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My liking for Scandinavian crime fiction led me into exploring literary writers from the same countries.

Wherever a writer grew up, they're obviously influenced by that area, and I'm sure their characters are pulled from those experiences.

I was influenced by autobiographical writers like Henry Miller, and I had actually done some autobiographical prose. But I just thought that comics were like virgin territory. There was so much to be done. It excited me. I couldn't draw very well. I could write scripts and storyboard style using stick figures and balloons and captions.

I felt like I haven't had the typical experience of a novelist whose book becomes a movie.

I've been mostly influenced by experiences in the theater growing up.

Thanks to the success of Henning Mankell and Peter Hoeg, there wasn't the same stigma attached to writing genre thrillers in Scandinavia as there was in many other cultures. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Abroad, they have covered pretty much all subjects, explored every possibility, every twist. So similarities between ideas you have and those filmed abroad are quite possible.

The films that I've done before were original stories most of the time, I did two adaptations before this, but they were mostly original stories where I had complete freedom to evolve in the direction I wanted.

Television and film are such streamlined story mediums. You can't really meander about, whereas a novel is an interior experience.