EXCLUSIVE: Thomas Vinterberg, here serving on the Un Certain Regard jury, is planning a new film based on the joys of alcohol, with the working title Drinking.
His The Hunt and Submarino co-writer Tobias Lindholm is also collaborating on the project, as is Anders Thomas Jensen (Love Is All You Need, In A Better World). Vinterberg jokes the trio enjoys writing about alcohol “while drinking Diet Cokes.”
With 10 children between them, he said: “We don’t have time enough to drink anymore.”
They are just at the initial stages of developing the film now for Zentropa to produce, and it will be set in Denmark, where society accepts boozy parties for teenagers or pissed-up Christmas lunches.
“It’s an acknowledgement that out of drinking a lot of huge things in world history happened,” Vinterberg explained. “From big literature - Hemingway - to the World Wars - Churchill was drinking in the morning. It can be a liberation of the word and thought. The room can enlarge from alcohol.”
It won’t glorify alcoholism but will acknowledge the role of social drinking - sometimes heavy drinking — in societies. “There are great drinkers who I admire both in world history and around me,” he said. “We’re trying to nail that.”
Lindholm added: “It’s not showing an alcoholic sick way [of drinking], it’s just drinking as part of life and celebrating. It’s not drinking to escape something.”
Vinterberg said: “I love this project, it’s really a thing I want to do. One day it will happen.”
Meanwhile, Vinterberg and Lindholm are also finishingthe script for The Commune, which Vinterberg will direct. They used his play for the Vienna National Theatre as a starting point. Vinterberg himself grew up in a communal household.
He is also attached to direct David Nicholls’ adaptation of Far From The Madding Crowd for DNA/Fox Searchlight.
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