If you listened closely during the premiere of The Model, Mads Matthiesen’s sumptuous and deeply unsettling fashion-biz drama, you could hear the sound of bums shifting uncomfortably on seats.

In the Danish director’s second feature, unveiled at Gothenburg Film Festival this month, teenager Emma (Maria Palm) flies the family coop in pursuit of a modelling career in Paris. But what starts as a familiar tale of an ingenue’s corruption at the hands of the fashion industry quickly shifts into morally murky territory when Emma embarks on an obsessive relationship with big-shot photographer Shane (Ed Skrein), and her career begins to blossom.

Who is exploiting who here, exactly? The answer is left troublingly unclear as Emma, an ambitious girl looking for approval in all the wrong places, attempts to navigate a world of bitchy roommates, brutally honest fashion agents and cliquey fashion-world chatter (“I hear they’re making fake gaps at the dentist now”). Then, after a disturbing turn of events at a lavish party in the French countryside, Emma’s fortunes are suddenly reversed, and she grows increasingly uncoupled from reality as she tries to get her life back on track.

To give his film the authentic feel he was after, Matthiesen met with fashion industry insiders in Paris before sitting down to write the script with Anders Frithiof August and Martin Zandvliet. Preferring real-world experience to proven acting chops, he auditioned some 60 or 70 models for the starring role, before finally casting Maria Palm, a 21-year-old Vogue cover star, in her screen debut.

It was a brave decision for a role that requires the audience to believe in Emma’s vulnerability – get it wrong, and the film risks excusing the allegations of abuse which have dogged the industry in recent months – but Palm proves herself equal to the task. How, then, did Matthiesen ensure his film struck the right tone? And what was the story he originally wanted to tell? The director breaks it all down:

The power of dreams

“For me, The Model is very much a story about a young girl’s dreams and (how they measure up to) reality. A lot of young people have dreams which they pursue and which turn out very different than they expected. That meeting of dreams and reality is something that fashion is all about. Because fashion is about the beautiful, the perfect, the fantasy of something. It’s not real in many ways; it’s a project of our dreams.

“A big thing was I wanted to have a real model in the main part, in order to get closer to the environment. Then when we came closer to the shooting stage we hooked up with a lot of Paris fashion people, like L’Officiel, who took care of all the styling and everything around the photoshoots in the film. All the extras – stylist, make-up and everything – were real people working in the industry. I wanted these shoots to be realistic.”

How far are you willing to go?

“One question the film raises is how far you’re willing to go to fulfil your dreams, which is something I experienced when I was young and trying to make it as a filmmaker. On the one hand, it’s a very classic story that we’ve heard many times, about this young girl travelling out to pursue a modelling career. But I also thought we hadn’t seen a realistic drama piece on (the fashion industry) for many years. We’ve seen documentaries and films that focus on designers, or comedies that take the piss out of it. So I also thought there was a place for a story like this one.”

Who’s exploiting who?

“I didn’t want to make a hardcore critique of the fashion industry, but I was worried people would interpret it that way. That was one reason I ended up changing Shane’s character. Originally, he was more manipulative: I had wanted to show this slightly older guy whose experience had made him more manipulative, because he knew life. But I changed that, because I wanted the film to deal with Emma’s dream and how far she would go. It’s Emma who does these things, because she wants this so badly. I didn’t want her to become too much of a victim in the process.

“It’s dangerous to have a main character in a film who doesn’t always act in a way you can empathise with. But it was something I wanted to play with, because Emma is young and she’s trying to figure out how to deal with people. I love movies where the main characters do stupid stuff, because that’s real life. We all do stuff like that. 

“I wanted all the characters in the film to be lost in some way. They’re pursuing something they can never achieve. Shane is also lost – he’s a little bit older, and he’s found out he’s not gonna find fulfilment in getting to the top. And what happens when you don’t find it there? When that has been your dream all this time? Then you can really get lost.”

Love versus success

“Maria Palm actually travelled out in the way that Emma did when she was 17, so a lot of the emotions (that Emma experiences in the film) are realistic. Of course, the film takes a more dramatic turn – but it could happen, I think. Emma is confused, she wants to be loved by someone and she doesn’t have the best relationship with her family, so she ends up confusing love with acclaim. And I do see that happening with these young girls, because suddenly they’re on the cover of these magazines, and they feed on it. It can be a curse being good-looking, because you get all this recognition for your looks, and suddenly you start to think that is the only thing you have got to offer, and maybe you start to believe less in your inner you.

“Emma needs to figure out what she wants. She thinks that (pursuing her career) will gain her love, that it will make her feel happy. This is also a story about how society confuses this girl, and what she really wants and needs. Society demands so much from us; it makes us go in a certain way because everyone else wants us to go that way. (But sometimes) you have to stop and listen to the inner you, and think, ‘Maybe I should go the other way.’”

Too much, too young

I think the audience (is led to believe that) Emma is a little older than she really is, like Shane does. I wanted it to be a bit of a surprise – like, ‘Wait, she’s 16?’ So we feel a little embarrassed about how we look at her. I was playing with the idea that these girls are really young (in the fashion industry), but we don’t see them that way from the outside. Why is it that all the fashion magazine girls should be girls, not women? You put make-up on them and make them look older, it’s a little bit weird. And we don’t see a 16-year-old girl, because if we did then we would maybe think a little bit. 

For me it was not important to point out the fashion industry as being bad, I think it’s more about the time we’re living in. It’s as much a critique of the fashion consumer. Of all of us, you know? I think we could play out this movie in any tough industry where there’s a lot of competition. With social media we can make a different image of ourselves; (there are) all these young girls putting pictures on Instagram and going for likes. You can stage yourself, (become) this fantasy of how you wanna picture yourself. Of course, there are some things in the film (which are critical towards the industry). This whole idea of young girls travelling out to pursue a modelling career can be very problematic, I do believe that. It very much depends on the girl going into it – what kind of background are they from, how are they psychologically? Are they ready for it, or are they a vulnerable person? But the film wasn’t meant as a hardcore critique of the fashion industry, it was more about the pictorialisation of our society, the striving for beauty in general.