Making of

A discussion with

writer/director Gunnar Vikene and producer Maria Ekerhovd

Gunnar Vikene has been thinking about the true stories of the “war sailors” since he first heard about them when he was a young boy. Vikene’s father used to paint houses with a man who seemed to have no fears – Vikene found out this man had survived three torpedo attacks during World War II despite never enlisting in the military.

“There were 30,000 of these Norwegian sailors in the war. And there were similar Canadian merchant fleets, and British, and America,” Vikene explains. “They’re all the unsung heroes of that war – they were caught up in it and they couldn’t decide for themselves if they wanted to enlist. Then after the war, they didn’t fit in in into the idea of the war hero because they had no uniform and had no guns, no medals or anything.”

The story of War Sailor follows two Norwegian civilian merchant sailors, Alfred and Wally, who find themselves thrust into danger when World War II breaks out. Alfred’s wife Cecilia, back home in Bergen, has to raise three kids on her own not knowing if her husband is alive or dead.

War Sailor is hardly a typical war film – and it spans the years 1939 to 1972 looking at the long-term consequences of what happened during the war years.

Vikene explains he wanted to avoid the usual war film cliches. “Yes, we have action scenes when it’s necessary for the story, but it comes down to the human factor. It’s not about the explosion, it’s about the consequences of the explosion.”

He discovered the true story of the real Alfred, Wally and Cecilia back in the early 1990s “and I never forgot it.” He researched their stories and similar stories of the time period and the legacy of war for decades later. Vikene doesn’t call this film a biography because it is a fictionalized version of their lives – “Alfred is not here anymore to explain anything, so I consider these fictional versions of the characters. But they are based on real people,” he says. “What I can say is that every war-related incident in the film actually happened. “I read everything that I have come across.”

Another devastating true story in the film is when British aircrafts trying to bomb the German submarine bunkers in Bergen accidentally bombed the primary school at Laksevåg and civilian homes at Nøstet, resulting in hundreds of civilian deaths. Vikene grew up knowing the story because one of his mother’s second cousins was killed that day, at only age 8, and another of her cousins survived.

What finally inspired him to make the film was a talk a few years ago with his then-12-year-old daughter, looking at images of a wounded child in Syria. He recalls, “My daughter said, ‘I’m so glad we don’t live in a country where we experience that.’ And I pointed out the window and said, ‘relatives of your grandmother were killed right over there.’ And my daughter didn’t know. It was the idea that we need to remind ourselves that we have been through it.”

The story then burst out of him onto the page. “I had been thinking about the story so long I tried to just sit down and get the first draft of the script out, and I did that in a month.”

He dreamed of telling this story for decades “but I never thought I was going to be in a position where I was actually able to make it.” His longtime collaboration with Maria Ekerhovd at Mer Film made it possible, working together on their third feature (after their past collaborations Here is Harlold and Vegas).

At first, Ekerhovd wasn’t keen on any story related to World War II. “I gave her the script, and told her that it takes place during the war but also after the war. She called me after she read the script and said, ‘This isn’t really a war movie, so I’d love to produce it.’”

Ekerhovd knew the production would be her biggest ever. “It’s a big production and I never actually had the ambition that I would do that kind of big film, that was never a goal I had. But Gunnar came to me in 2016 with the script, and he’d already been thinking of this story for 20 years.”

She was fascinated by this story which hadn’t been told in film before: “Gunnar told me that during Second World War, Norway had the fifth-biggest merchant fleet of the world. When the war started, the Norwegian government decided that all these normal Norwegian sailors had to sail throughout the war, and they didn’t have a choice. These ships had such an important job to get the supplies to the Allies. Their contribution to the war was never recognized. They were traumatized. The government never even paid them for the job they did during the war until the 1970s. This is a big scandal and it hasn’t been dealt with. This isn’t the kind of black-and-white story we usually see on the big screen. There is more complexity.”

Vikene adds, “All my films before are small arthouse movies, and I knew this would take more money and more resources, and Maria made it happen, she got all the right partners on board quickly.”

Ekerhovd put together the largest budget ever for Norwegian production, at 11m Euros, bringing on co-producers Rohfilm Factory, Studio Hamburg and Falkun Films.

She was excited to continue their 15-year-collaboration in new ways. The producer says, “I think it’s super important to really get to know the people you work with, in order to really know the strengths and weaknesses of each other and be open and honest and trust the process. It’s not going to be easy all the time, and we will have our ups and downs, but we can be together in all of those circumstances.”

Vikene is always impressed that Ekerhovd is brilliant both on the creative and the logistical sides of producing: “She’s a great reader and such a good analyst. And she can be compassionate about a project’s issues. She also doesn’t take no for an answer!”

Assembling the perfect cast

A trio of established Norwegian talents play the leads — Kristoffer Joner (The Wave) plays family man Alfred; Pal Sverre Hagen (Kon-Tiki) is his old friend Wally; and Ine Marie Wilmann (Sonia: The White Swan) plays Alfred’s wife Cecilia.

Vikene had made his first feature, 2002’s Falling Sky, with Joner and they have become good friends over the years. “He’s a fantastic actor and human being and I had written the script with him in mind, I was so lucky he said yes,” Vikene says.

Despite being two of the most acclaimed contemporary actors in Norway, Joner and Hagen had never met before. “It’s strange in little Norway they hadn’t met each other. But after two minutes in the room together, I just felt that they really respected and liked each other. They became great friends during the shoot and I think you see that on screen,” the director says.

He had also worked with Wilmann before and had a special challenge for her on this role of the wife left home in Bergen. He remembers, “I told her, ‘The trick this time was that you have to learn the local dialect.’ This is really difficult and very different from her own. I told her, ‘You have to learn it — not only learning the lines, you have to speak fluidly so we can improvise.’ And she spent a year learning it and was brilliant.”

“The process of working with the actors was very nice,” Vikene continues. “I told the actors that you need to own your characters. Because this is something that I need you to take responsibility for. And they did so in such a fantastic way.”

He also tried not to rehearse each scene too much. “We talked about the characters and scenes a lot but I do very few rehearsals. I was afraid if we rehearsed it too much they were going to drain it emotionally.”

An epic production

“We wanted that documentary feel when it comes to closeness to the character,” Vikene adds. The team shot digitally – and Vikene praises colourist William Kjarval for giving it “a filmic look” in the grading process.

The big set pieces were very carefully planned. “We prepared really well for all the technical sequences, so that was storyboarded in detail in advance,” Vikene explains.

And as much as possible was shot in camera, not added in post later. He adds, “I see so many films where you have 10 seconds of a CGI ship in an establishing shot. We weren’t interested in that. We only wanted the CGI to enhance what we already shot, to make the story better.”

Scenes of the ships and raft on the ocean are actually shot in the sea, not in a water tank. They thought the authenticity was worth going the extra mile. As Vikene recalls, “Sturla thought we would be able to detect the distinction where the real water ends, and maybe it would feel not quite right. The real thing is always better.”

The film was originally scheduled to shoot in 2020 but had to pause for a year due to the pandemic. They eventually shot it during March to October 2021, in Norway, Malta and Germany, with just over 60 shooting days.

They worked with a mostly Maltese crew in Malta and again with German crews in Germany, and Vikene praises them as “great professionals,” but he was still glad to get back to the Norwegian part of the shoot “working with a lot of people I’ve worked with before, with so many people pitching in because my film family is here.”

The scale of the project was a step up for Ekerhovd. “It was super exciting…it was a new challenge that it was such a big film, you can’t just wing it. It was fun because it was learning new skills and working with new partners and seeing how that side of the business works.”

Because Vikene has also worked in big budget TV like Occupied, he found working a bigger-budget film wasn’t a shock to the system. “The process is basically the same thing as with a lower-budget film, it just involves a lot more people.”

One key collaborator was acclaimed DoP Sturla Brandth. “Sturla is one of the best cinematographers on the planet and he’s also such a great human being – that was one of the most inspiring collaborations I’ve had in my career,” the director says.

They didn’t use typical war films for visual inspiration, instead watching documentary footage from the era or even more recent documentary films like The White Helmets.

They also didn’t just use spectacle for spectacle’s sake. “The explosions and actions are there because they have real consequences for human beings. There are a lot of very romantic films made about war and the great heroes, and we tried to stay away from that. It was a film about survival to make it home to your loves ones, not about heroism in action. I hope you can see on screen the fear and the panic in the those war scenes.”

Ekerhovd adds, “I think what Gunnar has achieved with the film is to actually give us a feeling of how it was for them to be out on the boats and also how it really played out for the families at home.”

Vikene also praises the authentic work across so many members of the crew – such as by costume designer Stefanie Bieker (“she gave it a texture that feels really believable and not like a typical costume drama”; makeup designer Jens Bartram and his team (“they nailed it for this documentary feel we were going for”) production designer Tamo Kunz. The director adds that editors Peter Brandt and Anders Albjerg Kristiansen “were so enthusiastic and brave during the process, and challenged me and the material in a great and constructive way.”

Honoring the legacy of the war sailors

Vikene hopes this film will personally touch people who still live with the legacy of the war sailors. “People remember being children and not knowing if their beloved father is coming home. I’ve spoken to so many children of those kinds of families. That’s an important part of the story. It is so much about what happens with families after the war.”

He felt the importance of the story today when the team were shooting in his hometown of Bergen. “We were shooting in places that were so close to the school that was bombed, and there are so many people in Bergen who had families impacted by that, so that felt very special. People stopped to tell us their stories. It felt so close in a way that was inspiring, we were dealing with real people’s stories and that’s a big responsibility.”

The cast and crew were away from their families for four and a half months while making the film, and while that’s not as extreme as the story of the sailors – Vikene wanted the cast and crew to draw on that feeling. He told them, “Take this emotion that you come home to your children and they have grown five centimeters since last time you saw them. And then multiply that emotion by a million. That’s how they felt.”

Sadly, this kind of war story still feels relevant today. “This story about the civilians, the working-class perspective hasn’t been told,” Vikene says. “90% of people dying in war today are civilians. They aren’t wearing uniforms. You just have to look at Ukraine.”

He continues, “I haven’t lived through war. If you live long enough, you have things in your life that you cannot fix for ourselves. Things that we can’t control and has sent our life in a different direction. I hope everyone can relate to that feeling. I hope we can all relate to having a father that you don’t know if you will ever see again, or relate to being a wife who doesn’t know if her husband is alive when she wakes up in the morning. I think on a basic human level, people can relate to that. I hope the audience can identify with the characters, there is something universal about the feelings they have towards each other.”