‘Game of Thrones’ Producer Frank Doelger on His New Series, the Utopia-Set ‘Concordia’: I’m Always Intrigued With Subverting Genres’
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Any new show by producer Frank Doelger – whose credits include “Game of Thrones,” “The Swarm,” “John Adams” and “Rome” – must rate as an event. That event takes place Oct. 17 at Cannes Mipcom trade fair, with the world premiere of “Concordia,” on which Doelger serves as executive producer and showrunner.
Produced by Intaglio Films, a joint venture of ZDF Studios and Beta Film, which share international distribution, “Concordia” is backed by a powerful partnership of ZDF, MBC, France Télévisions and Hulu Japan. Shot in English, the six-part series is directed by Barbara Eder (“The Swarm,” “Barbarians,” “Cop Stories”).
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“Concordia” begins in classic Noir style cutting from a seeming suicide on a windswept moor to the discovery of a young man’s dead body, found beside a road just outside Sweden’s Concordia, a attempt to create a utopia powered by AI surveillance to ensure a fairer, more humane and safer society.
Near 20 years old, Concordia is about to be replicated in Koblenz, Germany.
But Concordia’s first murder is followed up by its AI system being hacked. Thea, an external investigator (Ruth Bradley, “Ted Lasso”) teams with Concordia security officer Isabelle,(Nanna Blondell, “House of the Dragon”) in a race against time to solve both crimes before Concordia’s expansion is halted.
What they discover, however, is a ghastly original sin involving Concordia’s creation.
This is no usual utopia tale. In modern fiction utopias take place in a future and normally price to be dystopias, Doelger observes. “Concordia” is far more ambivalent on its utopia and set in the present. The large question is whether the murder and hack reflect failings of a system or of those who run it, and whether either will destroy Concordia itself.
“Concordia” is created by Mike Walden (“The Frankenstein Chronicles,” “U Want Me 2 Kill Him”) and Nicholas Racz (“The Burial Society,” “The Real Thing”).
Variety engaged in a far-ranging conversation with Doelger in the build-up to the series billed world premiere at Mipcom.
“Concordia” weighs in as a socially relevant thriller, mixing building concerns about surveillance and data security and crime thriller format tropes: an initial suicide, a double race against the clock. But would you agree?
Frank Doelger: That’s correct. The original idea came out of my fascination with utopian communities, Hershey, in Pennsylvania, Bournville in England, Germany’s Siemensstadt.The whole question was: Can you reimagine and reform society to actually benefit the needs of its residents? This became to me very pressing. I kept reading articles about people’s growing concerns at the divide between the haves and the have-nots and people of great means buying up huge tracts of land to create gated communities and hiring private armies. I just kept thinking: There must be a better way to approach this.
And when did AI come in?
Doelger: If you’re religious, you believe in a moral order, the idea of a guardian angel. I kept thinking: What if it’s possible to imagine a guardian angel, someone you trust, making sure you’re safe, protected. Also, if you’re aware you’re being watched, that would make you think a little about the decisions in your behavior. Those two ideas came together. That’s how we decided to make AI part of this community. What I wasn’t expecting when we started developing was the conversation about AI right now, whether it’s a force of good or evil. That really becomes central to the drama of “Concordia.”
And the thriller propulsion?
At the same time, we wanted a classic story engine to drive it along. Particularly for our partners, murder mystery investigations always seem to be very popular. The question was also: Can we marry all these elements together? So, yes, it is a bit of a hybrid, but I’m hoping that those elements have come together in a satisfying way.
The series’ seems to be highly ambivalence about the utopia… That seems to me to be one of the interesting intellectual attractions of ·Concordia.”
Doelger: It’s a very interesting question, and I had a very interesting experience. Whenever I would go out to actors or directors and even with one of the writers, they immediately assumed that this was going to be a dystopian drama. And the cinematographers, the directors came back based on the first episode a little bit thrown, because anything with AI surveillance had to be negative, had to be dark. It really was very curious how hard it was to get people to take a step back and say, actually, this is a drama in which I think one could argue that AI is a force for good.
Could you drill down on that?
Doelger: It has transformed the lives of people. In some ways Concordia is a very successful community. What is revealed to us there’s something about the founding of the community, other aspects that actually have nothing to do with the principle and goal of the community itself. We really wanted very much to subvert the genre. Sometimes evil comes from within. People don’t start out with bad intentions, but sometimes they manifest themselves in interesting ways. That’s very central to this drama again. I’m always intrigued with subverting genres. There are all sorts of things in the series that speak to the fact that this is not what people are expecting when you describe a drama of this sort.
Another thing that you expecting and I haven’t seen are futurist details. You’ve commented that that this is a present.
Doelger: All the technology in the show exists today. So our feeling is that this show is happening today. We approached it as if it were a contemporary drama. It was very important to us in creating this community to ask all the questions that urban planners would be asking today. I felt very strongly that if you’re building a town for the future, you’re building a sustainable town, so you would rehab buildings, use local materials. The DNA of this project is: What would you do today if you were going in to create this type of community, which addresses across the board all sorts of issues, not just security.
This lack of futurism feeds through to the production design. Settings may be stylish but that looks like design. Drone shots of Concordia’s suburbs look like shots of an actual place.
Doelger: Very much so. Again, the key thing this is that this is an experiment. A group of entrepreneurs, philanthropists got together to think about an achievable, reasonable experiment to create this town. And they had adequate financing, but they wanted to make sure this is a model that could be replicated if successful, anywhere in the world.
So you could go into abandoned towns that have lost their populations because factories have been abandoned. You could go into world to places where resources have been diminished and reforest them. Everything had to be practical and achievable on a very human level. And that was part of the vision of the people who created this town.
And in the series for a long time it is very successful….
Yes. It’s very important that we’re coming in on the twentieth anniversary of this experiment, and it has been very successful, and it’s about to be rolled out. Countries around the world are lining up to try this experiment. This is not some impossible futuristic model in every aspect. It was important to me that people come away saying this isn’t fantasy. This actually could be achievable.
Could we talk about he series’ industry context? It relates to two different systems. One is a kind of Nordic Noir, 2.0: Many of the most ambitious series now coming out of Scandinavia are crime thrillers, but mix that with another genre such as action. At the same time, you could also relate this series to the 2018 Alliance of European public broadcasters, and indeed two in the Alliance – ZDF, France Télévisions – are behind “Concordia.” The principle seems to be the same: To make a select number of blockbuster or very big premium series, which will be event viewing….
Doelger: Yes, it’s a case of ambition. When I finished “Game of Thrones,” I received quite a few offers. I was approached by Jan Mojto from Beta Film with whom I had worked in the past and he told me about a company he was putting together with his idea of a studio trying to make international programming at a scale that was difficult to achieve. I was very intrigued, but the first thing I said to everybody is that international had to be defined by subject matter. By the very nature of the project, it had to be subjects at the core, something that would be international and also needed an international cast.
You did that with “The Swarm”…
Yes, and with the next project. So that’s very much the DNA of it. And in terms of the mix of genres and approaches, I wanted to subvert the genre a little bit. I wanted to imagine this world as a place where everybody would want to want to live, a place that was sunlight and filled with positive images. The darker side is there, but it doesn’t predominate. It’s something that you discover. So fortunately, partly due to the success of “The Swarm,” our partners returned and MBC was a new partner.
Do you think that this kind of scale is increasingly attractive in what seems to be a streaming platform world where they are returning in part to an old Hollywood studio system of making some very big series, but quite modest series in the major markets because of cost concerns? That means that there may be market openings for big established players in markets such as ZDF Studios, Beta Film or France Télévisions….
I can’t really speak to that. I’m not aware enough of the particulars of the business side and programming strategies. Particularly in attracting younger audiences, attracting audiences to the streaming services, that is one of the things that is very attractive to them, how that fits into a broader picture of what’s happening in the business I can’t speak to.
But I do know that our partners are very interested in the type of projects we have been doing and have asked us to keep trying to find more of them.
Could you talk about the ambitions of Intaglio?
Doelger: We would hope to do at least two big series a year. And the company is expanding. We have talked about doing some smaller projects and returning series. We’ve expanded the number of people with whom we’re working. I think that’s achievable. The key thing for us is that we always want to do things, if possible, that can distinguish us from the type of programming ZDF, France, Télévisions are doing on their own. I’m hoping that with the addition of some staff and slighter broader understanding of the type of programming we do, we can expand again, slightly more modestly, but I’m hoping for interesting and provocative dramas.
You’ve just mentioned the word “provocative.” If you were to think what makes you an auteur, would you say that one element is that you want to make series which stimulate you intellectually and that there is a large market, “Game of Thrones,” for example, asked about the nature of humanity and delivered a kind of “read Tacitus” answer.
Doelger: Yes, very much so. For me almost every project I’ve done is a process of discovery. Whether it was “John Adams,” or “Rome,” which asked how to imagine a Rome that people had never seen. “Game of Thrones’” particular challenge for me was how to meld the fantasy elements with what I believed very strongly was the heart of the show, the character drama. In “The Swarm,” I really wanted to make a monster movie in which we discover that the monster is us. As for “Concordia,” I was really intrigued to ask if there’s a solution to so many of the problems facing us as societies that people are saying are insoluble?
Your stories are seen by tens of millions of people. Do you feel that you can make an impact on how people think and behave?
I can’t say whether I’m making an impact. I would hope that was the case. One of the things that was very important to me when making “The Swarm” was that the novel ends in a very dark place. I wanted to end on a note of hope with people thinking it wasn’t too late. They could make a difference. That’s very important in “Concordia.” I wanted people to come away asking if, despite the events, that this a way forward.
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