It’s a “privilege” for filmmaker Anders Ølholm to direct “Snake Killer,” Amazon MGM Studios’ first Danish original series, released today on Prime Video. This four-part crime thriller, inspired by real-life events, follows the activities of Denmark’s notorious Uropatrlien police force, which operated from 1965 to 2001 and was dedicated to cracking down on drug traffickers and gangs in the sprawling capital of Copenhagen. “The Snake Killer” stars Pilou Asbaek (“Game of Thrones”) as controversial officer Brian “Smiley” Petersen, and features a large ensemble cast including Lars Lante (“Another Round”), Mira Obring (“Dark Horse”), Joey Mo (“Fuglhulten”) and Ali Al-Bayate (“Samadhar”).
Director Ølholm was already familiar with the world of Danish police, having directed 2020’s ‘Shota’. The thriller, co-directed by Frederic Louis Hviid, follows two police officers trapped in a fictional Copenhagen neighborhood when news breaks that a young foreigner has died in police custody. The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival, was successful at subsequent film festivals, and was eventually picked up by Magnolia Pictures for North America.
But “Snake Killer” was a completely different challenge. Speaking to Variety ahead of the show’s release, the director said that “not a lot was known about” the infamous Uropatrurien. “I’ve always wanted to break into this hermetic world and write a project, but there was no way to get in.”
When former Uropatrlien officer René Dahl Andersen contacted Ølholm’s production company and said he was interested in working on a project based on his time in the unit, it felt like fate. “At first it seemed too good to be true,” says the helmsman. “But once we met, he was a very cheerful and sociable guy and had incredible stories to tell. Eventually I met some of his old colleagues and informants and started walking in his old stomping grounds. Slowly but surely, I realized that he was the real deal and that he was my entry point into that world.”
When the two first met, Dahl Andersen was writing the book that would become Hærdet (literally, “Hardened”). The Danish bestseller is a collection of stories about former coppers roaming the streets of Copenhagen, which also helps inform the show. “What I fell in love with was the idea that if you want to be successful in that environment, you have to be very sociable and have a lot of social intelligence and empathy,” Ølholm adds.
“This particular unit had been portrayed as mostly Neanderthal, but we realized it was much more subtle and had a very complex human side to it,” he says. In the end, Dahl Andersen brought his former colleagues on board for the project, with several ex-Uropatrlian police officers playing their roles in the show alongside former drug dealers and petty criminals, which the producer admits added to the “authenticity” of “The Snake Killer.”
“Snake Killer” provided by Prime Video
It took Ølholm six years to get the project off the ground. Commenting on Denmark’s first Amazon original series, the director said working with the major streamer was a “godsend”. “When I heard that Amazon might be interested in a project in Denmark, I had a lot of doors closed to me, but I was almost ready to move on. I pitched them and was completely baffled by the immediate positive response.”
“Working at Amazon felt like a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” he continues. “I’d heard horror stories about working with major streamers in terms of creative control, but that wasn’t my experience. I was prepared to have to tone down some elements, but from the beginning they really understood the project and let me make the project I wanted to make.”
Has collaborating with a global player, and therefore aiming for a global audience, changed the series in any way? Ølholm says it has only strengthened his desire to blend Danish social realism with American genre films, especially classic cop-killers like “Serpico,” “The French Connection,” and “Training Day.” “We wanted to drink from that fountain while being rooted in Danish culture, specifically in this part of Copenhagen. We shot in real locations, like a real police station and a real motel, so this show is very rooted in our culture and reality, but built on mechanics familiar from classic American cop movies.”
Another factor that ensured the production of “Snake Killer” was star Asbaek, a longtime friend of Ohlholm. “He’s one of the few actors in Denmark who can actually green light a project,” the director emphasizes. “He has played a huge variety of characters in the United States and abroad, but when it comes to Danish fiction, he is best known for his empathetic and calm public persona. He plays characters who are far removed from who he is as a person. I think he was interested in doing that. I hired him and he was an extraordinary person. He really worked with you and the other actors, and without a name like his, we wouldn’t have been able to make this project.”
All four episodes have arrived on Prime Video at once, but are there any future plans for this series already? Not yet, says its creator. “At one point, this show was nine episodes long. That alone is a lot of material that we wanted to pursue. But we were able to make the show that we wanted to make. It would be great if there were more, but even if that didn’t happen, I’m really happy that we had the opportunity to make the first season.”
Following the release of “Snake Killer,” Ølholm is gearing up to shoot another passion project that has been brewing for a long time, a feature film called “The Plan,” based on Morten Pape’s Danish bestseller of the same name. The director described the film as “a cross between ‘Do the Right Thing’ and ‘This is England’,” adding: “It’s about a boy growing up in a very famous housing complex called the Finger Plans, but it’s about The Plans. It’s exciting to do something as genre-defying as I’ve done before.”
