When crafting the film for American audiences was there a conscious decision to make a certain mood?
MR: There wasn’t an attempt to do that. I would say that it has to do with the tone of Linqvist’s novel. The thing about this story is that Lindqvist has managed to express the pain of growing up through a vampire tale, but you are meant to identify with the characters. In that sense it is warm and tender, but the darkness is about the juxtaposition of those tones. What struck me about the book was that there was real darkness, but there was real tenderness. That’s very unusual. It really is meant to make you identify with them, and connect to their pain through this story. In that sense it doesn’t distance them from you emotionally so it doesn’t seem as eerie. Hopefully there are a lot of other eerie stuff that gives it that horror side. The Policeman character played by Elias Koteas was not in the book. What made you put in that character? MR: In the book there is a policeman, and his name is Staffen. Some of the dialogue is from him. And there is another character that is Latka, who
