Perfect Sense • “deep inside. enjoy the moment. because this is how life goes on“
my meeting with Kim happened unexpectedly at the end of 2020 after my COVID 19 illness before re-infection.
Kim’s films were strikingly anticipating scenes of the present, and my main decision was to contact him directly to ask personally how he did it. He was kind to me and by e-mail we struck up a friendship correspondence.
This interview is first published with Kim’s permission and I retain top precision of our dialogue:
thanks, bohdan, I got your last email and besides a lot of work I am all good here and ready for the Q n A, and please ask again if I am going to easy over some parts
Bohdan Rodyuk Chekan Tell us a little about yourself. You were born in Copenhagen, Denmark. Your talents are versatile — writer, illustrator, comic writer, screenwriter. You drew, did literary work, made music, worked at the local radio station, worked as a cartoonist. Everything was interesting for you and developed you as a person. But what did you gravitate towards most of all? What are the most vivid impressions of childhood and adolescence that you captured in your works? How is this reflected in your work?
Kim Fupz Aakeson I grew up in the suburbs of Copenhagen in the sixties and seventies, small streets of villas and terraced houses, those areas were called Sleeping Citys at the time, cause noone worked there, the jobs where elsewere, so the adults (mostly the men) left in the morning, leaving the invironment to housewifes and kids, then they returned late aftermoon, dinner was served and tv’s were on until bedtime.
And from puberty on, I felt alienated and not belonging, on my dads side everybody were electricians, on my mothers side they were accountants, I had no role models, couldn’ see anyone doing anything I wanted to do, it was all just longing and mist, but that all changed with the new french cartoonists, Wolinsky and Reiser and others, sloppy drawings and harsh content, political satire, sex, human despair and I had this sense of honey-I’m-home and started drawing 24/7, making my first album in 82. And startet as an illustrator to make a living as well.
For a while that was great, but the magazines and papers I worked for, kept sending their most boring articles for me to pimp up, so I started looking for other places to illustrate and found children’s books interesting, not that I knew any kids, I was still very young, but a small amount of text and a lot of space for the illustrator, that was appetizing, so I started to write small stories to have something to illustrate and slowly, slowly the drawings shrinked and the words expanded, until I realized that my time as an illustrator was history, I was an author now.
This was my second moment of honey-I’m-home, writing books was my life, my real life … and it was for some years until the loneliness of a writer got to me, I didn’t meet anyone during the day but my wife and daughter, solitude day in, day out, no encounters besides an editor now and then, so my restlessness drove me out again. The danish filmschool and their scriptline was at the time only three terms, three days a week, and you could still work on the side, and the timing showed to be great, mid nineties, dogme, danish film was on a roll and suddenly my eye was on other stories than the ones in the children’s books, no angels, no elephants, no fantasy kingdoms, we wanted to tell about the time we were in, the place we were in, contemporary stories from real life, in many ways I looked back on my childhood and the Sleeping City, stories from the middleclass, the small life, the boredom, what could play out behind the curtains?
But writing for the movies includes a lot of raising money, a lot of practicality, a lot of other people interfering, a lot of anxiety, so books still offered something the moviebusiness didn’t, a room of your own, possible elephants, a sovereign situation, so I have been pendling back and forth between scriptwriting and books for many years now, and I still believe this is where I want to be.
BRC I had the honor to familiarize myself with some of your books published in Ukraine — “Erik und das Opa-Gespenst” and watch a considerable number of films on the Internet based on your scripts, for example, “Unga Astrid”. But I was most impressed by the film “Last Love on Earth” (English “Perfect Sense”).
It’s like an excursion from the past into our days, like a terrible echo of what you described, how that can take place in people’s lives, and talented actors have implemented in the film, but that should never have happened. It’s hard to believe, but we have faced in recent years — we lost our sense of smell, taste, it became difficult for people to breathe due to lung damage, that is, what can be even worse and worse than the loss of the ability to just breathe and irreversible phenomena in the body and brain, leading to loss of mind and life. All this came into our lives with the COVID-19 virus and spread across the globe, bearing grief over the loss of loved ones.
KFA Well, actually this idea started in Lebanon years ago, I travelled the middle east as a very young man, and was strucked by humans ability to adapt when I visited Beirut. At the time a city wrecked by civil war and countless militias, but still humans found a way to get on, I saw a chickenfarm on third floor in a ruined building with no front left, people when out shopping and if shooting started you would find shelter somewhere and wait for it to pass, like a shower, and this urge to live on no matter what, sparked the idea years later. Based on the good old question in arts, what if?
BRC Why did you endow the main character with the profession of an epidemiologist, and made the main character a chef — our daily bread, your taste is not sweet, but also not bitter, it simply does not exist, but you want it to bring only positive taste emotions, even its aroma is not felt, but I want everyone to eat with pleasure.
KFA I needed someone with hands on the pandemic, someone who would be very close to the research, knowing something, an epidemiologist was the obvious, but I also neede someone in daily life, someone just wanting to do what they love, making a living with passion, and when it comes to senses, a restaurant, would be a place where loosing senses would have a lot of impact, a place that needed a lot of adapting, therefore the chef.
BRC Your scenario is a warning to humanity or a statement of a fait accompli — the possibility of affecting the world’s population, and without exception, globally spreading pandemics and other man-made horrors, without a doubt, created by man. With malice or because of chronic hindsight and inability to predict future challenges?
KFA Actually vira and pandemics it’s one of my few scares and have always been, I dont spend a lot of time fearing desease myself (that might change as I get older), i was never to worried in traffic, airplanes, haven’t thought much of being a victim of violence (the privileges of living in a country like Denmark maybe), but the bugs, the vira, the stuff you cant see, to breathe it without knowing and then to spread it to everyone near you, that can really trick my paranoia, my kids have always been taught to wash their hands, long before Covid.
BRC What personally touches you the most in the film, and whether the actors, in your opinion, coped with the most difficult psychological task? After all, it is beyond the bounds — death, illness, grief — to lose step by step everything (sense of smell, taste, hearing, sight) and try to fight, keep a person in oneself?
KFA I thought of it mostly as a lovestory, even though death, illness, grief are major players as well, but love is as mandatory as death in human life, we just cannot help it, my mother was devastated when my father died, and thought this was the end of romantic love in life, but few years later she met a man again, he was 80 she was 78, and they fell in love, he moved in with her and they had almost 10 beautiful years until he passed away.
So yeah, the love surviving and insisting is what touches me the most, and the task to make that feasible, that’s the main thing in this tale.
BRC The idea that a person can influence the world around him with one effort of will and thought, without using muscles, intrigued a person for a long time. Telepathy, telekinesis and other supernatural abilities were endowed with heroes of fairy tales, science fiction stories and urban legends.
Here is a kind of collision of the last days. For example, what do the latest developments of the American businessman-innovator Elon Musk in the field of brain chipization mean and what do they bring to humanity? On February 2, he announced that employees at his company, Neuralink, were performing an operation to implant a computer chip into a monkey’s brain. The news may mean that the technologies of fusion of the brain with the computer described in science fiction are literally a stone’s throw: and if this prospect inspires some, then it terrifies others. How are you going to reflect this landmark event in your creations?
KFA Oh, my brain is melting down when it comes to the future and where it will go, where my kids will go, what kind of world will emerge, it seems there is no breaks on mankind, someone alwyas will sail out into the unknown to see if the world really is flat or not. I have written a childrens book on that already, called God And Adam And Eve, and the couple is not thrown out of Eden because of apples, no, the leave themselves because of curiosity, the want to see whats behind the boundaries of that very small garden God has made
When it comes to tec and future and these mindblowing steps, I guess I’m pretty slow, it has to be solid consolidated before I can bring it in, mobile phones took me e.g. a while, maybe my eye is more on the present than on the future?
BRC Now we are faced with the problem of vaccines for COVID-19, each country is trying to develop the most breakthrough (and, of course, sell it for the benefit of everyone else). Do you think vaccination will save the world or will it plunge it into an even deeper abyss? After all, mutations can no longer be counted and will all vaccinations be able to resist the pandemic that is destroying humanity?
KFA Big one, I talked to an epidemiologist as part of my research on the movie, and he was certain that we would see a tuff plague-ish virus at some point, a pandemic that would really harass humanity, and as a true nerd he said: I hope it will happen in my lifetime, could be really interesting.
It seems at the very least, that we will face the same situation as with the flu, we cant get rid of covid and the mutations to come, every year we will have to face a new breed of the virus, make the right vaccine for it, revaccinate and hope for the best, but on a dark day you could fear that something like this could end us.
BRC New challenges and new crises — mankind does not get tired of producing them for the sake of destroying some and gaining superprofits by others, whether it be a war (in a hot phase or informational), or created pandemics for all, as a new weapon of destruction, is working on this path more and more actively and fruitfully …
KFA Seems that any superior kingdom will at some point erode and disappear, the egyptians, the roman empire, and so forth, every supremacy carries its doom as well as its strenght, and it’s unfortunately not too hard to see us humans outspending our time as king of the hill, but maybe there is no answer to it, but to live a decent life, behave, raise decent kids, speak up, try to be on the right side of history.
BRC With your script, you loudly asked this screaming question to all of humanity. Maybe someone, at your suggestion, thought about maintaining a comfortable and conflict-free life on earth. Your opinion — are there many of them?
KFA Our ability to forget and ignore reality is one of our big and fatal flaws, we all know this way of life we are performing does not hold, planet earth just can’t take it, and still it seems everybody is waiting for someone else to change it, seems that politicians who promise growth gets the majority in parlament, seems there is no end to the amount of stuff we are piling up in our homes, so yeah, we might go down in flames as a species, but the seats will be comfortable all the way
BRC And finally, plans for the future, what are they?
KFA Right now I opened up a new project, a tv-series on prisonguards, I am quiet taken with prisons, guards and inmates, how a soft, democratic society respond to those not following the rules, is it revenge or rehabilitation, does punishing and prisons makes a difference at all, or is it a place to educate young criminals to more experienced criminals? And the guards, men and women, putting on a blue shirt and entering this world of misdeed and violence, that’s really an arena worth exploring.
BRC You a fairy tale teller! A children’s fairy tale can make the world a better and kinder place — the beauty of a fairy tale in children will save the world. Isn’t it the mesmerizing beauty of words? The hidden magic of the words …
KFA Oh yeah, I was raised on words, my dad read to me every evening until I was ready to decode the alphabet myself, and writing sometimes feels like an act of a god, there is nothing there, white paper, a blank screen on a mac, and then you write … and look, something is there, a boy, a dog, a house, a world and someone in it, doing what? Going where? Being who?
all best and get well soon
kim
Sun., Feb. 28 at 2:48 p.m. 2021
Biographical note Kim Fupz Aakeson
Screenwriter and illustrator. Born 12/9 1958. Educated on the Danish Film School’s script line 1999. Started as an illustrator and author, especially of children’s and young people’s books. Got a sensational breakthrough with the romantic comedy ‘The Only One’ (1999), directed by Susanne Bier. It became one of modern Danish film’s biggest audience successes.
Kim Fupz has since demonstrated overwhelming productivity in collaboration with quite diverse directors and is side by side with Anders Thomas Jensen, Danish film’s leading screenwriter. Has taken many of his themes and conflicts from modern everyday and family life, often with strong women and weaker men at the center.
Among his greatest successes are ‘Okay’ (2003), directed by Jesper W. Nielsen and with Paprika Steen as a dominant family head, the prison film ‘Crimes’ (2004), directed by Annette K. Olesen and ‘A Soap’ (2006) by Pernille Fischer Christensen, an unconventional love story that has won 11 festival awards, including the Silver Bear at the Berlin Festival.
In recent years he has worked a lot abroad and among other things. written ‘Perfect Sense’ (England, 2011) with Ewan McGregor and directed by David MacKenzie, ‘Happy End’ (Sweden, 2011) directed by Björn Runge and “Gnade” (Germany, 2012) directed by Matthias Glasner.
In 2003, Kim Fupz received an Honorary Bodil for his combined efforts in Danish film.
Kim Fupz Aakeson, born 1958 in Copenhagen, is a trained screenwriter from the Danish Film School and is an author.
Since Kim Fupz Aakeson debuted in 1984 with the children’s book WHO DARE TO AWAKE THE GODS ?, he has published over 70 books for children and adults — including the VITELLO series, WONDERFUL, WONDERFUL, TOUCHED KATRINE and in 2018 the adult novel BÅDENS NAVN til DR. Novel Prize 2019.
In March 2021, Kim Fupz Aakeson is up to date with a new novel for adults, PRISONER.
Kim Fupz Aakeson has over the years received several awards — including The Ministry of Culture’s Children’s Book Prize, the Children’s Librarians ‘Culture Prize, the Danish School Librarians’ Association’s Children’s Book Prize, the Allen Prize and Gyldendal’s Children’s Book Prize.
Kim Fupz Aakeson (b. 1958) is one of the most established children’s book authors in Denmark and has over the years received many awards for his books. He has worked within stage theatre and radio theatre and has also written manuscripts for film.
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