Using Sound to Establish Place: Line Langebek Knudsen Talks ‘The Girl with the Needle’

Writer/Producer Line Langebek Knudsen (I’ll Come Running) understands that the visual isn't just important in a narrative, but sound is as well. One of the meetings she had with The Girl with the Needle co-writer Magnus von Horn (The Here After, Sweat) was strictly about sound. “We had a slightly unusual process. We started with a visual temple document, which the Danish Film Institute agreed to fund. Magnus and I gathered 14 or 15 images that we felt spoke to the story, in terms of the characters, time period, and setting. Then I wrote these first-person prose texts. Four for Karoline, four for Dagmar, and some for Peter. We put that together as a sort of alternative treatment.”

Dagmar Overbye was one of Denmark’s most prolific serial killers. Played by Trine Dyrholm in the film, she is like a Grimm’s character at its most evil. Vic Carmen Sonne is Karline, someone unfortunate enough to get caught in Dagmar’s web. The look of The Girl with the Needle is bleak, giving it a nightmarish quality. The sounds are vibrant and put us in the middle of the happenings. As a nominee for Best International Feature Film at the Oscars, it’s a psychological horror film that relies on its look, sound, and complicated characters to convey its Stygian fairytale. From the opening scene where a child gets viciously slapped by an adult, we know we’re in for a journey through a Dickensian hellscape. Line recently spoke with Script about developing this world that’s based on a true story and is a slice of history.

On Writing with Magnus von Horn

Sonya Alexander: How did this project come to be?

Line Langebek Knudsen: This was an idea I'd been tinkering with for a while. I read the true story of the serial killer in a book that my dad had that I stumbled upon. She has a chapter in that book about famous Danish crime cases. I became fascinated by her and what had happened and the ‘why?’ question, even though it's one of those questions you can never get an answer to. That was sort of all the more interesting for that. 

Then I met a director at an event and told her about the story. She said, 'That sounds really interesting. Can you send me a bit about that? I think my company might be interested in doing it.' Then I met Malene Blenkov of the Danish Film Institute and was introduced to Magnus. She had been looking for a project for Magnus and knew that he was interested in doing something that was more like a horror story. Then we met and started working together. That was the original genesis of it.

Sonya: How did you decide what to include and what to leave out of this intense story?

Line: It was a long process. From when it first started and met Malene, that was about seven years ago. And then we properly started working on it six months to a year later, when we got funding. There was a lot of research involved in this project because even though the film isn't a biopic of this woman's life and it's not historically accurate in every way, there's a lot that's been invented where you go into the gaps of history and go ‘nobody knows what happened here so we're free to invent’ but we still wanted something that felt true to the time. 

I live in London and visited a museum dedicated to medicine and is dedicated to the invention of the early days of plastic surgery which really started around and after the First World War. There's a museum just outside of Copenhagen that's dedicated to WWI as well. There was the Royal Archives in Copenhagen where there was a transcript of the entire court case which was around 122 pages. Everything unveiled something else. 

This is a story that isn't dramaturgically like a traditional three-act structure. It's more chapter-like and each chapter reveals something else. It's a different way of pushing the story forward. It's more character driven. Peter, the husband, who's obviously entirely fictional, but emerged from this research. We had to figure out a way to show how the war affected people in Denmark. 

Denmark was neutral during the war officially. One of the things I discovered during research is that you're never really neutral. You still have to have an army in case neutrality breaks. There was rationing because we border Germany. The war was present even if Denmark wasn't fighting on the front lines. The part of Denmark where we decided where Peter and Karoline were from is southern Jutland, which is a border that's moved up and down because of different wars. Most people in that region are fluently bilingual.

Sonya: How is collaborating with someone who's also a director?

Line: A lot of the films I've worked on I've worked with the director from very early stages. It's great in a way because you kind of know what the film will be. You're writing with a vision in mind. Rather than writing something and a director coming in at the end and doing a director's pass and changing it to something different from what you envisioned. 

Whereas, this, when you're working so closely, you discuss references, you discuss imagery. We worked with imagery and sound from the beginning, which is the kind of writer I am, I think. When I first came to the U.K., I naturally became a more visually, orally driven writer. English wasn't my first language, so I wrote the images first. Magnus and I developed the script in English. And then I did a Danish translation.

There's a city museum in Copenhagen and I found a black and white photo of Dagmar’s stove. It was a different way to get into characters' heads. You're dealing with characters that are quite complex. Not always likable, but you want to understand them and humanize them.

Sonya: What are the benefits of collaborating?

Line: When it works, it produces something better than you'd hoped for because there are two minds. As a screenwriter, inherently you have to collaborate. In TV you have more power in that sense. Things like thinking about sound are important, which is something I don't think writers always do but it's very much a part of the world. When you're stepping back 100 years, you wanna think about not just what it looked like but what it sounded like because you want to pull people into that world.

What’s Next?

Sonya: If your next project was adapting a book, which one would you choose?

Line: I recently started a new project, working with another director, but that's adapting a short story. There are a few different books I've been talking to people about. There's a book called The Employees by a Danish writer, Olga Ravn. It's called a workplace novel but it's a weird sci-fi novel that's like the bastard child of Gattaca and Arrival. It's a story that questions the way our society is structured right now.

Sonya: What's the biggest takeaway from The Girl with the Needle?

Line: Obviously it talks about the importance of having reproductive rights. It also talks about poverty. Copenhagen didn't look the way it did now. Also, the importance of looking after the rights we acquire. We can't take our rights for granted. They can be taken away from us again. Sometimes people will say to me that they're not political and I think that must be a privilege. We're all a part of the world and we have to look after the rights of our fellow beings.

The Girl with the Needle is currently streaming on MUBI and Amazon Prime and available for rental on Apple TV.