Biography

Magnus von Horn, born Dec 21 1983, in Gothenburg, Sweden, is a director and screen writer. He studied directing at the Polish International Film School in Lódz 2009-13. His first feature film "Efterskalv"/"The Here After" (2015) received the Guldbagge Award for best film, best director and also best actor in a supporting role (Mats Blomgren) in 2016.
- IMDb mini biography by: Ulf Kjell Gür

Usually makes films based around real life murders.

[press conference for The Girl with the Needle (2024) at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival] What brought me the story was Line [Line Langebek Knudsen] and Malene [Malene Blenkov], who had a very strong idea to make a film about something that happened in Denmark a long time ago. And that story was so horrific and provocative to me, especially since I have kids of my own, and I couldn't at first sight know how to tell this story inspired by these crimes. That to me was a huge challenge - how to find a way to tell that story on a human level, as well as on an interesting visual level. And I think the topic matter at the beginning.......I felt I wanted to make a horror movie - I'd always dreamed of making a horror movie - but since I got involved in a long development process and in the end I'm very interested in human beings and the characters. I get involved in developing them enough to switch it away from a clear genre and it becomes something else. I really enjoy that process - that's discovery for me - taking something that feels so horrible and to make something human about it and to look for the humanity in it. What is it about and how to complicate it beyond the borders of how it's packaged in the beginning.

[Cannes press conference for The Girl with the Needle (2024)] Black and white fits my idea of that world. If it was a film about a painter during the Renaissance, it would be colour for sure. Because I see that world in colour. But this world is completely imprinted in my head as black and white. Michal [Michal Dymek] is involved in the project at a very early stage, when the script is not ready. He's also part of developing this idea and this film. When we start speaking about what kind of film we want to do in the beginning, it was important for us to take the audience on a time-travel. Because all too often we don't feel that in costume films; we feel the scenography, we feel the costume, we don't really believe in the world we live in. And we wanted to create something that used the elements that for us make that world believable on screen. We wanted to make something where we focused a lot on the mise-en-scène. Really make a film that felt thought-through. That also goes hand-in-hand with using or being inspired by methods that were again used back in the days. Ways of working with set-design - we were building miniatures for this film. Smaller sizes to shoot buildings. There's a lot of effects in this film that you don't see but they're there to be invisible and to recreate this feeling. Just to mention two films that were important for us: Schindler's List (1993) and David Lean's Oliver Twist (1948), both of those I think are very inspiring when it comes to how scenes are made, organised, shot and how they evolve.