The first trailer for drama series ‘Other People’s Money’, which has his world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, debuts here. Variety Speaked with his producers and the maker showrunner about how they made the show, inspired by the real story of the greatest tax fraud in European history. Beta film deals with global sales in the series.
The first four episodes of “Other People’s Money” will be World Première in Berlin at 3.30 pm on 20 February in the prestigious Zoo Palast -ci -scath theater, followed by a Q&A with Cast and Crew.
The project started when Michael Polle at X Filme Creative Pool, the company behind ‘Babylon Berlin’, joined forces with Ole Søndberg of True Content Entertainment, whose credits ‘the girl with the dragon tattoo’ are. Their goal was to tell the true story about how a criminal network of mega-rich investors, bankers and lawyers stable 146 billion euros ($ 150 billion) of European taxpayers.
“The idea was always that this show should be inspired by real events on the one hand, but on the other hand fictional and very entertaining,” says Polle, and with this in mind he wanted to convince Jan Schomburg – whom he has known for about 20 years – as a maker and showrunner of The show.
“The money from other people” is inspired by the work of a network of European investigative journalists, and in particular Oliver Schröm’s “Die Cumex Files” and “Die deed Scholz”, with research by Christian Salewski and “Det Store Skatterøveri” of Niels Fastrup and Thomas G. SVaneborg.
The challenge, Polle explains, was to dig in the details of those studies, but also to deliver a story “that everyone in the world can relate to”, because the bottom line is: “We are all robbed in this whole scandal.”
He adds: “It was not logical to make a serious, very intellectual series … It had to be something where people think:” Oh, yes, I would like to watch the next episode. “”
Søndberg says: “We agree that this story should not be a comedy, but it was important that it contains a certain very precise type of humor. It needed a humor that was not laughable, but where you always had this silent smile on your lips. “Schomburg adds:” The word we used very often was absurdity. ”
Schomburg says that the reason he was chosen was probably that “my oeuvre is very wide, so I made very art -like films such as” Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe, “but I also sketched a comedy for German TV.”
Before Schomburg agreed to accept the project, he postponed two basic rules: “The first thing was to want people to structure and the structures behind this fraud, and the second was: I will never show rich people in a sexy way . “
He adds that there was a “current material” to wade through and the main task was “to find a way to take this great material and to be inspired to place it in a story that is intellectual but also Emotionally accessible to an audience. “
A challenge was to take the financial language and maneuvers in the heart of fraud and to make them understandable. “It is important to make it accessible to an audience, and especially because the dimension of the fraud is so incredibly large,” says Schomburg. “So we really tried to find images to make clear what that means. It was almost 150 billion euros – nobody really knows what it is, and then we came up with an image: that a network of very, very rich people came to every European citizen and would ask for 326 euros – every child, every old person, Every homeless person, every teacher. They would come to you and say, “Please give me 326 euros.” So it is really a relevant song for all of us, and we have tried to make it accessible this way. “
There is a broader context in the scandal, which is still resonating to this day. Schomburg mentions that according to the former Donald Trump -Strategist Steve Bannon, an important reason why Trump was chosen the first time: “There was a huge anger in society after the financial crisis of 2008 that no one was held responsible. And in this case Is what I have inspired a lot during the investigation, that the public prosecutors have really succeeded in keeping people responsible and really changing something, and so for me this was a very important idea. “
He adds: “And we all see, especially now, how great the influence of rich people and billionaires on politics is and how it is clear how they influence legislation, how they prevent more control and how nonchalant They do this fraud, how they all steal money from all of us and how they think it is their legal right to do it. And here we had the opportunity to say, “No, it isn’t.” And I think these forces were really important to me to show. ”
Polle adds that it was also important to show that the public prosecutors and journalists came up for the common man and woman, although it seemed as if they had no chance. “Jan said: ‘We must have an optimistic position over this whole story, because there are heroes, with regard to the’ Cumex ‘scandal, and this was something that I fully agreed. And that is why this story is very positive and hopefully inspires people to fight ”for what is good and correct.
A surprising influence on the show, if you look at the ‘character constellation’, is the romantic comic genre, explains Schomburg, ‘because both storylines are more or less treated as love trime. So I thought it would be interesting to tell these stories such as love stories. “There is also a Shakespearian influence on one of the storylines, with an ‘old patriarch’, a well -known tax lawyer, who takes care of a young lawyer and later betray him.
Polle adds that the directors, Dustin Loose and Kaspar Munk, were the key in developing the appearance of the show, in addition to the directors of photography, Clemens Baumeister and Lust Trier Mørk.
The series plays Lisa Wagner, Karen-Lise Mynster, Justus von Dohnanyi, Niels Strunk, David Dencik and Fabian Hinrichs. It is produced by X Filme Creative Pool and True Content Entertainment in co-production with EPO film. Commissioning Broadcasters are ZDF and DR in co -production with New8, a group of European public broadcasters consisting of NRK, SVT, RUV, YLE, NPO, VRT, DR and ZDF. It is co-financed by FISA+, GMPF, the European Union, Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, the Nordvisions Fund and the Croatian Audiovisual Center.