Move On – A participatory road movie

Mads Mikkelsen, the former James Bond villian and highly acclaimed Danish actor, stars in the unconventional road movie Move On. Why unconventional? Because at every stage, from pre-production to the actual shooting movie, fans were invited from all over Europe to actively contribute elements to the film. They could influence the design of the poster, the score and even take part in supporting roles. Thousands of fans applied online and the best were selected by director Asger Leth. Of course, tapping into such a wide pool of creative talent, described by Mikkelsen and director Asger Leth as influence from the outside, lends the movie a characteristic note. Read this short interview with actor and director below then stream the film in its entirety below.

Mads Mikkelsen: The challenging part about the movie was how to embrace the story. It was there, it was written, we had a fairly good idea where it was going. But for all of us, every day presented a surprise. The director Asger Leth was the one who was filtering everything, he would always come up with these crazy professor kind of ideas for something new, straight from the internet.

Asger Leth: In terms of the story, when we looked everybody in the eyes and said let’s do this crazy project, we agreed to do eight episodes, then we tried to find a way to wire them together. We came up with a rough storyline about a guy who arrives on the continent with a murky past. He has to go from one country to the other, encountering obstacles along the way. We tried to keep that boat sailing in one direction—it was a very conceptual, simple story in order to allow the room for all this feedback.

MM: It was not really a risk as this feedback was part of the project. If we were making a straightforward film then suddenly having 10,000 producers coming in to fiddle with the story would be a risk factor. But this was the whole idea. Instead of viewing it as a risk, we thought of it as a benefit, a gift.

AL: With a classical movie you have to write and plan for a year and you won’t allow anyone to come in and interfere with it. This had to be simpler project where we could allow interference.

Published November 14, 2012.