From Local to Global: The Bier/Jensen Screenwriting Collaboration

Abstract

Cath Moore draws attention to the unique Danish co-writing process that most Danish directors employ, in which a director and screen-writer collaborate on scripts and share writing credit. Bier’s most successful films have been co-written with Anders Thomas Jensen, who also works with actors during the writing process, rewriting lines of story and dialogue after collaborative reading sessions. With a focus on the Bier/Jensen trilogy, Moore delineates the creative divergences between Bier’s solo work and Jensen’s dark satirical and absurdist self-written and directed films. Moore concludes that the critical and commercial success of the unparalleled Bier/Jensen oeuvre is a result of their preference for highly dramatic stories focused on personal conflict that transcends the local domestic space of Denmark. These transnational storylines, she believes, utilize different national settings as an important facet of story construction to visualize a shared humanity.