The first trailer for drama series “Other People’s Money,” which has its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, debuts here. Variety spoke to its producers and the creator-showrunner about how they crafted the show, which is inspired by the real story of the biggest tax fraud in European history. Beta Film is handling worldwide sales on the series.
The first four episodes of “Other People’s Money” will world premiere in Berlin at 3.30 p.m. on Feb. 20 at the prestigious Zoo Palast movie theater, followed by a Q&A with cast and crew.
The project started when Michael Polle at X Filme Creative Pool, the company behind “Babylon Berlin,” joined forces with True Content Entertainment’s Ole Søndberg, whose credits include “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” Their objective was to tell the true story of how a criminal network of mega-rich investors, bankers and lawyers stole 146 billion euros ($150 billion) from European taxpayers.
“The idea was always that this show needs to be, on the one hand, inspired by true events, but, on the other hand, fictionalized, and very entertaining,” Polle says, and with this in mind he set out to persuade Jan Schomburg – who he has known for about 20 years – to be the show’s creator and showrunner.
“Other People’s Money” is inspired by the work of a network of European investigative journalists, and in particular Oliver Schröm’s “Die CumEx-Files” and “Die Akte Scholz,” with research by Christian Salewski, and “Det Store Skatterøveri” by Niels Fastrup and Thomas G. Svaneborg.
The challenge, Polle explains, was to dig into the details of those investigations, but also deliver a story “that everybody in the world can relate to,” because the bottom line is “we all have been robbed throughout this whole scandal.”
He adds: “It didn’t make sense to make a serious, very intellectual series … it needed to be something where people think, ‘Oh, yeah, I’d love to watch the next episode.’”
Søndberg says: “We agreed that this story shouldn’t be a comedy, but it was important that it contains a certain very precise kind of humor. It needed a humor that was not laughable, but where you had this silent smile on your lips all the time.” Schomburg adds: “The word that we used quite often was absurdity.”
Schomburg says that the reason he was chosen was, probably, that “my oeuvre is very broad, so I did very art-housy films like ‘Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe,’ but I also did sketch comedy for German TV.”
Before Schomburg agreed to take the project on, he set out two ground rules: “The first was I want people to understand structures and the structures behind this fraud, and the second was: I will never show rich people in a sexy way.”
He adds that there was a “flood of material” to wade through and the main task was “to find a way to take this amazing material and be inspired to put it into a story that is intellectually but also emotionally accessible for an audience.”
One challenge was to take the financial language and manoeuvres at the heart of the fraud and make them understandable. “It’s important to make it accessible for an audience, and especially because the dimension of the fraud is so amazingly big,” Schomburg says. “So, we really tried to find images to make clear what that means. It was almost 150 billion euros – nobody really knows what it is, and then we came up with an image: That a network of very, very rich people came up to every single European citizen and would ask for 326 euros – every child, every old person, every homeless person, every teacher. They would come up to you and say, ‘Please, give me 326 euros.’ So it’s really a relevant number for all of us, and we tried to make it accessible in this way.”
There is a broader context to the scandal, which resonates to this day. Schomburg mentions that according to former Donald Trump strategist Steve Bannon, a key reason why Trump was elected the first time was “there was a huge anger in society after the financial crisis of 2008 that no one was held accountable. And in this case, what inspired me a lot during the research is that here the prosecutors really managed to hold people accountable and to really change something, and so for me this was a very important notion.”
He adds: “And also we all see, especially now, how huge the influence of rich people and billionaires is on politics and how it’s clear how they influence legislation, how they prevent more control being implemented, and how nonchalantly they do this fraud, how they steal money from all of us, and how they think it’s their legal right to do it. And here we had the possibility to say, ‘No, it’s not.’ And I think these forces were really important for me to show.”
Polle adds that it was also important to show that the prosecutors and journalists did stand up for the common man and woman, although it looked like they didn’t stand a chance. “Jan said, ‘We need to have an optimistic point of view on this whole story, because there are heroes out there, with regards to the ‘CumEx’ scandal, and this was something that I totally agreed on. And that’s the reason why this story is very positive, and hopefully inspires people to fight” for what is good and right.
One surprising influence on the show, if you look at the “character constellation,” is the romantic comedy genre, Schomburg explains, “because both of the storylines are more or less treated like love triangles. So, I thought it would be interesting to tell these stories like love stories.” There is also a Shakespearian influence on one of the storylines, with an “old patriarch,” a well-known tax lawyer, taking a young lawyer under his wing, and later betraying him.
Polle adds that the directors, Dustin Loose and Kaspar Munk, were key in developing the look of the show, alongside the directors of photography, Clemens Baumeister and Laust Trier Mørk.
The series stars Lisa Wagner, Karen-Lise Mynster, Justus von Dohnanyi, Niels Strunk, David Dencik and Fabian Hinrichs. It is produced by X Filme Creative Pool and True Content Entertainment in co-production with EPO- Film. Commissioning broadcasters are ZDF and DR in coproduction with New8, a group of European public broadcasters comprising NRK, SVT, RUV, YLE, NPO, VRT, DR and ZDF. It is co-funded by Fisa+, GMPF, the European Union, Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, the Nordvisions Fund and Croatian Audiovisual Center.