00:02
Line Langebek
I have chosen the painting by Harald Giersing from 1922, and it's called Two Ladies, To damer in Danish. And it was one that I used during the development process of The Girl with the Needle. I did a lot of research, both about the historical period, but also in terms of visuals.

00:23
Line Langebek
This particular painting spoke to me because there's a sort of quietness to it, and it's two women on the couch. The colors are quite muted. There's something very Scandinavian about it.

00:35
Line Langebek
And in this challenge of trying to find the humanity in a story about something that was so gruesome and something that could very easily just have been a story about a monster, that spoke to me. It was like, oh, this is Karoline and Dagmar talking and what does that look like?

00:54
Line Langebek
There is a kind of doppelganger aspect, I think, to these two women that sit on a sofa talking. One is a little bit older than the other, but they also look alike quite a lot in terms of what they're wearing, and their haircuts, and so on. That painting immediately drew me to it.

01:19
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
My name is Tina Jøhnk Christensen, and I'm the host of Danish Originals, a podcast series created in partnership with the American Friends of the National Gallery of Denmark and the National Gallery of Denmark. Our goal is to celebrate Danish creatives who have made a significant mark in the US.

01:36
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Today, our guest is Line Langebek, a Danish script writer. Welcome, Line.

01:42
Line Langebek
Thank you.

01:43
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You and I met in Toronto at the film festival this year, and then we met again at the Oscars, where I was lucky enough to be invited to share the experience with the whole team behind the Danish Oscar nominees in Best International Feature Film, The Girl with the Needle. We walked the red carpet together. First of all, tell us what this experience was like for you. How was it to be at the Oscars here in Los Angeles?

02:10
Line Langebek
It was extraordinary. I think going to the Oscars is something that, one way or another, I think everybody who makes films or are in the film business dream about, even when they don't dream about it. Because it's so ingrained in our consciousness as the pinnacle for good and for bad.

02:31
Line Langebek
So, to be there was a little bit surreal, and I think in the moment it was hard to take in. It's a very overwhelming experience, and there's lots of protocol, so you're just swept up by the whole thing.

02:43
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You seemed to be doing fine. What was the red carpet like with all the celebrities and all the other filmmakers who are nominees like you?

02:53
Line Langebek
I think, at the moment when you come in, you're focused on yourself and your team, and being there with them. You're aware of the hullabaloo that's going on around you, and every time a huge A-lister comes in, there's a whole circus around them. But you have to move along and stand in a particular place, and there's lots of guidance and taking photos, whatever, it's all very quick, in a way. So, I think you're mainly focused on — I was mainly focused on people around me, I think —

03:26
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
The team —

03:27
Line Langebek
— the team, because they were the ones you were there with.

03:31
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Line, a very, very important question for you. How did you decide what to wear? And you looked absolutely amazing, I have to say. Which designer did you pick to dress you for the red carpet at the Oscars?

03:43
Line Langebek
I picked an English designer — because I live in London — Louisa Parris, who is someone who I know a little bit. I know her sister, who's a filmmaker as well. And Louisa makes amazing clothes. She's very into sustainability and actually also old American prints. And I think because I'm Danish but also a little bit English now, and I'm here, I wanted to support her as well. And she was kind enough to lend me a dress for it, and she does these very extraordinary prints that feel quite old school.

04:18
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yeah, it looked like you were wearing a piece of art.

04:21
Line Langebek
Yeah, that's her inspiration and I like that as well, about what she does.

04:26
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Did anything surprise you at the event?

04:30
Line Langebek
I think the way the whole show is run and what happens in the breaks.

04:37
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What happened in the breaks?

04:40
Line Langebek
When there's an ad break and everybody storms out to the bars. And then they storm back in again because there's only three minutes. Or they don't storm back in again because they've missed the window and they have to wait till the next category. And therefore they're all standing at the bar watching it on the TV and then they go back in again. And I think that happens on every floor, doesn't it? So that was a bit surprising.

05:04
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Apart from the bottom floor, I think they have seat fillers that they need to arrange if they leave —

05:10
Line Langebek
Yeah, that's more strict if you're right in the stalls near the stage. But, anything above that, it's a different thing. So that was a bit surprising. Although I had been told that by people who'd gone before.

05:25
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
The team behind The Girl with the Needle were represented at the Oscars with people from Poland, Sweden, and Denmark, where you're from. The director Magnus von Horn is Swedish. The cast, such as Trine Dyrholm, Vic Carmen Sonne, and Besir Zeciri are Danish, and so is the producer Malene Blenkov.

05:46
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
But there were also the Polish producer Mariusz Wlodarski, and a big Polish crew, and the film was shot in Poland. What is the strength of creating art across borders and representing all these countries at the Oscars, even though it was nominated for Denmark?

06:04
Line Langebek
I think for a film like ours, there's a necessity in terms of pulling a film like this together because it's period — it's not a huge budget film, even though it, I think, looks extraordinary, and looks maybe more expensive than what it was. So I think there's a necessity just in terms of pulling finance together.

06:22
Line Langebek
I guess in terms of the times that we're living through, it also feels more important than ever to work across borders and work together. And there's a beauty in that, not just between European countries, but between other countries across the world as well. But that wasn't exactly why it came together the way it did.

06:43
Line Langebek
That was partly because of the nationality of the main crew and obviously me and Magnus and Malena and where we're all residing, in a way. Although the UK is not in this mix. But that's a different story.

07:01
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Nordisk Film held a reception event at the Sunset Marquis, as they always do when Danish films are nominated. It is a tradition. The Danish Minister of Cultural Affairs, Jakob Engel-Schmidt, was there and he held a lovely speech that encouraged artists to create, and he spoke about the importance of art.

07:21
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You live in London, in the UK. So you have an international perspective on how significant Danish films are on the world stage. What do you think the success of Danish film means?

07:34
Line Langebek
I think obviously it positions Denmark on a global map. It also positions Danish values or what stories we bring to the world and what stories we consider important to tell. And The Girl with the Needle is just one example of that, and it's a story from the past, of course. And there are other Danish Oscar-nominated films and winners from past years that have been set in the present day.

08:05
Line Langebek
But I think it's a chance to say something about Denmark in different ways, both in terms of storytelling, but also in terms of the crew and everybody that works on these films and what we're capable of and our way of looking at the world. And obviously that's also colored a little bit by who we are as individuals and where we have grown up or are living.

08:29
Line Langebek
And I have a particular perspective being here and Magnus has a perspective being a Swede in Poland, and so on. So every aspect colors what stories we tell. But I think that is important as well for all the Oscar nominees for every country. That's why I find that category particularly important, in a way, and never more so than right now, maybe.

08:55
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And maybe I'm biased, but it's very often the best movies that are in that category.

09:01
Line Langebek
Yeah, I think so as well.

09:05
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You were in Los Angeles a short time after we had the fires here, which affected the spirit of the city. But you were at a glamorous event with the top of the movie business from around the world, so you got a little glimpse of different sides of the city. What was your impression of it? What is La La Land like?

09:26
Line Langebek
Well, I've been to La La Land before, but obviously I think coming with an Oscar-nominated film, invariably you come in a slightly different way and people look at you in a different way. It's an interesting city to me, also because it's a city that you have to drive around.

09:41
Line Langebek
I'm used to — partly because I'm Danish, and also just because this is how I move through London, is that I cycle or I walk. And this is the opposite of what you generally do in LA, even though I did see a couple of bicycles the week I was there and it cheered me up. They were very few and far between.

10:03
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You must have been in Venice or Santa Monica.

10:06
Line Langebek
I can't remember where I was. I wasn't. I was somewhere else. It was a very, very busy road and it was a guy with a kid at the back, which seemed incredibly brave. But also a bit cheering. But it's also clear that it's a city where there's a big disparity between neighborhoods.

10:21
Line Langebek
And this is something I know from London as well. I think we tend to say that London is a big city of villages. And you can have incredibly poor neighborhoods rubbing shoulders with incredibly wealthy neighborhoods. And the Grenfell fire was a very sad example of that.

10:39
Line Langebek
And you have that sense of Los Angeles as well. And I guess the fire's exposed that as well, that you know that it's a city where there are people who are living on the breadline. And there are then people who go to the Oscar parties and so on. And I think you're conscious of that, or at least I am when I'm there.

11:01
Line Langebek
Or your taxi driver will tell you stories and so on. And just getting the taxi from the airport to where I was staying, you have a taxi driver, invariably, who is an immigrant into the US. And actually a guy who told me that he was an engineer normally, or had been before he moved to the US.

11:23
Line Langebek
But obviously couldn't work as an engineer now, so now he'd been working as a taxi driver for many years. He was telling me about the neighborhoods he could no longer drive into because of the fires and so on. It makes you conscious of the other side of LA as well, that it's a city of dreamers, I guess.

11:41
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Let's talk a little bit about the movie that you wrote the script for. You collaborated with the director, Magnus von Horn, whose native language is Swedish. And the movie, The Girl with the Needle, or Pigen med nålen, it is loosely based on a true story about the baby killer —

12:00
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
— and yes, you heard it correctly, baby killer Dagmar Overbye, who was caught and sentenced to death in 1921 for her crimes. How did the project come about and what interested you in terms of this extremely dark story?

12:16
Line Langebek
I first read about the story in this book that my dad had, that was a book that was published by the Danish "police publisher," Politi forlaget. And they published this book about famous Danish crime cases, and she was a chapter in that book. And there was just this mugshot of her, where she looked incredibly evil, because actually everybody looks incredibly evil in their mugshot.

12:41
Line Langebek
But I was captivated by how horrific this crime was, because the most extreme evil act that you can imagine is killing babies because they're so innocent. And yet also when I began to look into it, because of course the question is how and why, you discover this time period that is not at all the Copenhagen that we know today.

13:09
Line Langebek
There were no reproductive rights. People, when they were poor, they were really poor. Copenhagen, by and large, was poor, and didn't look the way it looks. So it wasn't just about reproductive rights, it was about social rights and so on as well. And so she was part and parcel of that. I was fascinated by this story.

13:29
Line Langebek
And it was a little bit the question of, for the grace of God, what would I have done if I'd been in that, not just in terms of her, but the women who went to her who sought her out, because women put adverts in newspapers looking for somebody who could take their baby and stuff, if they hadn't succeeded in getting an illegal abortion, et cetera.

13:50
Line Langebek
And then I met Lone Scherfig, the director, at this writing boot camp that Nordisk Film and the Danish Film School held. And I told her about the story and I had a four or five page outline I think at that point. And she was incredibly fascinated by it and said, I think my company would be interested in that.

14:13
Line Langebek
Not for me to direct because this is far too dark. But my producer will know a director who's right for this. And so I was introduced to Malene and she knew Magnus, and had been looking for a project for him and knew that he was interested in doing horror and this is a kind of true horror sort of story.

14:34
Line Langebek
So Magnus and I met online. I'd seen his first film, which I thought was great — a way of looking at somebody who's done something wrong— that felt right. The way he came to the story felt sort of similar. So then we started working together and DFI came on board and so on. That was the kind of genesis of this process.

15:00
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I have an American friend who thought the film had a pro-life message, meaning that it supports laws against abortion. I started a heated discussion with him about why this was not the case. What is your take on it, and what were the Americans that you met's take on it, if you had a chance to talk about the film with Americans who'd seen it?

15:25
Line Langebek
I've talked to Americans here. And I heard one, possibly an American, who had the same reaction as your friend. And I was really surprised, actually. That message came to me via somebody else, I wasn't talking to them directly. I'd be interested to know why people interpret it that way, because I'm very clear, and I know Magnus is as well, that we're both very pro-reproductive rights.

15:54
Line Langebek
And for me, it's more a story about what happens if you take away rights. And I heard an American supporter of reproductive rights talk about what happens if you ban abortion, it isn't that abortion stops, it just goes underground. And I think that for me, is what this is about as well. But not just about abortion.

16:18
Line Langebek
Also, if you don't have a society where people can survive, they will do what they need to do to survive. So it's about reproductive rights and the right to have an abortion if you need to, but it's also about ensuring people live dignified lives and so on. So that's about a social healthcare system and so on as well. But it is interesting when people have read it in a different way and why they read that. Because in a way, I feel maybe that says more about where they're starting, maybe.

16:55
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Maybe, yes. Your version of Dagmar in this movie is not a monster, as I see her, at least. What she did is monstrous, and it is hard to understand how she could do what she did. But you also realize through the character of Vic Carmen Sonne, who plays a character that is taken advantage of by her boss in a little bit of a #MeToo way, and that being a woman who is pregnant out of wedlock at the time was not at all easy.

17:22
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How did you go about creating Dagmar and the reality of the world that she lived in, so that she's more nuanced than most writers would probably make her, because you could very easily see a person who kills babies as a monster?

17:38
Line Langebek
I think one of the things we discussed very early on was that we weren't interested — and certainly that was what drew me to the story in the first instance — to do a serial killer movie per se. I have a fascination with that genre, as it were, but there have been a lot: Monster with Charlize Theron or even 10 Rillington Place, which actually doesn't really delve into his backstory so much, but Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, or even as far back as the Fritz Lang films. But —

18:11
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And Hannibal Lecter.

18:12
Line Langebek
Yeah, and Hannibal Lecter, but he's a whole other, because he's a superhero serial killer — even though I did read this newspaper article around the time when Harold Shipman, the doctor in the UK who was caught killing lots of elderly people and maybe swindling them off money and so on as well, that mentioned Hannibal Lecter in the same breath as Ted Bundy and real life killers. And that was quite extraordinary.

18:40
Line Langebek
So, Lecter has his own mythology. But inevitably when you look into serial killers and Dagmar is probably no different. They have a very tragic childhood and there's often abuse. There is suspected abuse in her childhood as well. Often, it starts with petty theft and ends with killings, and that's not to say that everybody who's a petty thief becomes a serial killer. But it doesn't start with the killing. It starts with something else. So that felt less interesting.

19:09
Line Langebek
And always what feels scarier to me, and I think to Magnus as well, is maybe this darkness, this fear of how do you go there? There's a fear obviously, if you have children, you look down at them and go, oh my god. But, equally, how do you become that? And to try and understand that.

19:30
Line Langebek
If you can write somebody off as a monster, they're completely disassociated from us. And you don't need to try and understand them. But if they're closer to us, then we have to try and understand how they've gone to that place. And that's harder, but also in a way more interesting.

19:51
Line Langebek
I think you look at not just serial killers, but stories throughout war, World War II, or wherever people have done things that seem unspeakable, in terms of crime. And you go, there must have been humanity somewhere. And I think that was the interesting thing about Dagmar as well, to go, okay, what's the other side of her? How do you find that?

20:17
Line Langebek
Because if she'd just been a two-headed monster, the women, however desperate they were, wouldn't have handed over their baby in the first instance. There is a moment when they're in trouble, they need to get rid of this baby. But, equally, you're holding a baby and you wouldn't hand it over if there isn't a woman who presents as somebody who's caring, and maybe in that moment, she is.

20:43
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You created a character and you gave some reasons why. Did you ever find out why the real Dagmar did it? Are there any records of conversations with her or anything?

20:56
Line Langebek
There's various fictional accounts for people trying to second guess. There's 122 pages of court transcripts that I found in Rigsarkivet, the Danish National Archives, I think it's called. And some of that stuff we used for the court case at the end. That's not a transcript, what she says at the end, obviously. But the subtext of what she says is in those.

21:17
Line Langebek
She changes her mind and she never says, I did it, because of that. She does indicate at a point that nobody wanted these kids and therefore she just did what she had to do. The most I can deduce reading through that and other things is that it was a way for her to earn money. And it was just another way to earn money. And she did get money for that.

21:39
Line Langebek
But I'm guessing that maybe it was a scheme she set up and then she didn't actually know how to go through with it. And it was easier to get rid of them. And very newborn babies are incredibly, sadly, not very strong, shall we say. So it's horrible. But it also feels like actually there isn't maybe a very deep reason other than—

22:07
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Desperation, maybe.

22:09
Line Langebek
— desperation, and they were unwanted. The women who handed them over really couldn't look after them.

22:16
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And as you said, a means to survive. Since we are in the US, you co-wrote the script for a feature film called I'll Come Running. It's from 2009. It takes place in both Denmark and Texas. This particular state in the US could not be more different from Denmark. What was your meeting with Texas like, if you met Texas at all?

22:42
Line Langebek
Yeah, I went to Texas a couple of times. Or as far as I experienced it, was Austin in Texas. It's incredibly different from the rest of Texas, as I also realized. Austin is still very different from Denmark, but the community that I encountered there is —

22:58
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
It's more artistic, right? And it's a university town.

23:01
Line Langebek
Yeah, a real filmmaker's community that I encountered there, everybody from people who are starting out to much more established filmmakers. But for sure, obviously, when I was there, I saw a little bit of the other side of it where people would go, but this is not really Texas. I experienced Austin mostly, which I loved, but yeah, it's very different.

23:24
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
It is a film about people from different nationalities, who are trying to bridge whatever divides them. What did you see as the major differences that make it hard to create this bridge?

23:37
Line Langebek
I think there's a sense of scale that you grow up with. Denmark is incredibly small, just in terms of the size of the country. And I think you become aware of that. And I think maybe this has changed a little bit since we made the film, but I think there's also a sense of — we talked about it with LA, the disparity between rich and poor is much bigger in the US than at least in Denmark at the time.

24:04
Line Langebek
There's no social fallback, social security system, the way there is in Denmark. So there's a different need to succeed, depending on how you grow up, obviously, your background and your family and income and so on. You grow up with a different awareness.

24:23
Line Langebek
That said, in Denmark you grow up with a different awareness of the world as well, I think, in a way. Nobody speaks Danish, you have to learn another language when you grow up. Whereas you can go through your life in the US and not learn another language. So those are the challenges.

24:40
Line Langebek
But I guess when you're a young person — this is a story about young people falling in love — it's also about your personality and I think, your sense of humor and so on. And so that can be bridged if you share that, I think.

24:54
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
In 2015, you co-founded Raising Films. And what is Raising Films?

25:00
Line Langebek
Yeah, so Raising Films was started by me and other filmmakers, writers, producers. I had just become a mother when we started it. We weren't all parents at the time that we started it. But what we saw when we looked around was how difficult it was to navigate the industry if you were a parent. And then mostly it was women being affected obviously, but not always. And how un-family friendly it was. And we felt that affected who got to tell the stories that we saw on our screens, both big and small.

25:42
Line Langebek
Ironically, at a time when we probably had the least amount of time to spare, we set out with a mission to try and change this. We were all volunteers, but we raised money to hire a comms manager to work for us a couple of days a week and so on. And then we started raising some money to do research projects.

26:03
Line Langebek
We realized that if you want to change something systemically, you need data, because people don't believe you unless you have some figures, percentages, that you can throw at them. So even when they can see that there aren't that many women or people of color in the room, you need some data to throw at them and say this is why.

26:23
Line Langebek
That was our mission, and things did begin to change and other organisations in the UK have appeared since. There's an organisation called PiPA, which is Parents & Carers in Performing Arts. They even encompass theater as well as TV. There's more actors there, but there's an overlap between what we're doing. We're a little bit on the back burner now, even though we still exist, but everybody has got busy and so on and things have begun to be picked up—

26:53
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
That's a good sign.

26:54
Line Langebek
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the industry has changed a little bit and other organizations like The Film and TV Charity have picked up some of the stuff that we were doing, and other organizations have become more aware of it. And some of it was just a basic sense of child care as a budget line, or care in the budget line because sometimes it's not just people who have children. We're all going to experience having elderly parents to care for.

27:22
Line Langebek
Sometimes people have siblings that are disabled that they need to care for. We would see people disappear from the industry. And if you disappear for four or five years to take care of somebody, because they're ill, or they're dying, or whatever it is, it's very hard to come back, because there's a gap in your CV that's hard to plug. That was part of our mission.

27:45
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I mentioned two of your films, but you have more on your credit. What brought you into screenwriting in the first place?

27:53
Line Langebek
I started out writing poetry, actually. Maybe every writer starts out as a bad poet. But I started out writing poetry and I was always writing. And then I went to the European Film College in Denmark, which is a school in the folk high school tradition, and yet it's a slightly different folk high school because it's just focused on film.

28:18
Line Langebek
And it's eight, nine months where you literally just run around and make films. And you try every aspect. You have to move around between projects. And you direct, and you DOP, and you do sound, and you do different things. And I realized that I wanted to write.

28:35
Line Langebek
So from there on, I started applying to writing courses. I knew I wanted to go abroad because I was interested in writing different stories that expanded the borders of Denmark a little bit. So I was looking at the US, I was looking at Canada, I was looking at France, and I was looking at the UK.

28:58
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And why did it become the UK?

29:00
Line Langebek
Canada, there was no program that was directly just about writing. The US was very expensive. And France, I felt that even though I spoke French, that my French was, after all, maybe not good enough to write scripts in French. And so then it became the UK, and it was easier in terms of getting access to student grants from Denmark and so on as well.

29:27
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You grew up in Funen in Denmark, where I'm from too. What was your childhood like? And did you always dream of becoming a storyteller already back then? I know you started as a poet, but was that something that you dreamt of as a profession? Or was it mainly something you just did for fun?

29:46
Line Langebek
I don't think I knew that was a profession. My mum was a nurse and my dad was an engineer. It wasn't that I had any screenwriters or authors or anything like that in the family. I wrote from a very early age, but it was partly that we were writing stuff through school.

30:06
Line Langebek
I think maybe by the time I was a teenager, I had a sense that I wanted to do something with writing. I explored what seemed like more legitimate ways of becoming, which was a journalist. I went to the school of journalism, actually, and sat the test. It must have been the last year of high school or something, and then I thought, if this is journalism, I don't want to be a journalist.

30:31
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Okay!

30:32
Line Langebek
I can't remember what the test was, but it must have been something like reporting on news stories. And I just remember sitting in the room and all I wanted to do was to take the news story and do something different with it, to move it away from fact, basically. And I thought, okay, maybe it was better that I didn't become a journalist. I wouldn't be a truthful reporter.

30:55
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
That's funny. And when did you move to the UK and where are you based in the UK now? And what is it that you like about the part of London that you live in?

31:06
Line Langebek
So I moved to the UK at the end of the '90s to study. I know that I didn't at that point intend to stay for as long as I have. I came here to study screenwriting and I was going to do that, and it was a course in Bournemouth, which is a city by the coast. And afterwards, I was like, I'm going to move up to London and experience London for a couple of years, and then I will probably go home, or go somewhere else. And then I got stuck in London.

31:35
Line Langebek
And at that point, I lived in Haringey in North London, and I've more or less always stayed in the northeast, and I'm still in North London around Highbury, and Islington is one of my closest Tube stations. I like London. It's a hard city to be in sometimes, but there's always something new to discover, and it's quite green, which I hadn't considered.

31:59
Line Langebek
But I know that it's green because I use the greenness. I swim outdoors in a huge water reservoir that's not that far from where I am. And there's Hampstead Heath, and there's huge green places in other parts of London as well. Clapham Common and Richmond Park and all corners have greenness. And I hadn't thought of that until a French friend, who moved back to Paris from London, when I went to visit her.

32:26
Line Langebek
She said, I miss all the green spaces, and I always thought of Paris as quite green because of the wide boulevards and stuff. And she said no, we just have wide roads, but there's no parks here, there's no marshes. Maybe that is what keeps us all sane if you live in a big city. There's Highgate Woods. There's lots of other woods.

32:54
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
When you mention Hampstead Heath, I think about a bench where you can sit and look at the whole city. That's what I picture in my mind when you talk about that.

33:03
Line Langebek
Yeah, you can see all over North London and people go there for New Year's as well and look out over the city. And I think London, because it is a city of foreigners, in a way, and LA, maybe it's a little bit the same. I obviously know people here who were born here and have grown up here. But I also know just as many people who are probably Londoners, because they have been here for all of their adult life, but they're from somewhere completely different.

33:30
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What's it like for you to be an expat? You're not too far from home. I'm thinking you're just across the ocean from Denmark. You can easily get on an airplane and fly home.

33:40
Line Langebek
I don't consider myself an expat in that sense. And maybe that's because the word for me has a particular ring to it. And maybe there is a community in London, but I don't know that I'm entirely part of it. But my daughter goes to something called a Saturday School and she's learning Danish and there is obviously a community around that. I guess I'm an immigrant.

34:06
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yes.

34:07
Line Langebek
I think I can see it more if you're in the US or Canada or somewhere completely far away that you might look for that community more. But as you say, Denmark isn't so far away and therefore I never felt the need to look out for this particular thing. Although during the COVID years, Denmark was far enough that it was a problem to go there.

34:33
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You are a wordsmith. How do you keep both your English and your Danish up to date?

34:40
Line Langebek
I read quite a lot. I like reading. I read a lot both in Danish and English. And I like reading poetry, partly just because I love poetry. I also think actually for me poetry and cinema are quite closely linked, or at least it can be, maybe for the kind of cinema that I love. I'm quite a visual writer, I think, and poetry is written in images.

35:03
Line Langebek
I try to read fiction books as well. I try to read news online and keep up with what's happening in Denmark. And I think maybe since my daughter's arrived and now I talk to her in Danish and I read to her in Danish and so on, that's become a little bit easier in a way, because automatically, I am communicating with another person on a daily basis in Danish.

35:30
Line Langebek
And I think my accent is probably a little bit stronger since she's arrived, because before it probably just faded into the background a bit. I wasn't necessarily speaking Danish very often, other than calling family in Denmark. So it's become a little bit easier to maintain that connection now, I think.

35:47
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What is your favorite Danish word?

35:50
Line Langebek
There is a word, I don't know if it's my favorite word, but it's one that I often tell foreigners about, because I don't know that it entirely exists in English and I'm quite fond of words that don't entirely translate. But there's a word called nøde. And it's a very old Danish word.

36:09
Line Langebek
And it's what I would say that my grandma would always do. If she'd made food or a cake or something, and there was a little bit left, and everybody was completely full, she'd go, go on, come on, are you, can you not? And if you couldn't, she'd be like, did you not like it? It'd be like pushed on you, and you'd feel guilt tripped into it.

36:30
Line Langebek
And I remember telling an Arabic friend about it, and he went, that's exactly what an Arabic grandmother would do, and I was like, it translates, transcends borders, this thing. But it's a very specific Danish word and there's probably a new generation of Danes that don't necessarily know that. But, yeah, so words like that.

36:50
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I actually don't know it. Nøde —

36:52
Line Langebek
Nøde, to nøde somebody, to encourage them.

36:56
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I actually learned something today.

36:58
Line Langebek
Yeah, I'll come up with another word in a second, but yeah.

37:03
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Do you — I think I know the answer to this one — Do you still think of yourself as a Dane?

37:08
Line Langebek
Yeah, I do, but also as a Londoner.

37:10
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
As a Londoner, not an Englishwoman?

37:13
Line Langebek
No, a Londoner. I remember being in Denmark once, and I think somebody was like, oh, but you're like half English now. And I was like, no, I don't know that I am. That's a different thing. But I definitely feel I've been here long enough, that more of my adult years have been spent in London than in Denmark. London has definitely shaped me. But I don't know if I'm English, per se. Yeah, that's a different thing.

37:43
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Alright, Line, my final question to you. What do you still want to achieve? You're still very young and have the world in front of you. What would you like to squeeze out of this world, so to speak?

37:55
Line Langebek
That's a hard question. Lots. I think there's lots of stories to tell, both to entertain, but also just stories that I feel are important in the world. I have many ideas for stories that feel important, and people that I want to collaborate with. That's a little bit broad and not very specific. But I think we live in very turbulent but also interesting times. I think we have a responsibility to say something about that. And I've lots to say.

38:32
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I can't help but ask you, because you mentioned Lone Scherfig before, if you would love to work with her as a director. I hear from actors who've worked with her and also from meeting her personally, she's absolutely wonderful.

38:45
Line Langebek
Yeah, of course. Yeah, I think she's fantastic.

38:48
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Is that something that we'll hear about in the future maybe that you're working on right now?

38:54
Line Langebek
I mean, nothing is on the cards right now. But yeah, that would be wonderful, obviously. Yeah, I think Lone's a fantastic director.

39:01
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What is on the cards right now?

39:03
Line Langebek
There's a couple of things that aren't signed yet, so I can't really talk about them. And then I've started work on a BBC Films project with a French Moroccan director, which is an adaptation of a J.G. Ballard story. And that's exciting. I think by the time this shoots, it'll probably be her third feature film.

39:22
Line Langebek
So that's incredibly exciting, and also a story set in the past again. That wasn't deliberate, but that came to me, but also a story that talks about now. It talks about climate change and our current state of the world in a roundabout way. So it's set almost a hundred years ago but speaks into today as well.

39:45
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Like The Girl with The Needle. So now we've gone full circle and we can say thank you very much for being part of Danish Originals. We really appreciate that you were part of our podcast.

40:00
Line Langebek
Thank you for having me here.

40:09
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
For today's episode, Line Langebek chose Harald Giersing's To damer or Two Ladies from 1922 from the collection of the National Gallery of Art.