Hot on the heels of a spate of Scandinavian noir-thrillers comes Jackpot, a darkly comic Norwegian film from the pen of acclaimed crime writer Jo Nesbo.
Based on the anarchic escapades of a bunch of ex-criminals and their supervisor who get lucky with a big win on the football pools, Jackpot is a riot of crazed characters and underworld carnage set in the murky borderlands between Norway and Sweden.
After trying to gain interest in a crime script of his own, without any luck, Marten discovered Nesbo had a film idea in need of a director.
"Basically, he [Nesbo] sat back and told us to do what we wanted to do, as we were the film-makers," Marten said.
To workshop Nesbo's loose idea into a cohesive film, Marten filmed the actors improvising their roles and then cut and pasted dialogue from these sessions straight into his evolving script.
"Yes, the most important thing in the film is character, basically. A film like this needs personalities, so improvisation is something I use to try and get the actors to figure out the characters, so it is a tool to find more dialogue really, more comedy."
Is it something in the water up there that influences the Scandinavian skill for dark menacing thrillers?
"Well, it's quite simple really," says Marten.
"Scandinavia is cold, it's dark and cold. We also have a long history of great crime fiction in Scandinavia, so the films tend to reflect that. We have a long history of reading crime and we do live in a very dark and cold part of the world, and that creates a very nice universe for those types of stories."
The first film adaptation of a Nesbo work, Headhunters, has not only gained universal acclaim, it is now being remade for Hollywood. Was there any pressure to replicate the success?
"No, the films were made basically at the same time, and our budget was so much lower. I knew that we had a completely different film, and we kind of understood that we were the underdog Jo Nesbo film inasmuch as our film wasn't based on a book that many people had read.''
The fact that Jackpot has gained worldwide distribution is heartening but it did leave Marten with some concerns.
"Until the film first screened to a non-Norwegian audience, I was very afraid of things getting lost in translation, as it's impossible to translate all of the jokes that we put in the film. But, when the film screened at Tribeca [New York], it was a huge relief, as people laughed in all the right places and proved to me that as soon as people get into the universe of the characters, the understanding comes automatically, as comedy is such a universal thing."
Jackpot is set in what appears to be a piece of no-man's land between Norway and Sweden populated by criminals and sex workers. That's not so far from reality.
"This is the one thing that doesn't resonate with the rest of the world, as it's not universally understood," says Marten.
"Norwegians have always regarded Sweden as some kind of magical country, in a way. I mean, we have the oil and the money and everything, but Sweden was the place, still is the place where you go to buy cheap booze, tobacco, and that's where you went to buy porn (well, in the '70s and '80s) and this still exists in a way. There are still shopping centres on the border designed especially for Norwegians. Actually, strip clubs in these locations still exist. I remember driving around location-scouting and there would be nothing for miles but one house that was a strip club with its own porn cinema, the creepiest place you could imagine. I parked the car and wanted to go in, but I was alone so thought it might not have been a good look."
On a more sober note, Jackpot was released in Norway just six months after the Oslo bombing and massacre on Utoya Island. The timing and the style of the film prompted one Norwegian newspaper to suggest it was too "bloody" to review.
"Obviously we were aware that something like that could surface," says Martens, "but the reality is, your average American thriller probably has a lot more violence than Jackpot does ... We were aware that there might be concerns about the film, so we did some test screenings to see if we should cut certain scenes out. Fortunately, everybody says 'no, this is a film, and it had nothing to do with it [the tragedy]'."
With many films in this genre, finding an ending that adequately fulfils audience expectations is not easy. So much so that Martens shot three different endings.
"It was very tempting to go with a different one to what we have. I mean, one of the endings tied everything up so you knew who had done what and then another one was very open, so the tricky thing was to find an ending that resonated with the rest of the story. We tried to please everybody and ourselves and I think a film like this needs a kind of an open ending; it's nice to hear people debating the film after they have watched it."
One aspect of Norwegian cinema culture that is totally at odds with their fondness for brooding crime is a national love of insipid Brit-coms, in particular Notting Hill. Marten lists it in his top five films.
"It is possible to like Notting Hill, isn't it? I feel no shame to say I like it. I mean, the comedy and writing is outstanding, and every time that film goes on television in Norway, which is about twice a year, people watch it and the ratings are really good, 'cause that is a film that relates to just about everybody... I will always watch it."
