Richard: Mr. Paulson, I saw your movie, The Damned. Very great, very atmospheric. You should be really proud of the work you’ve done. I just wanted to ask, what drew you to this particular project?

Thordur: Well, it’s been a while. I wrote the initial story to it eight years ago when I was living in a small fishing village in Iceland. I myself am not from the countryside. I’m from Reykjavik, so I’m from a city. And yeah, it was just the influence of living in a small village. I got snowed in for the winter, and then I always knew about the story of the Dreygur, which is what could be, you know, it’s like a mythical being in Icelandic folklore where it’s almost, you could translate it today as a ghost, but it’s actually closer to a zombie, but there were no zombies back then, you know, they hadn’t written, they hadn’t found, you know, figured out what that was. So the Dreygur is almost like a kind of a flesh and bone rotting corpse that comes back to seek revenge on the people that wronged them. And then just these interesting stories about fishermen and ships sinking, and some people surviving, and some of the poor villages decide to rather just kill the survivors and take what they can, and to say that no one survived because, you know, easier. So you have all these interesting stories. And then from developing and writing, the moral question of the film kind of came out of it. And what would you do if you were snowed in for the winter, and you yourself and your friends were running low on food, and then you see a ship sinking off your shores? Do you go out and save these poor people that are drowning? Because if you save them and bring them back, you’re snowed in for the winter, you barely have enough food for yourself, you will then all starve and die.

(Rest of the interview is in video interview)