“Peter has no vanity and the ability to identify with someone who has a crooked mind,” Scherfig says. “A lot of David’s complexity comes from Peter. In all my films, the leading characters are men in their 30s. It’s a moment in a man’s life where he’s a fully developed personality who is at a turning point. Men are much more interesting to me because they’re a different species. I’ve been more bored as a writer when I’ve written for women.”
Scherfig was the first woman admitted to von Trier’s brotherhood of filmmakers, a group whose members vow to give up their claim to being artists and to any directing credit for the Dogme films they make. (They must also employ handheld cameras; use only natural lighting; and avoid depicting murders, weapons and superficial action.) She says that, like Jenny, she “studied hard and went to Paris and got in the wrong cars with men,” though she came of age in the mid-Seventies. To Scherfig, Jenny is emblematic of the restless previous decade. “She’s exploding with something but doesn’t yet know what it is, longing for a future she can’t yet define,” says the director, who grew up in an artistic family—her mother was headmistress of the Royal Danish Ballet School and her father a publishing executive—in Copenhagen. “Right after the film ends, you know the first Beatles album is going to come out.”
That An Education has provoked charges of pedophilia and anti-Semitism in some quarters has taken both Scherfig and Hornby by surprise. Sixteen is the age of consent in England, and David, Scherfig points out, is based on a real character in British journalist Lynn Barber’s memoir of her schoolgirl liaison with an older Jewish man. “I come from a culture where the moral standards are a bit sloppier,” she says. “The anti-Semitism and underage sex weren’t something I thought I was going to have to explain and defend to the degree that I have. I didn’t think it would make sense not to depict those elements of the period, but the fact that you have a Jewish main character who is so flawed is more controversial than I had anticipated. Nick and I decided not to cut out the fact that he’s Jewish, because it’s an important part of David’s character—that he’s an outsider.”
Though she has no plans to decamp from her home by the sea outside Copenhagen, Scherfig—who worked as a television writer while her daughter, now 15, was young, and is married to a biotech executive—yearns to follow up her recent string of intimate, character-driven ensemble films with “more plot, more suits, more gangsters, more shiny cars, more action.”
