New Susanne Bier project revealed

Susanne Bier, whose US drama Serena will debut in April 2014, will return to Denmark for her next film, A Second Chance (En chance til).

TrustNordisk will start presales on the film at AFM next week and it will shoot from Nov 18 to Jan 16 on the Danish island of Funen.

Bier will again work with scriptwriter Anders Thomas Jensen, having first collaborated more than a decade ago on Open Hearts (2002) and later on In A Better World, which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2011.

The pair most recently worked together on Danish romantic drama Love Is All You Need (Den skaldede frisør/2012).

Describing the new film, TrustNordisk issued a statement which said: “How far are decent human beings willing to go, when tragedy blurs the line between just and unjust?

“With A Second Chance, Susanne Bier and Anders Thomas Jensen have crafted another startling yet moving drama, about how easily we lose our grasp on justice, when we face the unthinkable and life as we know it hangs by a thread.”

Leading man

The leading role will be played by Danish actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau who perhaps best known as the dastardly Jaime Lannister in HBO fantasy series Game of Thrones.

He has appeared US films such as Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down (2001) and Kingdom of Heaven (2005) and this year’s Oblivion, with Tom Cruise, and Mama.

Coster-Waldau took a role in Norwegian crime thriller Headhunters in 2011 but A Second Chance will be his first leading role in a Danish film in more than a decade.

More cast will be announced shortly but according to local press a casting next week should discover one of the stars “for a new Susanne Bier film,” a baby boy aged seven-or-eight weeks.

Kon-Tiki DoP

Currently in pre-production, the director of photography is Norway’s Geir Hartly Andreassen (Kon-Tiki),

The film is produced by Sisse Graum Jørgensen for Zentropa Entertainments14 in co-production with Zentropa International Sweden, Film i Väst.

The Danish Film Institute and regional film centre FilmFyn will chip in $1.7 million (DKK 9 million) production funding for the $6.4m (DKK 35m) project.

Further support will come from the Swedish Film Institute, Nordisk Film & TV Fond and Eurimages, in cooperation with DR, SVT.

Nordic theatrical distribution will be in collaboration with Nordisk Film Distribution while TrustNordisk handles international sales.

Serena

Bier’s has most recently worked on Serena – which she took over from US director Darren Aronofsky – and is her second American movie after Things We Lost in the Fire with Halle Berry in 2007.

Adapted from US author Ron Rash’s novel, it follows Serena (Jennifer Lawrence) and her new husband (Bradley Cooper), who in the depression-hit late-1920s travel from Boston to the North Carolina mountains to create a timper empire.

Bier has also signed to adapt US author Helen Schulman’s best-selling novel This Beautiful Life for the screen.

A fable about the decline of privacy, it is the story of 15-year-old tenth grader Jake, who receives a video with salaciousphotos of his admirer, 13-year-old Daisy. He forwards it, and when it goes viral, his family is embroiled in a scandal.