00:02
Benni Korzen
Paul Gernes — he never gave his paintings titles. Nor do I. He played around with things that I play around with, circles of different main colors — red, blue, green, yellow. He creates shapes that don't seem to be painted. There is no texture.

00:24
Benni Korzen
He stays away from painting anything other than the shape and the color. And the combination of colors and the placement of the colors — round circles inside of a square box that quite often he did on pieces of wood — fascinates me because I'm playing around with the same things.

00:44
Benni Korzen
Not necessarily just circles, but shapes that dance around and that when they move around, they relate to each other and to the background in ways that other things do not.

00:59
Benni Korzen
He has concretized nine circles onto a square piece. I'm envious of his ability to do this without having lines. That to me, is brilliant.

01:20
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
My name is Tina Jøhnk Christensen and I'm the host of Danish Originals, a podcast series created in partnership with the National Gallery of Denmark and the American Friends of the National Gallery of Denmark. Our goal is to celebrate Danish creatives who've made a significant mark in the US.

01:38
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Today, our guest is Benni Korzen, a multi talented artist who is both a painter and a successful film producer. Welcome, Benni.

01:47
Benni Korzen
Thank you. I barely recognize me in what you just said. Okay, go ahead.

01:52
Tina Jøhnk Christensenb
But it's the truth. Benni, we're in your house in a part of Los Angeles called Park La Brea. Would you be as kind as to try to give the listeners an idea of how colorful and creative your home is? We are surrounded by your artwork, which is represented in many shapes and forms, and this is a wonderfully cozy place with a lot of character.

02:14
Benni Korzen
Yes. What we have here is a couple hundred pieces that I have done over the many years. Some as far as 50 years ago, and others I did yesterday. And I'm finishing a two week gallery show that my wife Annie convinced me to get into. And that has been fun. We had an opening, with a lot of friends who came, some of whom really surprised me, because I hadn't seen them. One person I had not seen for 35 years.

02:51
Benni Korzen
Anyway, the painting and the collages that I have done over the years — I definitely don't consider myself an artist because I don't earn a living as an artist, but I have fun doing it. And because my wife, three years ago, she was convinced by a very young friend to get onto TikTok. She now has more than 400,000 followers.

03:18
Benni Korzen
And because of that and because all of the TikTok videos that they create, most of which have been shot here in our house, a lot of my paintings that hang on our walls have been seen by 400,000 people, 20 of whom last year bought paintings because they happened to see them. I guess it is fun not to be a serious artist and then sell 20, some were very large paintings that I did.

03:51
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
When was your first show and what does it feel like to show your artwork in a public space like that?

03:58
Benni Korzen
Because I don't take that art very seriously, I have a hard time explaining what it feels like. It's great to see old friends showing up. That's sort of how I'm dealing with that. The first show I had was a long time ago, when I was about seven or eight. And it was a show that an aunt of mine had organized in her apartment — some doodlings that were basically an eight year old child's drawings. That really would be 78 years ago because at the age of 85, which I now am, that is how the arithmetic works out.

04:42
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Wow, eight years old. When did you start painting?

04:46
Benni Korzen
Around that time. I was lucky to have, when I went to school, which I, of course, did in Copenhagen, I had only very interesting teachers in the— what was then called, I forget what it was called — it was not called art. We had some fun hours during the week and so I always had teachers who were very helpful getting all the kids to do what they really were good at. That sort of started me.

05:17
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What did you study? Did you ever learn professionally how to paint?

05:21
Benni Korzen
No. Whatever little I know is what I have taught myself. Very early on, I went to places where accomplished artists had their stuff hanging, including the museum in Copenhagen, the state museum, which has and had, also then, an enormous amount of wonderful stuff.

05:46
Benni Korzen
One of the first things that I remember when I began to be a little more serious about it, I was fascinated by a painter whose name is Preben Hornung. And I felt that I really had to learn from him. I picked up the phone, I got his phone number, and I said, my name is Benni, and would you mind if I visit you? And he was very friendly.

06:12
Benni Korzen
He said, yeah, come next Thursday at three o'clock and I'll show you something. I spent two hours in his studio, which was the first time I'd seen an artist at work and he was really the first person who steered me into the meaning of being a painter.

06:35
Benni Korzen
Later on, we had some friends, one of whom sadly died a short while ago, Stig Brøgger, a painter all his life and whose stuff hangs all over the world. So anyway, I had fun dealing with that because I never planned to be an artist. I just made something that I had fun doing and as I was doing other things.

07:01
Benni Korzen
Early on, I decided that a university education was really not the way I wanted to go, no matter how much my parents, who actually did not force me to make any decision. They were just waiting for me to decide how to conduct my life.

07:20
Benni Korzen
And I ended up deciding to learn about producing movies, helped by an introduction that my father's third wife created, and that led me to meet a Dane who had an enormous involvement in something really important.

07:43
Benni Korzen
His name is Mogens Skot-Hansen. And Skot, as we called him, got in 1946 a phone call from New York asking him to come to the United States, because an organization that was about to be created needed a PR manager. They needed somebody who could help explain to the world what this organization was. The organization was the United Nations, the UN, which, I think, was then created in 1947.

08:20
Benni Korzen
Skot spent two years in Hollywood doing his best to advertise to the world that the UN now existed. Skot was very good at making friends with everybody. He was a lawyer who also was a filmmaker. He introduced a lot of people to this idea of the UN.

08:44
Benni Korzen
After he left Hollywood and moved back to Denmark, he started a movie company called Laterna Film. And for a number of years, he decided I — I was then 22 — yeah, okay, Benni, come in here and do this and do that. There was no formal film education available. This is way before The Film Institute, et cetera.

09:10
Benni Korzen
What happened was that various of Skot's friends that he had made in Hollywood would show up because he had told them, whenever you come to Europe, come see me. And one day, a young person showed up, that was Francis Ford Coppola. We spent some time there. And at that time, Skot was trying to do a movie that had some problems in getting a screenplay fixed.

09:38
Benni Korzen
And so he said, I know, I've heard from your USC teacher that you are a smart young person— take a look at this script and see if you can fix it. Francis was placed in a small room and he sat there and worked for about ten hours without stop. And he gave us a screenplay that had been vastly improved.

10:03
Benni Korzen
I also later on met him because around 23 years ago at the millennium, a mutual friend invited a lot of people on a cruise and Francis showed up. So I've stayed a little bit in touch. He's my age and at that cruise, what happened was that there was a salon so that everybody who wanted to perform, could tell stories, whatever. And I'm not a performer, I do well behind the camera, not in front.

10:35
Benni Korzen
But I was convinced to do something. In my desperation of trying to find something to do in front of an audience that included not only Francis, but also he flew in with friends, all of whom were very famous actors and actresses. So I decided to do levitation, because somebody had done a party trick where we actually learned how to levitate a person.

11:03
Benni Korzen
You seat a person in a chair, and four people using only their fingers are actually able to lift a person. What happened was we lifted Francis, who at that time claimed that he weighed 265 pounds. I think he actually weighed more. We managed to lift him something like six feet up in the air, and put him down again without any damage. And that was one of the highlights of my life as a performer at that time.

11:37
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
So was Francis Ford Coppola the reason that you came to New York and that you ended up becoming a film producer?

11:45
Benni Korzen
No. No. There were other reasons why making movies started being fun. And one such reason was that, at that time, at Laterna Film, Skot had an ability to make young people, who wanted to do something, he gave them a chance to do that. He was very generous.

12:09
Benni Korzen
He said, yeah, you can use the editing room and he brought in people like Klaus Rifbjerg and many others who at that time were trying to figure out what they wanted to do with their lives. At that time, and I'm talking about the 1960s into '70s. This Laterna Film, as far as I'm concerned and as far as my recollection goes, was the one place where a lot of smart people had a lot of fun.

12:40
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You became a very prolific film producer, and one of the highlights of your career is when you produced Babette's Feast. It won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1988. The film was directed by Gabriel Axel. What was this experience like? Describe also, what it was like being part of the Academy Awards back then in the 1980s.

13:05
Benni Korzen
What happened was, I had a partnership with a Danish producer, Just Betzer. We made six movies together, one of which was Babette's Gaestebud, Babette's Feast. At that time, Gabriel's script had finally found a producer, Just. Gabriel had written a screenplay ten years earlier and for ten years he had knocked on everybody's door, literally ten years.

13:36
Benni Korzen
We made the movie in 1986, '87. I was actually producing another movie which we shot in what was then called Yugoslavia. My involvement in Babette's Feast was as follows. After the shooting that I did in Yugoslavia was over, and at that time I had moved to New York, I came back to Denmark. Everything that had been created during the shooting of Babette's Feast, I did not attend to at all, because I was shooting another movie.

14:13
Benni Korzen
When the editing began to shape up, that's when I really got involved. I introduced to Just, Walter Manley. Walter was a specialist in selling movies. And so I brought in him, since nobody in Denmark at that time had any faith in what Gabriel Axel as a director could do. Because before he had made Babette, he had made ten other movies, not one of which caused anybody's excitement. So nobody really expected anything to take place with this movie.

14:52
Benni Korzen
We took it to the Cannes Festival and we had a lousy Sunday morning, a rainy Sunday morning screening. And something like 20 minutes after the screening started, I saw people starting running out of the movie theater, which is not necessarily a good sign. But my wife, who sat next to me, turned around and gave me a nudge with her elbow, which was at that time a signal, something interesting is happening up there on the screen.

15:29
Benni Korzen
The people who ran out, they ran out to the sales office of Walter's to pick up the rights. So we made, within the first 45 minutes after the movie, we made sales to all the important places that this movie would end up. And it ended up playing in New York at the opening theater for 46 weeks, and we also made a deal with a company called Orion Classics, which is now Sony Classics, the same people.

16:01
Benni Korzen
They were very smart about how to handle this. They suggested to us, and we accepted that, we made a deal with a food consultant who organized so that every city in which the movie opened, which was about 50 — we only had 50 prints circulating — everywhere it opened in a movie theater, very close to that movie theater would be a restaurant that served the meal.

16:32
Benni Korzen
The opening of Babette in the United States was an enormously successful thing for a little movie that nobody had ever heard of and expected nothing from. So my involvement there was to deal with the marketing aspect of this movie rather than anything else.

16:51
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And it went on to go all the way to the Academy Awards.

16:54
Benni Korzen
Yes.

16:54
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And I assume that you were there as the producer. What was that experience like?

16:59
Benni Korzen
It was a lot of fun. And it was a lot of fun because nobody expected — okay, what happened was that our distributor, Orion Classic, called me and said, I assure you, even though your movie is wonderful, it will not win, because Louis Malle's Au Revoir, Les Enfants is the favorite and there's nothing we can do about that. We are spending exactly the same amount for PR for your movie as for him. Don't expect anything.

17:30
Benni Korzen
And it was a big surprise and I do remember that at 4:00 am in Paris when the camera was close up on Louis Malle's face as the announcement was that he did not win. There was a disappointed face there. Anyway, so yeah, this was 1990, I think, or '91.

17:52
Benni Korzen
Now, what 30 years later, we are now working on creating, not a remake, but another story, set in the United States, a story that makes sense today, that uses Karen Blixen's basic themes.

18:12
Benni Korzen
As one of the big fans of the original movie, Pope Francis, describes it, and it's actually written in his papal announcement: Babette's Feast is a wonderful movie because it combines three very important themes — generosity, tolerance and the power of art to transform people's lives. Of course, it's culinary arts. And in the attempt to make a movie that we are now working on, those are three themes that we are very much hanging on to.

18:53
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I would like to take you back still to that night at the Academy Awards, when you said Louis Malle wasn't happy when he did not win, but I assume that you were very happy. What was the experience like, and who was in the room, whose eyes did you catch when you realized you'd actually won an Oscar?

19:14
Benni Korzen
Okay, so here's the thing. At that time, I was not in Los Angeles. I was shooting something somewhere, and I ended up at an Oscar party. Every year we have Oscar parties at a friend's house.

19:30
Benni Korzen
And because I also believed the prediction that we didn't have much of a chance. So in the local pool where you pay ten bucks and you put your projected winner, in that, I put down my ten dollars for Louis Malle's movie. And as a result of this, I did not win. I won a third prize. And I think I took home something like $25 as a third prize winner. And I was as surprised.

20:04
Benni Korzen
And when I got back to my own apartment in New York, there were like 14 messages on the answering machine. And they all had to do with what a wonderful victory it was. And I was still totally un-comprehending of what actually happened. That's the truth.

20:24
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You mentioned that you were doing a lot of marketing. Today, at least, I don't know how it was then, there's a lot of campaigning going on when you have a movie and you would like for it to be considered for an award. What was campaigning like back then? You mentioned you had dinners with the meals that were being served. What else?

20:44
Benni Korzen
Okay, right now, there is total confusion in the global business of where programming is created, and the confusion has a lot to do with the fact that new markets have been created because of streaming. Streaming has only existed for the last, whatever, five, ten years.

21:04
Benni Korzen
And so PR for anything, whether it's a movie or a miniseries, is now something that has another element onto it, which is we don't really know what's going to happen next year, in addition to which, as we speak, there's slowing down, globally, of creating anything that we call programming.

21:27
Benni Korzen
It's the first time that I can think of in the last hundred years, where the creation of movies and TV has taken place, that there is less understanding of what's going to happen next year and in the next five years and so on. But, the programming, we have all learned, is a very nice element of the human condition. So things will be figured out.

21:52
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You mentioned that you're doing a remake of Babette's Feast, or a different version of it. The book was written by Isak Dinesen, as she's known in the US, Karen Blixen, as we know her in Denmark. Are you close to her writing? Is her writing special to you?

22:08
Benni Korzen
I have read just about everything she has written. It is the strength of her story in Babette's Feast that we are focusing on. We're trying to tell a story that has resonance in today's world as opposed to her story, which I think she wrote around 1950.

22:33
Benni Korzen
In other words, if we're able to tell the story, which is not a remake, it's another version that has today's world incorporated. If we are able to tell that story so that it really gives today's world the resonance that this story deserves, then, yeah, that's the whole point this movie is about.

22:57
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You are still very active today as a producer. What do you think winning the Academy Award, winning the Oscar meant for your career?

23:06
Benni Korzen
I have no idea. I think that as helpful as it is to get recognition, the most important thing is what your most recent work represents. It's only the most recent creation, the most recent movie or TV thing that really counts. I'm hoping that one of the five, or maybe all five, of the things that I'm juggling right now will be of some note and success.

23:36
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You have produced a large number of films. How would you describe the work that you do as a producer? And do you personally get involved in the creative aspect of the movies you produce?

23:47
Benni Korzen
Yes. It typically always starts with the story. Nothing really works unless the story that is the basis for a movie or a TV thing really makes sense. The writing is by far the most important aspect of any such programming creation.

24:10
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
As I said, you've produced many films. Which one stands out for you in terms of the best experience or the best movie? And what does it take for you to be proud of a film?

24:22
Benni Korzen
The very first movie I produced, it took place, I forget the year, I have to look it up on IMDb, but we made a movie called Doktor Glas. It's based on a Hjalmar Soderberg novel he wrote around 1900. What happened there was, my wife Annie found a book — at that time we lived in New York and she picked up a book at our local library. She picked up the book because of the cover of the book which appeals to her.

24:55
Benni Korzen
That book happened to be Hjalmar Soderberg's Doktor Glas. And I read it and I saw right away, it has a wonderful love story. At that time, I had no idea — this was the first time I was trying to do something as a producer. I reached out to a Swedish director — I'd just seen her second movie, her name being Mai Zetterling.

25:21
Benni Korzen
And I said, I'm interested in making and producing a movie, and I think you're a very good director. Would you care to get involved? And she said, I know that book, it's a wonderful story, but there is just nobody who can possibly play the lead of Doktor Glas. So I'm sorry, I have to turn you down. Okay, I took that rejection as a, well, I have to deal with that.

25:46
Benni Korzen
Then, I found, and I forget who it was who brought Per Oscarsson's name to me. I called Mai Zetterling back and I said, how about Per Oscarsson? And there was a long silence, something like ten seconds. She said, Per Oscarsson is wonderful. I want to do this with Per Oscarsson.

26:09
Benni Korzen
I then went back to the person I mentioned before, Skot-Hansen, and I said, Skot, I now have a director and a wonderful story. Would you care to help me put together the financing? And Skot, having been my first helper into the business, said, Okay, I think we're ready.

26:32
Benni Korzen
And he got the financing, and so we made the movie. That was really the first important thing for me. We shot both in Denmark and in Sweden, and got a nice cast together, and so that was how it all began.

26:48
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You have mentioned a few names now that have been important in your career. Who else would you name?

26:54
Benni Korzen
In my family in Denmark, everybody, and this has, I don't think, anything to do with me, but they're all in the same business. My sister Nina has been a producer and still is active as a producer. Her first husband, Erik Crone, who sadly died a couple of years ago, had been a producer and was also the head of the production department of Nordisk Film. And their oldest daughter, Natasha, is on camera on TV2 in Denmark, and her sister, Barbara, is a producer.

27:29
Benni Korzen
When I moved from Copenhagen to New York back in 1964, I had a few contacts. And some of those contacts led to a number of movies and they're all important. And instead of now having to go through a list of people, take my word for it, a lot of important people have been very helpful.

27:51
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I take your word for it. Benni, you're a mature man now. You said it yourself. But you have not retired. You're still going strong. What motivates you to still keep working at this age?

28:04
Benni Korzen
I have never understood the concept of retirement. We have many friends who have tried to explain what retirement means. And every time I hear somebody explaining what it means for him or her, it does not include my brain cells, because I don't get it. I think retirement really, to me, means that is something that happens after you die. Before you die, it does not fit into any of the lifestyles that I can relate to.

28:40
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
So what motivates you?

28:42
Benni Korzen
I don't know. I have no idea. For the same reason that when I paint, which quite often, by the way, to be totally honest, when I paint, I, quite often, I used to smoke pot. Now I eat pot. I'm very fond of edibles. And, edibles do serve, whatever it is in the THC or the other stuff.

29:09
Benni Korzen
In my brain, what it does is, it animates my brain cells to see things that I don't see when I don't use pot. And so that's all it does. It also helps me to eliminate all the noises and phone calls, et cetera, so I can focus on things very clearly.

29:34
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I spoke about being mature and your wife, Annie Korzen, is in her 80s. She has become a big TikTok sensation. That is a young people's medium, I would say. Can you explain what this means to be a TikTok sensation and do you understand this new world?

29:53
Benni Korzen
No. And nor does she. We have no fucking idea how it hangs together. What started her was a young person. Her name is Mackenzie. Mackenzie Morrison said to Annie, you should get on TikTok, because you will make people very interested in what you have to say. To which Annie said, no way. This started three years ago. At that time, her understanding of social media was that she was very attached to Facebook. That was all she knew.

30:30
Benni Korzen
And so she said to Mackenzie, as far as I'm concerned, she said, TikTok is about 12 year old girls who dance and I don't see me fitting in there. And Mackenzie, who knew something that clearly we did not, said, you're wrong. And she forced Annie to start doing some videos, one of which, early on, is 13 seconds long and has more than 9 million views and has caused many thousands of what is called sounds, which is people take Annie's voice and put their own image together.

31:18
Benni Korzen
All of this is a new world that is a lot of fun and she has used it also for certain, let's say, more serious usages. We went to Denmark a couple of months ago and we also went down to Berlin. In Berlin, we went to the Humboldt University Plaza, and Humbolt, that plaza, was where in, I think it was in 1938, the book burning took place.

31:54
Benni Korzen
Annie did a 45 second video of the burning, what that event meant to her. And at the end of that short video, she said, any country that destroys books is a country in trouble. That was a clear reference by Annie to what's going on in Florida. And that video was seen by half a million people. There is a way to use that social medium to make important statements.

32:33
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Annie is not a stranger to the world of entertainment. We should probably tell the audience who your wife is.

32:41
Benni Korzen
Annie is a writer and an actress. As an actress, her best known past credit involved some episodes of Seinfeld. Another actress had been given the same offer and had decided that the role was much too small for her to be interested in. Annie, at that time, did not have that problem. She did end up, I think, five episodes of Seinfeld. That has been very helpful in her career. She's done other things that has brought her some, not fame, but acclaim.

33:16
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And you met her very early on when you moved to New York in 1964. Why did you move to New York and did you stay because of Annie or why did you stay in the United States?

33:28
Benni Korzen
So what happened was, before I went to New York, I decided in 1960, to hop into my 1939 Citroen, a car I had bought for $600 in Helsingborg. And I put my Swedish girlfriend next to me, and we drove down to Paris. And we stayed in the camping site that then existed in the Bois De Boulogne, the forest in Paris. We stayed there for three months and bummed around.

34:03
Benni Korzen
And then I met an American by the name of Paul. And Paul and I became close friends and when we had all the fun that we could have in Paris, I went back to Copenhagen and this American Paul went with me and so we bumped around in Copenhagen. And then Paul said, when you come to New York, you have to look up and call my brother Michael.

34:26
Benni Korzen
So I went to New York a few years later, and I called up his brother Michael. Michael said, you have to meet some friends. And so that was in January of 1964. The first person he made me meet, this was in February of 1964, her name was January, and we met, and it didn't work out. I said, thank you very much, Michael, she's a very nice woman, but it didn't really click.

34:53
Benni Korzen
Michael said, okay, I'm ready with number two. Her name is Annie. And so that was now, end of February and then come March of 1964, Annie and I got married. We had no idea why, we didn't know each other, we got married and so that's how I met Annie.

35:14
Benni Korzen
Her friend said, well, look, he clearly married you because he needs a green card. After you give him his green card, you'll never see him. Annie mentioned that a few weeks ago when we had our 59th celebration. So, things sometimes take place in ways you cannot predict.

35:36
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
That's an incredible story, Benni. Which Danish values do you think you've taken along with you on your road to success in the US? And which ones do you think you left behind?

35:46
Benni Korzen
Okay, I have some theories about that and a lot has something to do with some of the movies that I've been involved in. I believe that there is a national Danish DNA that includes a large ingredient of modesty. It has something to do with Janteloven and all of that stuff, that can be both a positive and a negative. It can be a positive because boasting is not necessarily a good thing.

36:22
Benni Korzen
And by the way, this theory of mine is proven by one episode in my early life. Back in 1960 around the time when I started working for Laterna Film and Skot-Hansen, five guys from New York, from CBS in New York, they came to Denmark in order to do a documentary about what happened in 1943, when 99% of all Danish Jews were saved to Sweden, including my family and me.

37:00
Benni Korzen
We made a documentary and after it was done CBS sent a 16mm print to Skot to say, show it to everybody in Denmark because it has been a big success in the United States. It's the first time that a major amount of public has seen what happened in 1943. Skot contacted the Resistance people who were very much involved. They looked at the 16mm film, and they said, it's a wonderful film, but we forbid you to show it, because it just shows that we are boasting.

37:41
Benni Korzen
Now, how you translate that into the DNA modesty factor that I'm talking about is where I have both problems with that and also, okay, it's obviously at the same time, something that leads to the world now believing that Denmark is one of the happiest places in the world, et cetera, et cetera.

38:05
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You speak English with your wife, you've been based here for a long time. Do you still feel Danish?

38:14
Benni Korzen
Yes. And she speaks the same kind of Danish of other Americans with their funny accent. We're very close with my Danish family. We spend time on FaceTime, et cetera, every week, and so we know pretty much what goes on there at all times and can see things from both perspectives.

38:37
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What is your favorite Danish word? And please spell it for our American listeners.

38:43
Benni Korzen
Okay. It's a made up word, and I forget when I first heard it, but many decades ago, I used it with my then Danish friends. And the word is hylegrineskæg. And it's spelled h-y-l-e-g-r-i-n-e-s-k-æ, which is a Danish letter that does not exist in English, which is an ae, g. hylegrineskæg. It does not exist, and if you look it up on Google, it'll say it does not exist.

39:18
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Could you explain what it means?

39:20
Benni Korzen
It means having fun. Fun is spelled f-u-n.

39:24
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Thank you for that. Expats are often split between two homes, two cultures, and sometimes that can be a challenge. What are the advantages of belonging to two different worlds?

39:36
Benni Korzen
That's a good question. And if we can take another three hours, I might get at the end of the three hours to have some vague explanation. Look, if you have just one way of looking at things, you may lack the double perspective or triple perspective that comes from having different angles. In today's world, I think it's very important to really not just have an insular single view. So, that's my vague answer to that question.

40:14
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And having been here for so many years, you have a different perspective on Denmark and Danish society and culture. What do you think the Danes miss when it comes to their understanding of their own country?

40:26
Benni Korzen
That's a very good question. In my group of friends and family, everybody spends a lot of time outside of Denmark. The particular Danish milieu that you're talking about is fairly unknown to me because the Danish culture that I am familiar with is really a multi situation. Quite often I learn about things that has very little to do with Denmark, but pulls me into a world that I didn't know about.

41:01
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
When you hear the national anthem Der er et yndigt land, which we could translate into, there is a lovely country or there is a beautiful country, what do you feel?

41:10
Benni Korzen
It reminds me of all the soccer matches I have attended where that is being played.

41:18
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And may I ask you a bit of a heavy question: where would you like to be buried? And if you could decide what it should say on your tombstone, what would you like it to say?

41:32
Benni Korzen
Okay, Annie and I did something some years ago. It's a long story, but David Geffen has created in this country a situation where if you donate your body for scientific purposes, that organization that he has created will take care of everything. So we are not going to be buried in a cemetery.

41:54
Benni Korzen
But there's another thing in this regard. Muhammad Ali had a wonderful way of putting words to that aspect. He said — this is not exactly what he said, and this is not exactly what is put on his gravestone, but it's something like this: service to others is the rent you pay for your room in heaven.

42:26
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
That's beautiful. Thank you so much for your time, Benni. We appreciate that you were with us.

42:32
Benni Korzen
You're welcome. Thank you.

42:36
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
For today's episode, Benni Korzen chose Paul Gerne's Uden titel, or Untitled from 1968–1969 from the collection of the National Gallery of Denmark.