Bleeder
Short description
Bleeder centers on Leo, a video store worker in Copenhagen whose life is going nowhere. He spends his time watching horror films with his friends and stewing over his dead-end job and cramped apartment while his girlfriend Louise mostly stays home. When Louise tells him she is pregnant and intends to keep the child, Leo grows cold and distant, and the resentment he carries turns outward. After he witnesses a shooting and a brutal beating at a club owned by Louise's brother Louis, violence stops being something he only watches on screen; it begins to draw him in, and his self-loathing and anger find a target in Louise. Her brother, fiercely devoted to her, reacts.
Nicolas Winding Refn wrote and directed the film, his second feature after Pusher, and it sits between that debut and Fear X in his filmography. Kim Bodnia plays Leo, with Mads Mikkelsen as Lenny and Rikke Louise Andersson as Louise; Zlatko Burić and Levino Jensen are also among the 23 credited cast members. Refn produced with Henrik Danstrup and Thomas Falck for Zentropa Entertainments, with backing from the Danish Film Institute, TV 2 and Scanbox. Made for about 1 million USD, the film holds a 6.8 rating on IMDb from roughly 11,000 votes and a 6.7 on TMDB from a much smaller pool of 222. The wide gap in vote counts reflects a modest art-house reach rather than a broad commercial one.
What's left behind the scenes
- Zlatko Burić's character, who orders three 'Tuborg' beers before watching a movie with friends, is a reference to Burić's role in a 'Tuborg' advertising campaign commercial (where he played a foreigner – a kiosk owner), which was also directed by Nicolas Winding Refn (director and screenwriter of 'Pusher'). Interestingly, Burić pronounces 'Tuborg' with a hard 'g', which is not correct according to Danish pronunciation rules.
- In the original script, Lenny was a much more comedic character, and his life was far more interesting. When the actor playing him, Mads Mikkelsen, read the script, he immediately told Nicolas Winding Refn that Lenny couldn't be so cool, and the character was made more introverted than he had been before.
- In preparation for filming, Mads Mikkelsen (who played Lenny) worked for several weeks in a video rental store.
- The actor playing Leo, Kim Bodnia, and director and screenwriter Nicolas Winding Refn had a falling out during filming, and their quarrel was widely covered in the press. Bodnia even claimed that after completing work on the film, he had to seek help from psychiatrists. Since then, Bodnia and Refn have not spoken to each other.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
