Danish screenwriter and director Tobias Lindholm makes his English-language feature debut with The Good Nurse, starring Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne. In a story based on real events, Redmayne plays Charles Cullen, a nurse who poisoned up to 400 patients with lethal drugs in the 2000s in Pennsylvania in the US. Chastain plays a fellow nurse, Amy Loughren, who helped to bring him to justice.
Krysty Wilson-Cairns, a 2014 Screen International Star of Tomorrow, wrote the script, inspired in part by Charles Graeber’s book of the same title. The story marks Lindholm’s first time directing from another screenwriter’s work – he started as a screenwriter himself (and has long been a writing partner for Thomas Vinterberg, including on Oscar-winner Another Round) before moving into directing with his Danish-language features R (with Michael Noer), A Hijacking, A War and TV’s The Investigation. His first work in English was on David Fincher’s Mindhunter.
After its Toronto premiere, The Good Nurse is screening at the BFI London Film Festival before going on to launches on Netflix on Oct 26. Protozoa Pictures and FilmNation produce.
Why was this story a good fit for you and what you could bring to it?
It wasn’t just another movie about a serial killer. I realised reading the screenplay and reading the book that I was mainly interested in the last couple of chapters in the book, which was Amy’s life and the ‘hero’s journey’ that we saw there. She could be the light in the darkness, the human and emotional reasoning to tell the story. It’s a portrayal of the end of a serial killer but it’s much more a critique of the systems at play. That fell in line with the other movies I’ve done as a director. Also, it felt like an American story that I could tell even though I wasn’t American, because it was a story about all societies and how we create these systems that end up dehumanising the individual to maintain the system.
You’ve worked with great actors, but does it change working with big stars like Eddie and Jessica – not just them as people but they come with powerful agents attached, and paparazzi and all those trappings?
I’ve been part of the sausage factory long enough to not be blown away by movie stars. They are the biggest stars for a reason. This is not because of the agents and not because of the paparazzi is but it’s because of their devotion and their hard work. And both Eddie and Jessica come from theatre. There are big movie stars and there are big actors. Once in a while those two are one person. That was the case here. [Their fame] never became a thing. Also, because it was during the pandemic, we’d stay in small groups. During prep, I was in an apartment in Tribeca with my family and they’d come by to rehearse in my kitchen and the kids would come in and I’d wipe their nose. It felt much more like an intimate workshop.
There is no ‘why’ explained by Eddie’s character. How did you and he talk about the fact he was never going to be fully understood by the audience?
It’s more the question that we want to satisfy our childish need to bring order into chaos. And I don’t think that that order necessarily is there. I don’t think we can understand and I don’t think it’s our job to understand. Clearly Eddie needed to understand his own character and how he wanted to portray him. It’s also looking at a system that allowed this to happen – much more than the mental state of the killer. It was the mental state of the system in many ways. This guy was a nice guy 90% of the time, so how do you dramatise that? It was very important that we only showed when Amy was scared of him, it wasn’t about making him a typical serial killer.
Why did you cast real medical workers as extras in the hospital scenes, was that for authenticity or to help set the mood?
I’ve always done this on my past films [such as hiring former soldiers in A War]. If you hire professionals to do the professional things they have done 30,000 times, it just feels real in a way that no actor can do. We [even] had real police dogs to come and work with us. We populated the ICU with real nurses and doctors, so Jessica and Eddie could blend into a reality and not have the full responsibility of authenticity. They can honestly portray their own characters in this authentic setup. They also went to nursing school for four weeks before the shoot to learn how to maneuver and were actually very good at it.
Also, because we were shooting during the pandemic year, and we were making a film portraying crimes happening among nurses, we didn’t want to portray nurses wrongly. We wanted it to be respectful and truthful about this group of people who had just carried us out of the pandemic.
What was the goal with the visual style of the film, such as these uncomfortable closeups?
This is a portrayal of a dysfunctional system, and individuals caught in systems. I felt that the structure of the system needed to be there and that’s why there are so many lines in the frame. And these uncomfortable closeups, when you’re almost claustrophobic in the frame.
It’s also a story where things are happening in the darkness, we wanted to try to make it as dark as possible without making it a suspenseful darkness. Jody Lee Lipes is a brilliant cinematographer and he could underlight our locations and lift it in camera, which gave it a grainy disturbance. That lighting also created an intimacy. And whenever we’re in darkness, we all start to whisper and have this intimate feeling and then it becomes a shock when we suddenly cut to the daylight.
There is a version of this story that could have been a very lurid thriller. How do you balance the tone of keeping it compelling for an audience but not just doing anything for thrills?
It’s a gut feeling. We have real victims out there, relatives of people who got hurt. We have a huge responsibility to not worsen or retraumatize. For me, the only way to do that is to not sensationalise and not be too fascinated with the cruelty of the crimes but be factual about it. And then be fascinated about something else. And that’s not necessarily as thrilling as going in and killing people [on screen], but I think it is thrilling in another way, and it’s the only way to do this responsibly. We have to look at darkness. We have to talk about it, because it’s part of life. Working in the true crime genre comes a huge responsibility to have a good reason and a better reason than just to entertain a thrill. In this case, I think that Amy’s humanity and the fact that Amy turn on a light in that darkness and with her humanity.
Do you plan to also keep working in Denmark too?
I want to tell stories I find meaningful, whether that is in Denmark or the US is not important to me. But I feel I have been lucky enough to expand the playground. I definitely have not made my last Danish project or my last American project.
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