The Good Nurse is the English-language debut of the filmmaker Tobias Lindholm, who had been leery of Hollywood: “I was basically afraid of losing myself or whatever vision I had in the hunt for something that I didn’t really understand.” Photo / Getty Images
Tobias Lindholm emphasises his characters’ humanity, an approach that won over Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne, stars of the Netflix true-crime thriller.
The true crime thriller The Good Nurse is ultimately an indictment of American systems: the hospitals that turned a blind eye to the atrocities of Charles Cullen, a nurse who admitted to killing 29 patients and may have killed dozens more as he quietly moved from job to job; and the interlocking demands of employment and health care benefits that held back Amy Loughren, a fellow nurse who eventually helped bring Cullen to justice.
The Good Nurse, which is adapted from Charles Graeber’s nonfiction book, is also a movie that would not exist without another American system — namely, Hollywood. Its stars include two Academy Award winners, Eddie Redmayne as Cullen and Jessica Chastain as Loughren, and is available to stream on Netflix.
This is the first English-language film for director Tobias Lindholm, a Danish screenwriter and filmmaker, and The Good Nurse has the potential to be seen by his widest American audience yet, although many viewers may already be familiar with Lindholm’s work.
At 45, he has seen many of his films and TV series cross seamlessly into the American marketplace, without having to sacrifice his homegrown artistic sensibilities. Those projects include the political TV series Borgen, which he wrote for; the life-affirming drama Another Round, which he wrote with its director, Thomas Vinterberg; and the procedural miniseries The Investigation, which he wrote and directed.
Lindholm has always eyed Hollywood warily, regarding it as a place where some of his peers lost their way. Speaking from his office in Copenhagen, Denmark, during a recent video conversation, Lindholm said, “I had seen a lot of awesome fellow Scandinavian filmmakers disappear in the American studio system and not end up making the film they wanted to make.”
Yet Lindholm said he inherently identified with what he considered American cinema, in which people are defined by their jobs. (“That’s why all your stories are about presidents, police officers, sheriffs, cowboys, detectives,” he said.) He contrasted that with European cinema, which he said is “obsessed with psychology and caught up in emotions.”
Lindholm said The Good Nurse was the right American film for him, one that exemplified his own narrative philosophy. As he put it, “Good storytelling should be around 50 per cent identification and 50 per cent fascination.”
Lindholm grew up fascinated with American cultural exports like jazz and hip-hop, and devoted his early 20s to pursuits like skateboarding and graffiti before enrolling in the National Film School of Denmark.
There, he met future collaborators like Jeppe Gjervig Gram, a fellow Borgen writer, and his future wife and producer, Caroline Blanco. Before graduation, Lindholm was tapped by Vinterberg, a co-founder of the Dogme 95 film movement, to help him write what would become the 2010 social realist feature Submarino. That same year also saw the release of R, a prison drama that Lindholm wrote and directed with Michael Noer, and both movies earned widespread international acclaim.
His resume rapidly grew to include Borgen as well as the script for the 2012 drama The Hunt, another collaboration with Vinterberg. Lindholm also wrote and directed A Hijacking, a 2012 thriller about a cargo ship captured by pirates in the Indian Ocean, and A War, a 2015 drama about Danish soldiers in Afghanistan.
His relentless productivity, Lindholm said, was driven partly by a desire to make the most of what he assumed would be limited opportunities. “I have so much anxiety all of my life, so I’m always afraid that with everything I do, they will finally realise I’m a fraud,” he explained. Also, there were financial incentives: “I suddenly made money for the first time in my life, and I forgot to pay taxes,” Lindholm said. “So that was a blessing in disguise.”
Certain themes were already emerging in Lindholm’s work, which tends to focus on people in familiar careers whose humanity is tested when they are placed in extraordinarily tense situations.
“It’s always a person and a system,” said actor Pilou Asbaek, who has starred in several of Lindholm’s film and TV projects. “The system expects you to behave a certain way. You, within the system, may make the correct or incorrect decision. That will have lasting consequences for you.”
Although his reputation as a filmmaker was growing, Lindholm said, he was not necessarily looking to parlay it into a Hollywood career. “I was afraid of it,” he said. “I was hesitant because I was basically afraid of losing myself or whatever vision I had in the hunt for something that I didn’t really understand.”
But that reluctance began to evaporate about six years ago when Lindholm was approached by David Fincher and Charlize Theron to direct two episodes of Mindhunter, the Netflix serial killer investigation series on which they were executive producers. He was also permitted to observe Fincher’s directing work on earlier episodes, which Lindholm said was “the perfect film school for me.”
“That gave me courage enough to pursue an American dream,” he added.
It was on his flight to the United States to work on Mindhunter that Lindholm read the screenplay for The Good Nurse, written by Krysty Wilson-Cairns (a co-screenwriter on 1917 and Last Night in Soho) and determined that he wanted to direct it.
In a genre that is often derided as exploitative and voyeuristic, Lindholm said, The Good Nurse was more interested in dramatising the quiet bravery of Loughren than the gruesome offences of Cullen, who injected patients with deadly doses of drugs.
“In these stories, there’s no doubt who the villains are,” he said. “To allow ourselves to tell stories from that void, from that big, black hole of nothing, there needs to be a good reason. We need to find the light in that story, and that light became Amy the nurse and her struggle.”
Chastain, whom Lindholm had admired for her performance in Zero Dark Thirty, agreed that it was rare to come across a true crime screenplay that did not feel like a celebration of violence. “It really is fetishised so often and shown as power,” she said, adding that in this film, “it isn’t violence that stops violence, it’s compassion — it’s treating someone as a human being and not as a monster.”
Eager to work with Lindholm, she and Redmayne signed on to The Good Nurse. The actors underwent two weeks of nurse training and spent another two weeks rehearsing before production began in April 2021.
Redmayne said he was impressed by Lindholm’s directorial command on the actor’s first day of filming: a long, slow zoom-in as Cullen impassively watches a team of doctors and nurses try to revive a doomed patient.
It would become the film’s opening shot. “After we’d done that and I saw that take, I immediately got the essence of the film,” Redmayne said. “I knew that it had his fingerprints all over it.”
The stars said they were equally impressed by a decision that Lindholm made later in production. When they started to film a sequence in which Chastain would be printing sensitive data from a hospital computer, looking over her shoulder for Redmayne and suddenly startled by him, the director called cut on the scene — and then cut it entirely from the movie. Lindholm had decided it was too overwrought and unrealistic.
As producers raced onto the set, Redmayne recalled, “I was like, ‘Tobias, why don’t we just shoot it so you have it, in case you need it?’ And he was like, ‘No, this is the only moment in the film that doesn’t come from a true place. Go home.’ I just admired it so much.”
Chastain said she also felt bolstered by Lindholm’s on-the-fly assessment. “As an actor, that’s what I longed for,” she explained. “I want someone to captain a movie. And when a director has that, it makes me feel safe.”
Following The Good Nurse, Lindholm and Succession star Jeremy Strong have been developing a miniseries, tentatively titled The Best of Us, that will dramatise the lives of several people exposed to toxic debris following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York.
It is a project that Strong explained has required months of careful preparation, delving into existing research and journalism, reading firsthand accounts and speaking to people who experienced the aftermath. “This is obviously a very sensitive and serious subject, and he’s not someone who’s going to just waltz into it,” Strong said. “He shares the belief that the right to tell any story must be earned, and certain stories are hard won.”
Lindholm said that when the gravity of the material can start to overwhelm him, he thinks back to the advice he received from his wife some months ago. At that time, he was feeling especially burdened by the pandemic and his work on The Investigation, which dramatises the efforts to solve a chilling real-life murder. “She said your only responsibility as a filmmaker is to make sure that there is hope — always add hope to the stories,” he explained.
He added, “If we can provide an inspiration to feel that you’re part of this world, that there are ways out of complete darkness, then we’re making a difference in our lives and that’s worth something.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Dave Itzkoff
Photographs by: Devin Oktar Yalkin
©2022 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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