We were all taken by surprise that after a film about the worst of human beings like ‘The Hunt’, the same director brought us a story as vital as ‘Another Round’. It is even more surprising considering that, while he was filming it, Thomas Vinterberg had to face the terrible loss of his daughter.
“She’s in Every Minute”
Back in 2019, director Thomas Vinterberg was preparing to shoot ‘Another Round’. It was going to be his most personal project, with Mads Mikkelsen playing the professor who embarks on a curious alcohol experiment with his classmates and his daughter Ida Vinterberg playing the protagonist’s worried daughter.
It would be the debut of Vinterberg’s daughter as an actress and it was even planned to shoot at Ida’s institute with her friends, to achieve the greatest possible naturalness. The director sent the script to his daughter while she was on a trip to Africa. “She showed unconditional love for this project. She saw herself reflected in it” remembered the Danish director.
However, shortly before filming began, Vinterberg’s wife gave him terrible news: Ida was involved in a traffic accident in Paris, dying on the spot. She was only 19 years old. Understandably, that brought the entire production to a standstill:
My life had been destroyed. We were very close. She always told me the truth with sincerity (…) she It didn’t make sense to continue but it didn’t make sense not to either. She would have hated that we didn’t continue. So we decided to make the movie for her. It was the only possible option.
After Ida’s funeral, Vinterberg returned as best he could to the film. He had the unconditional support of Tobias Lindholm, the film’s screenwriter, who took over the reins of the shooting at those moments in which the director was overwhelmed by pain.
The final result was this wonderful film, with moments of drama but also black comedy and a truly moving vitality. “She’s in the whole movie for me. Every minute” Vinterberg declared.
The actors also tried very hard to be supportive of the director. and to achieve that “everything turned out just as he imagined it”. This is how Mads Mikkelsen explained it, whom we see dancing and representing that desire to live better than anyone else in the film:
It was always a movie about embracing life, but because of this tragedy, it became a movie about embracing life on a scale we hadn’t imagined.
‘Another round’ was one of the most remembered films of its year, with a successful run at festivals such as Toronto or San Sebastián and even managed to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2021.