police would handle. So we were forced to cut the body in half: The top half was Swedish, and the bottom half Danish. In doing so, we effectively forced both police forces to work together, to cooperate. In real life it wouldn't work. There's very little cooperation between the Swedish and Danish police forces."

Rosenfeldt adds that "The Bridge" is "a kind of bubble as far as language goes."

"For example, the series is bilingual, with each side speaking its own tongue," he says. "In reality, Swedes and Danes don't understand each other's language in such a fluent, intuitive manner. They need to speak slowly and clearly. The crimes the series focuses on are also somewhat overblown: It's hard to believe that someone would plan and carry out such a super-crime, with bodies and complicated technologies, and manage to carry out his plans without getting caught. Sweden and Denmark are dark, gray countries, I agree, but not that dark and gray."

Q: How did the unusual character of Saga come into being?

Rosenfeldt: "She was born as a kind of response to Martin's character. Martin was the first character we created, and we wanted to get as far away as possible from the stereotype of a white, middle-aged cop, the way they are often portrayed on TV: a lone wolf, usually divorced, who has a bad relationship with his kids. He generally finds comfort in a bottle and drinks too much. Rather than talk about feelings, these police characters just drank whiskey and stared into the darkness. We wanted to create something totally different: a family man who enjoys small talk about relationships, who talks openly about his feelings, someone who is in touch with his feminine side. That's how Martin was created. Then, of course, we said to ourselves that the Swedish partner had to be his total opposite: first of all, a woman, and maybe what we'd do would be to take away all her social skills. She would be very, very good at her job, but not have a clue about relationships or feelings. She'd be a little 'masculine.'"

Rosenfeldt says they gave their first draft to a director, who said immediately that the character was on the autism spectrum.

"But we realized pretty quickly that we didn't have to give her that diagnosis in the series, because if we did, we would have to have her behave accordingly, and that would limit her. The result was that in public opinion, she [Saga] is diagnosed, but not in the series. No doubt about it, we were lucky to find actress Sofia Helin. She cracked the character perfectly, and is fantastic," Rosenfeldt says.

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