You are listening to The Next Best Picture podcast, and this is my interview, with the writer and director for The Promise Island, Nikolai Arsel, and the film's leading star, Mads Mikkelsen.

Ludwig Hayle. Welcome to Helguss.

You have tried to dig in the hood.

I will build a carmust for us to come in order.

It's fantastic that you're in going with. I will be a king's first in the out. It's fantastic that you're going to go with. I'm for there's a chance of life here out there. Hedden is God's nature in all its pract. Why castrere a wild vass that just is a free? He has God not set a man in the earth for to create civilization. God is chaos. Life is chaos. No, a cares. No, I'm being joined.

I am being joined right now by Danish royalty, as it were, director, filmmaker, Nikolai Arsel, and Mads-Mickleson here to talk today with me about the Promise Land, one of 2023's best films and also the Danish entry for this year's

Best International Feature at the 96 Academy Awards. Gentlemen, how you both doing? Good. We're good.

We're here doing the footwork. Yeah. I'm talking to people like you. So we're just happy that you guys are talking about them.

Absolutely.

I mean, when I saw this at the Telluride Film Festival, I was completely blown away by this movie.

I just watched it for a second time now at AFI Film Fest.

And I said to you, Nikolai, like this film just keeps on holding up each and every time.

The crowd reactions to it have been massive.

It's a movie that I think has stood out a lot compared to some other international films that I tend to see,

which tend to be a bit more slower-paced and tend to go with, like, kind of the beat of their own drum, whereas your film taps into something that I think

a lot of other international films don't necessarily tend to do, which is they kind of harken

back to old Hollywood blockbuster, like style epic filmmaking on a grand scale. So I know you've

talked a lot about you, you're influenced by David Lean in particular with this movie

Can you tell me though specifically what it is about David Lean that you were attracted to when you told this story?

I think you know Lawrence of Arabia is one of my favorite films of all time

I think I watch it maybe once or twice every year and I think one of the I couldn't, I didn't always understand exactly why that was, you know.

But I think I've got to realize that it's the mix between sort of the grand scale epic filmmaking,

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