‘I wanted the intimate scenes to be very vulnerable’: Mathias Broe on ‘Sauna’

[This interview is an unabridged version of an interview originally published on Cineuropa.]

The waiting time for gender-affirming surgery at one of Denmark’s three Centres for Gender Identity can be up to four to six years, according to the website of the centre in Copenhagen. At the same time, the intimate embrace of non-heteronormative love—both platonic and romantic—offers, for trans people, a safe haven to deal with these barriers. Combining rigorous social commentary with a tender romance, Danish director Mathias Broe dramatises these throughlines in Denmark in his debut feature, Sauna, which just enjoyed its world premiere in Sundance’s World Cinema Dramatic Competition.

Purple Hour: You self-describe as a queer filmmaker. What is your approach to creating queer stories onscreen, and how does Sauna feed into this impetus?

Mathias Broe: I’ve been wanting to do queer cinema since I graduated from my film school, and I really wanted to create something that I felt represented my own experience as a queer person. I saw that a lot of the people in my community didn’t really find anything that represented the life that they lived. My producer, Mads-August [Grarup Hertz], was like “Hey, read this book called Sauna”. It’s from a writer called Mads Ananda Lodahl, who has been very activistic in his practice, and he wrote this book that was based on a love story that he had with a trans guy. The really interesting thing was that a year into the project where we were writing the script and creating a film and trying to board primarily queer people for the project at the time, my own partner started transitioning as well.

In a way, the film was a part of an already existing story from a book, but it was also becoming my own story. It also really helped me kind of go through my own transition creating this story, because they say that when your partner transitions, you also transition yourself. It was really a very therapeutic process for me. I never really understood this “art imitates life, life imitates art” kind of analogy, but then with this film, I was like, “Wow, okay, if you’re true and honest with what you want to do, then it will really affect your life in a very positive way.”

Could you talk about the casting and finding the right actors for these two main roles?

It was really important for me to find, of course, a trans actor for the role of William. We started there because it was the brick that we needed to build the whole cast. It was a really tough job because there are so few trans actors in Denmark, and to take on a main part in a feature film is a big task. I wanted to open up the process, so we did an open casting and searched the entire country for people who wanted to be a part of the film. In the end, we went with Nina Rask, who is quite a famous person in Denmark. She’s a comedian and an actor and is trans. But then, a lot of the other trans people we met that didn’t have experience with acting got smaller parts in the film. In a way, it was a nice process to make space for new faces to go into smaller parts. Then the next time we get a project in Denmark, they might be able to get a bigger part. It’s this organic process of allowing people, even though they don’t have a lot of experience, to actually get the chance.

With Johan, I really wanted also to cast queer people, but in the end, we ended up going with an actor called Magnus Juhl Andersen, and he was just the best actor for the part. For me, the big thing is always to make sure that you do your research right, and you make an effort to make sure that the people that should tell the story actually tell the story. But in the end, I also want to acknowledge who tells the story in the best way, and he was definitely the right choice for that part.

There is a larger conversation happening in the industry about intimate scenes, and there are certainly a few in the film. Could you talk about your approach?

I had a very close collaboration with my intimacy coordinator Anne Sofie [Steen Sverdrup] in Denmark. She has [a collective] called Bedside Productions, and they primarily do porn but in a very different way than what you would normally do porn. It engages the local community, queer community, and the underground scene in Copenhagen, to be able to create parties that are a little bit more sex-positive. They also create a magazine and do porn with amateurs. It has been a really fun process to get to know them and follow her work. She almost became my second director in those scenes. We knew we were going to have these very explicit scenes, and there are a lot of explicit things that are not in the final film. But the way we did it was that we took in the actors and we made choreographies with them. We worked with this red, yellow, green work method where green is “okay”, yellow is “be aware” and red is “no go”, and then you never cross these borders. We were so prepared that when we went in there, it almost just felt like dancing because the choreography was there. Then Anne Sofie could come in and stop the process if she thought something should not continue.

In the end, even though some of these scenes were on paper, really difficult, they were some of the easiest scenes to make, because we had prepared so much for them. I wanted the intimate scenes to be very vulnerable and feel very real and authentic. I wanted to be able to recognise what I experience myself in queer spaces, in intimate situations. I really didn’t want to just film out of a window—I wanted to make sure that the bodies that we have are actually being portrayed and seen on screen. Because the development of William’s body is so apparent in the film and is such an important aspect of the narrative development, then I think especially seeing him in the scene where he gets the strap-on and he has gotten his top surgery [is important]. It was a really beautiful moment to create a character that suddenly you see for the first time as a whole, in the way that he sees himself. The way to get there is to have an emotional approach to your intimacy scenes, which is just as important as all other scenes.

Is there also an ongoing discussion in Denmark that you’re trying to speak to with regards to gender-affirming care?

I have a lot of friends who have gone through the process of getting medical transition and just recently, I also been a part of my own partners’ medical transition. I think what has been the issue a lot has been that there’s been a really long waiting time. There’s been this feeling of having to really defend who you are and having to go through a lot of difficult processes to even get to the point where people actually believe that you’re speaking from an honest perspective. When we did some research, and I spoke to a lot of trans people about it, I realised that people are helping each other, and they’re lending each other hormones and making sure that everyone is kind of getting what they need. 

It’s kind of almost this secret process that is going on behind the scenes because it’s so difficult to get access to hormones. It’s not just someone getting allowance to get medical treatment. It’s their entire existence, their authentic existence. That was what I wanted to portray, but I think it’s difficult to talk about the medical system in Denmark because every person has such an individual experience. It’s a problem when you put your mental health right up next to medical transition, and that’s a conversation we’re not really ready to have. It was really important to also portray a partner that doesn’t really understand to kind of position and to kind of position him in a role where he can also ask the questions that the audience might have, and I think in the end, where they had the big conflict, where he says, “Why can’t you just be you? You’re only thinking about your hormones.” I think a lot of people that are not close to a trans person or are not trans themselves don’t necessarily understand this dilemma.

You use a lot of dramatic cinematographic choices to distinguish between spaces, such as the shadowy sauna versus the outside world and the club.

In the beginning of the film, before they kind of start falling in love, I wanted to have a feeling that everything in these spaces are a little bit claustrophobic and dark. A lot of the cis gay culture is a little bit stuck in time and stuck still in this notion of secrecy and cruising, drawing a bit from the time when people had to hide. It was interesting to capture in the visual language and be very close to Johan. Then as he meets William, his world is expanding, and he’s getting insight into a community that represents something else that he is actually also longing for. He’s longing for deep conversations, he’s longing for love and he’s longing for being close to someone. In the middle of the film, when they’re going to the summer house, and they’re actually opening up to each other and having these intimate days together, [I thought] that should be very light and colorful and way more open. 

My production designer also made very structured dramaturgy around how to open up both production design and visual style. We were definitely very curious to make sure that the characters’ mental and emotional state was also aligned with the visual style. I like to work with this thing called emotional realism so that everything is quite realistic, but it’s just tweaked enough to be a picture of how the characters are feeling when they’re in the scene. That’s also why the club scene is just like being at a club. But I think what is super fun about it is that if you look at the first scenes at Nevermind, the first club, that club scene is very cis-gay. It’s very classical, and then they go to the techno club [where William hangs out] and everything changes. Even the music changes as well—it’s no longer hyperpop, it’s like techno. It’s funny, in Copenhagen, these two clubs are just next to each other, on opposite sides of the street. For me, it’s very humourous. You have the rave-y club art kids just on one side, and you have the cis-pride gay people on the other side. They’re never really mixed, but they’re kind of borrowing each other’s codes sometimes. You can kind of choose what you want to be, depending on where you go.