Diederik van Rooijen firmly dismisses the suggestion of a ‘return to the Netherlands’. The energetic director will be in Amsterdam at the beginning of December to edit a project that will be released in the spring. About ten years ago, the thriller caused Taped sure that Hollywood became curious about the Dutchman – in 2016 he made the switch with his family and “took on the adventure”. His children graduated in Los Angeles and the director himself made the American exorcism film in 2018 The Possession of Hannah Grace.
“I never left for the US because I no longer liked it here in the Netherlands, or because I couldn’t make what I wanted here,” Van Rooijen insists. In fact, his popular series Penoza, in which housewife Carmen van Walraven turns out to be mafia queen, paved the way for a new generation of Dutch makers and a new kind of series. “So many cool crime series are now being made here that push the boundaries, think of it Macro Mafia. And the demand has also increased so much because of all the streamers.”
If there is one big advantage that the director has to stick to the US, it is the enormous wave of inspiration that life in Hollywood continues to bring him: “I am naturally someone who gets ideas all the time, but in Los Angeles everything delivers what you do and see incentives to come up with new plans. Your horizon suddenly becomes so wide and the sky is the limit.” An advantage of Europe, on the other hand, is that Van Rooijen here has ‘the luxury of the total director’s cut. Only the very big directors in the US get that carte blanche, and I understand that. Here I can keep everything in my own hands on the set.”
Universal story
The same applied to the ambitious project The Ancestor that Van Rooijen made for AvroTros. The eight-part film adaptation of journalist Alexander Münninghoff’s book spans nearly a century of family history, spanning various countries, times and wars. In the 1960s, impending fatherhood forces Alexander (Matthijs van de Sande Bakhuyzen) in his twenties to confront his traumatized father (Marcel Hensema) and his own hidden past.
“After the success of Penoza offered an awful lot of similar crime series,” says Van Rooijen. “But I don’t like doing something I already know, I get bored easily. When I got the chance to make an epic family drama, I immediately said yes. I really wanted to see how I could put my own spin on that genre.”
Writer Alexander Münninghoff passed away in April 2020, he has not been able to see the end result. “He had been ill for some time but would still come to the set. Corona threw a spanner in the works: when we were allowed to play again, he had died. After that it felt even more urgent to make something he would have been very proud of.” When director Van Rooijen started the project in 2019, he had a number of intensive conversations with Münninghoff. “It is a huge epic story, in which the entire history of Europe in the twentieth century passes in review,” explains Van Rooijen. “Alexander has had a bizarre, wonderful life. But at the same time it is also a universal story about a disturbed family relationship. About fathers and sons who don’t understand each other, about legacies from the past that have determined the future of so many other people. Suddenly I saw so many similarities with my own life.”
Different experience
The proposal to tell the whole story much more concretely through the eyes of the journalist and his wife took some getting used to for Münninghoff and his wife. “I explained to them that you definitely have to be carried away in history by one or two characters in a film. It does not work to simply present a viewer with a number of violent events.” In test screenings, readers of the book also reported that, despite the same themes and emotions, watching the film produced a very different experience. “We have made it more of a puzzle: you have to be constantly curious about the new pieces that are still ahead.”
Corona hit a hole in the series’ recordings for the second time at the end of 2021; production had to wait seven months before the final weeks could be played in Poland. “For the series, those breaks were very intense, but for me personally it gave me some peace,” laughs Van Rooijen. “I am away from home for a large part of the year, now I was at home for months at a time. That paid off a lot quality time up, for my family but also for myself. In that period I wrote drafts for three new plans, one American project and two Dutch series.”
Münninghoff’s family history was partly determined by the Russian Revolution and the two world wars. In a frame story full of retrospectives and time jumps, the viewer learns to fathom the motives of the most important characters – especially the war scenes, Van Rooijen calls “heavy shit”. This ambitious puzzle of timelines and parallel events resulted in a schedule full of challenges, says Van Rooijen. “But because I’m dyslexic, it takes an above average time to read a screenplay and I have to force myself to get such a story into my head in detail. That was when turning The Ancestor a big advantage: I could immediately retrieve every meeting, every scene that we had to shoot a-chronologically and place it in the bigger picture.”
Final goodbye
With the movie Penoza: The Final Chapter the adventure of mafia mother Carmen van Walraven seemed to come to an end. The cinema hit (more than 500,000 visitors) seemed to be a final farewell to the heroine played by Monic Hendrickx, her family and her posse. Or, despite the fairly unconditional final scene, are there still possibilities for a restart?
Van Rooijen laughs. “I’ve always said never say never. And it’s a question I’m still being asked: everyone wants more Carmen and more Penoza.Still, he very much doubts whether a restart, in any form, would be a smart idea. “I sometimes feel that the momentum is over. We really live in a different world now than we did four years ago. And in general it doesn’t work to reanimate old successes after a few years just because the fans want it.”
But at the same time, a plan is slowly forming in his head for a kind of ‘intermediate part’. “I don’t want to offend The FinalChapter, that feels like cheating. But of course there are still stories that we haven’t told that took place before that last chapter. A kind of ‘Year One’ for Penoza. But the idea is not much more concrete than that.”
The Ancestor can be seen from 1/1 on NPO 1, 9.30 pm. And via NPO Start.
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