Headhunters
Short description
Roger Brown is a successful headhunter in Norway, placing top executives with major companies. To fund a lifestyle beyond his means, including a country home and his wife Diana's art gallery, he runs a double life as an art thief, stealing valuable works from his clients and hiding the thefts. At a gallery opening, Diana introduces him to Clas Greve, a Dutch businessman who is both the ideal candidate for a navigation technology firm and the owner of a painting long thought lost during the Second World War. Seeing a way to settle his financial problems for good, Roger plans to take it. He soon finds that his mark is a former special forces soldier playing a game of his own, and that he has become the target rather than the hunter.
Morten Tyldum directed this Norwegian thriller, his second film listed here and the one that came before The Imitation Game and Passengers. The screenplay is by Lars Gudmestad and Ulf Rydberg, based on Jo Nesbø's novel. Aksel Hennie plays Roger, with Synnøve Macody Lund as Diana, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as Clas Greve, and Julie R. Ølgaard as Lotte, across a credited cast of 21.
Released in August 2011, the film grossed about 19 million USD worldwide. It rates 7.5/10 on IMDb from 111,000 votes and 7.2/10 on TMDB from 1,422 votes. A critics' rating stands at 7.7/10 from 97 reviews, higher than the audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- In the novel of the same name by Jo Nesbø, which served as the literary source for the screenplay, the heroine, played by Synnøve Macody Lund, has a Prada mobile phone with a Beatles track set as her ringtone. In the film, both the phone and the ringtone are simpler.
- Class Greve's (played by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) dog is an Argentine Dogo (this is the first and so far only officially recognized breed of dog bred in Argentina). Keeping dogs of this breed at home is prohibited in Norway.
- Finding actors for the roles of the Monsen twin brothers, who serve in the police, turned out to be difficult. It was necessary for them to be literally indistinguishable, and for each to weigh over 100 kg. Eventually, the casting directors found Gunnar Skramstad Jonsen and Lars Skramstad Jonsen.
- The film is based on Jo Nesbø's novel "Headhunters" (Hodejegerne, 2008).
- The film contains several references to the Millennium detective series by Swedish author Stieg Larsson. On the night Roger (played by Aksel Hennie) returns home late, the character played by Synnøve Macody Lund is watching the second film in the series – “The Girl Who Played with Fire” (Daniel Alfredson, 2009) on television. In addition, some scenes include aerial footage from David Fincher's “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” (2011). The scene where a car drives across the bridge also uses footage from Fincher’s film, simply replacing the car from “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” with a car carrying Hennie’s character using digital technology.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
