Wirkola About What Happened To Monday and release

It also explains where and who will see the movie.

How did you end up on What Happened on Monday?

My friend, Morten Tyldum, was on it before I was, and I heard about the story through him. He left it to go do The Imitation Game, and I read the script after that. I felt it had a similar feel to Children of Men, Looper and Blade Runner — all those sci-fi films with a limited budget — but with a really cool high-concept idea. When I met with them, the script that was written was for a man, it was about these seven brothers. But I always wanted to work with Noomi, whom I knew from way back. So I met with producer Raffaella De Laurentiis and pitched the story with a woman, starring Noomi. She loved the idea.

What was inspiring to you about sci-fi films like Children of Men, Looper and Blade Runner?

Those films were the main inspiration because we wanted to create — not a glossy, perfect, neat super-futuristic future — but this gritty, overpopulated, troubled one filled with garbage. So those films, with good realism to them and the world-building, were especially inspiring.

What were the challenges of directing a film where one actress is playing seven characters?

There were many challenges technically and also with story: How can you do this without it being a gimmick? Shooting it would take very long. We ended up shooting in Romania, where we could get the most for our money, and we had a budget of about $20 million. We shot in 94 days, which is an extremely long shoot. The first two months, almost, it was just Noomi alone playing against herself. We had to hire seven doubles, seven good actors from Europe, so we could rehearse with them and could basically block out all the scenes with them.

When we shot it, I had a rule that I’d shoot it like any other scene. I didn’t focus on the fact that it was the same actress playing different roles. I didn’t want the audience pulled out of the film. Of course, the technical side is one side of it, but the other is Noomi’s performance — the nuances and differences that she added to the different characters.

The film is already with Netflix for distribution. What is your take on the way streaming has become a major part of moviegoing?

It actually is a little bit more complicated because our film had pre-sold in many territories around the world, so in Europe we will have a normal cinematic release when it plays there. But yes, it’s a brand new world out there when it comes to Netflix. We are all happy that it is sold and that it is going to be seen by so many people, but when you make a movie, especially this one, we maybe thought we were going to have a normal cinematic release in New York as well. But times are changing, and when the offer came, it was clear this was the one we wanted to go with.