Erik Poppe opened the Norwegian International Film Festival in Haugesund with Quisling: The Final Days and carried it to Toronto, and he begins the conversation by owning the credo behind all of it.
My role as an artist is to raise questions and not hand out all the answers.
It’s a philosophy forged long before he was a director. Poppe came up as a photojournalist straight out of school, covering the Falklands, Iran and Iraq, apartheid South Africa, Cambodia, Afghanistan, until a virus caught abroad put him in a Norwegian hospital for six months and redirected him toward film. He studied at the Drama Institute in Stockholm, where his best friend happened to be Daniel Bergman, Ingmar’s son, working contentedly as a grip. Movies that hand you the answer in the first five minutes, like the political films of the 1970s, bore him. He’d rather drop the audience into a hard subject and make them search.
The deeper reason he left journalism for fiction was control. As a Reuters stringer he watched his stories get edited past recognition, and he came to believe a feature offers something reportage cannot: an unspoken contract with the audience that lets him pull them bodily into a room, into the felt sense of being there, in ways a documentary never could. He still shoots small documentaries between features, often traveling alone with just a camera into eastern Congo or the border regions of Afghanistan, but fiction is where he gets to build the entire emotional architecture himself.
The Man Whose Name Became a Slur
Vidkun Quisling was Norway’s wartime puppet leader, the politician who collaborated with Nazi Germany so completely that Winston Churchill turned his surname into the common word for traitor, coined in Parliament days after Quisling’s 1940 radio-station coup. Poppe had circled the subject since 2003 without finding a way in, until a family sent him the previously unknown diary of Peder Olsen, the pastor dispatched by Oslo’s bishop into Quisling’s cell to lead him toward contrition. Their recorded conversations turned out to be less about religion than about guilt, responsibility, lies, and truth, a meeting between a humanist and a fascist, and that was the key. The film, which runs from Quisling’s arrest at the end of the occupation to his execution, became a contained two-hander: Gard B. Eidsvold as Quisling, in his first leading role and carrying a private weight, his own father had been arrested and tortured under Quisling’s regime, opposite Anders Danielsen Lie as the pastor. It’s a bookend to Poppe’s 2016 hit The King’s Choice, which dramatized the first three days of the same invasion.
The Risk of an Empathetic Monster
This is the controversial part, and Poppe knows it. He builds the film so you come to understand how Quisling thinks, even risk being briefly seduced by it.
I want you to learn how he’s thinking.
A Norwegian critic argued the film shouldn’t exist at all, that Quisling should be met with silence. Poppe, who never responds to reviews, made an exception, because that objection sits at the dead center of why he made the film: to dismantle extremism, you first have to understand it, and silence is exactly what lets the next Quisling go unrecognized. The movie traces the radicalization, his years in Soviet Russia, where he helped feed hundreds of thousands during the famine before concluding that Bolshevism was a planetary threat, his unheeded warnings back in Norway, and the fatal moment he heard Hitler saying what he’d been trying to say. Driven by ideology rather than money, Quisling becomes a case study in the word Europe now uses constantly: radicalism.
Here’s the stance the film quietly enforces, and it’s structural. Poppe refuses flashbacks and locks us in the present tense from arrest to execution, which means he denies us the safe distance of hindsight, the comfortable perch from which we already know this man is the villain. We have to sit in the cell and listen. The discomfort of almost feeling for him isn’t a side effect; it’s the mechanism, a low-stakes reproduction of the very process by which an ordinary person gets pulled toward a monstrous idea. The pastor becomes the audience’s proxy, a decent man who keeps catching his own creeping sympathy. It’s the same unnerving territory as Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall, which drew identical objections for humanizing Hitler’s final days, and Tim Robbins’s Dead Man Walking, where a spiritual companion and a condemned man talk their way toward an accounting.
Why The Wild Child Never Left Him
Asked what shaped the filmmaker he became, Poppe reaches back to a film he saw young and never shook, François Truffaut’s 1970 The Wild Child.
Truffaut’s black-and-white drama, based on the true case of a feral boy found in a French forest in 1798, follows the doctor who patiently tries to bring him into language and society, with Truffaut himself playing the physician. Poppe pairs it with Ken Loach’s Kes, another spare, intimate story of a working-class boy and the kestrel he trains. Both are about small issues in life rather than huge dramas, and Poppe, raised by his father after his mother left when he was young, was clearly peering into them for something personal. There’s a deeper rhyme he doesn’t name: The Wild Child is a contained two-hander about one person trying to reach another across an almost unbridgeable gulf, patiently, through talk and trust, which is precisely the shape of Quisling, the pastor laboring to reach a soul that may be beyond reach. His earliest features drew the same DNA forward, the Oslo gang film Schpaaa openly indebted to Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine.
The Craft of Truth
Poppe’s method is built to protect that truthfulness. He demands enormous preparation with actors, twelve weeks rather than the usual two or three; for A Thousand Times Good Night he sent Juliette Binoche, baffled at first, to train as a war photographer in conflict zones until the camera felt like part of her body. The payoff is practical as well as artistic: actors that prepared let him shoot faster and direct with a single trusted word. On Quisling he wrote with two screenwriters, then handed the script to the readers he knew would react most violently, and during a ten-month edit he ran a screening every Wednesday for three months, passing out the same twenty-two questions each time so he could measure, week over week, whether the film was working or sliding toward catastrophe.
He’s just as candid about the business. He maps the festivals like a working professional: Berlin is the focused, well-run market in February, all coffee and screenings; Cannes is warmer and looser in May; Venice is chaos; Toronto is a genuinely valuable marketplace, which is why landing there mattered, with a US distributor coming aboard and, after The King’s Choice made the Academy’s foreign-language shortlist, a real eye on Oscar categories this time. His advice to younger filmmakers closes the loop back to the credo: start with a story that’s personal and that you already know deeply, keep it simple, and above all make it truthful, because a story told with honesty, contained and close, is the one that finally hits hard.
