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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.

What Stieg Larsson was up to - it was the Swedish guilt over World War II. All of our neighbors had the most terrible experiences with the bad forces, but Sweden didn't. I think we use the thrillers in a different way. We never write a thriller like 'Who is the murderer?' The big question in most of our thrillers is... 'Why?'

Where I come from, it's a little bit like England. We start from the theater, and we do films a bit on our free time. The history of making films in Scandinavia is so old, it's like the oldest. The Nordic film industry started before Hollywood in Stockholm in Copenhagen.

Norway is a small country, about half the size of Sweden, but it has a very good film climate because they have municipal cinemas, so even in the smallest towns you have a cinema that shows art house films from all over the world.

The quality of CGI, audiences are now so used to it. They don't know what is CGI and what is real.

Obviously, CGI in the last ten years has gone through such leaps and bounds that today, people are looking for these kinds of movies to wow audiences with technology.

We have a certain warped sense of humor in Scandinavia, and that is what comes across in the choices in a lot of our movies.

Danish film is spreading in a fantastic way.

This worldwide spread of recognition is insane. I was brought up in a small country. If you made a Swedish film that just got into a film festival somewhere, that was like the biggest thing you could wish for.

The pace of Swedish crime fiction is slower - Stieg Larsson's the exception. And I think we use the environment more.