Some Notes on Present European and Scandinavian Co-production Practices Through the Prism of ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ (2009)

In a critique of the sometimes confusing ways in which the term transnational has been repeatedly used, Mette Hjort, in 2010 attempted to outline what she called a “typology of transnationalisms” in connection with contemporary audio-visual production (2009: 12–33). Hjort’s palpable purpose here is to more specifically illuminate and contextualize the increasingly more used concept of transnationalism. As a result, she consequently identifies nine specific types of cross-border collaboration. These types, or forms, moreover, seem neatly usable when describing and examining present forms of co-production within the audio-visual field.
In this talk, Hjort’s typology will be used and scrutinized in order to shed light on the various production strategies employed during the making of Scandianvian film’s by far most financially successful venture during the last few decades. The widely discussed and distributed The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009) was consequently an international co-production, shot and post-produced at particular locations in Sweden, including at the geographical sites of two major regional film funds. Simultaneously, the production represented collaboration between four mayor public and private broadcasters in Denmark, Germany, Norway and Sweden while also involving two of those countries’s public film funding agencies as well as various film production companies. In addition, the production was able to attract substantial private equity, an increasingly rare occurrence in present Scandinavian film production. Similarly, though nearly all actors were Swedish and the dialogue was spoken in the domestic language of that country, virtually all the so-called “A-functions” behind the camera was being handled by Danes, including a Danish director, director of photography, producer, editor, sound designer, production designer and music composer. In addition, finally, the film’s script was written by two Danish screenwriters who in turn adapted the Swedish bestselling novel that initiated the entire project.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – both a feature film and part of the later released Millennium television serial - consequently represents an alliance of different domestic and international organizations and agents informally negotiating their diverse interests in the Swedish and Scandinavian audio-visual production sphere. As a kind of conclusion, some sort of answer to the question of how and why a contemporary individual project can attract such an alliance of diverse agents and organizations will briefly be attempted.