Guillermo del Toro hit the nail on the head when he said Rev Uthaug during a recent conversation that his film Troll demonstrated a playful mixture of Norwegian sensibility and American flair.
Uthaug, whose anticipated sequel to The Norwegian MonsterTroll 2” comes out on Monday Netflixgrew up watching the same sci-fi and disaster films of the 1990s that shaped a generation of Hollywood directors.
“The idea of such a film about trolls came to me back in the 90s,” he says. Diversity in an interview with Jenny Stjernströmer Björk, Vice President of Scandinavian Content at Netflix. “This was after watching Armageddon, Independence Day and Jurassic Park. I thought, “How could we do this in Norway?” What will it be about?
Then he came across a century-old drawing by Norwegian artist Theodor Kittelsen of a troll walking down Oslo's main street, and the idea for his adventure film crystallized. “I thought: What would happen if a troll actually walked through the center of Oslo today? How would the government and the army react? And that was the first inspiration for the film,” he says, hours before the presentation of Troll 2 at a lavish red carpet party hosted by Netflix in Oslo.
Considered to be the most ambitious Norwegian film in recent history (if not all time), Troll took streamers by storm when it released in December 2022. With 103 million views in its first three months alone, it became the most streamed non-English language film of all time on Netflix and entered the top ten in 93 countries. It even topped the charts in Norway, the US and the UK.
Troll 2 brings back the stunning paleontologist-turned-adventurer Professor Nora Tiedemann (Ine Marie Wilmann), who witnessed the appearance of a huge troll in the 2022 film. Tiedermann is recruited again to join forces with Andreas Isaksen (Kim Falk) and Christopher Holm (Mads Pettersen) to stop a dangerous new troll (nicknamed Megatroll) who has awakened and is wreaking havoc across Norway. The expanded sequel also introduces new faces such as government official Marion Orin Radani (Sarah Horami) and historian Esther Johann Tiller (Anne Krigsvoll).
Stjernströmer Björk says she immediately realized the project had global appeal. “It was something we’d never heard before,” she says, recalling the moment Uthaug and his producers at Motion Blur introduced it. “What struck me was the combination of these big grand scenes with so much humor, warmth and emotion. It's also very deeply rooted in Norway. The combination of all these ingredients was exactly what we were looking for,” she explains.
Ultimately, Uthaug says, “Troll” attracted a huge fan base because “it's based on a genre people can relate to, like the monster genre, but the exoticism of local Norwegian folklore, trolls and nature make it unique.”
Roar Utaug, director of “Troll 2”
Courtesy of Netflix
Larry DanceNetflix's head of EMEA, notes that the first Troll film “was number one of the most popular non-English-language films on Netflix.” And most importantly, he adds: “This is a super Norwegian film.”
“It really came from such an authentic place, from a storytelling perspective, rather than us wanting to make a creature movie,” Tanz said. Diversity right before the International Emmy Awards ceremony. “Roar said, 'I want to tell this story about this thing that is very connected to our culture here.'
Uthaug, who counts Steven Spielberg as a “big inspiration” for his talent for fusing entertainment and movie magic, always with a big heart, also strived to maintain authenticity in both Troll 2's aesthetic and visual style and storytelling. “I think we have one day of green screen in this movie,” he says of his sequel. “The rest was shot in real locations with actors, in the snow, in the wind, so it was as real as it gets and as rooted in Norway and the Norwegian landscape as possible.”
The trolls themselves are designed with visual effects, so Uthaug had the actors interact with a drone hovering 30 meters above them to guide them. He also used extensive pre-visual images and concept art to help the actors understand the emotional stakes of each scene.
Uthaug also believed that the Trolls films were character-driven. “It’s very important that you care about the characters,” he says. “The ones you feel empathy for are the ones who make you invest in the film.”
The only thing about Troll 2 that doesn't feel local is the scale of its budget and production values. While Netflix hasn't revealed the budget, Stjernströmer Björk and Tanz suggest it won't come cheap to make.
“We really made sure we had the right budget to make Troll 2; Since the first film was such a big success, this time we wanted to give the participants something even more unusual – that's why we have two trolls!” she says.
Tanz says Troll 2 is a great example of Netflix looking for local stories and giving them enough scale to achieve global success.
“We provide support to our filmmakers at a level that they wouldn't normally receive in these types of situations,” Tanz says. “Roar is a world-class director and we can give him the resources to tell the story at its best.”
Internationally, the streamer is also promoting its dubbing strategy. “We dub into about 36 languages now,” Tanz says, citing a family anecdote that illustrates how dubbing allowed “audiences to watch something and feel like it was made for them.”
“When my mother-in-law told me, 'I saw Lupine,' I said, 'Oh yeah, that's our show from France.' She said, “No, it's not like that.” It’s in English,” he says.
Unsurprisingly, Uthaug has attracted some Hollywood interest since starring in Troll, but is in no rush to cross the Atlantic. “I get a few scripts from time to time,” says the director, “but to be able to make a film in Norwegian on this scale here in Norway is fantastic. It really is the highlight of my career.”
While he's keeping his options open, he's not entirely ready to leave the Troll franchise behind. “We talked about it, and the word ‘trollology’ sounds really good,” he says with a smile.
Dance hopes for the prospects of “trollology.” “That would be a great result,” he says. “And success begets more success.”
