00:02
Gregers Heering
I have chosen a piece by Niels Skovgaard. It's called Troldeskoven. It's from the late 1800s and it's a landscape that shows a forest.

00:13
Gregers Heering
The black and white tonality has been fascinating to me for a while now. There's a cinematic aspect to it, a world that can be both of a fairytale quality or that I'm about to enter through the eyes of someone else.

00:34
Gregers Heering
It's almost photorealistic, and the softness of the trees and the plants makes me want to go along on this journey, and step further into this universe and see what can happen, who you will meet, what animals will show up, what the weather is going to turn into in just a moment.

00:55
Gregers Heering
In terms of mood, it's a little bit on the grittier side, but there is this amazing light in the background that draws the eye to it. And it makes me feel safe to step into this quite magical place where anything can happen.

01:22
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.

01:39
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Today, our guest Is Gregers Heering, A Danish Photographer Based In Los Angeles. Welcome, Gregers.

01:46
Gregers Heering
Thank you. Thanks for having me.

01:47
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
It's very nice to have you here. We're in Los Angeles, where you live and work. Which part of the city do you call home? Try to describe what makes it a good place for you to be.

01:58
Gregers Heering
My wife, Sarah, who's American and our little daughter Maya, and our dog Elsa, we live in Echo Park. And for those of you who do not know what and where Echo Park is, it's the eastern part of Central Los Angeles between Silver Lake and Downtown.

02:18
Gregers Heering
Like many other things in my life, everything has been a coincidence. We used to live in Hollywood Hills. And we rented a house there, an old beaten up house that we loved. It had a great view. We had a lot of good times there. But the landlord, I guess if Tony Soprano and Danny Devito had a kid, it would be this landlord.

02:40
Gregers Heering
And the only thing he was really thinking about was money. And we couldn't justify the rent any longer and decided to see if there could be a possibility for us to get into the housing market. Long story short, we found a house in Echo Park that none of us really had a relationship to, but we liked the vibe when we went to see it and spent some little time there. So, yeah.

03:08
Gregers Heering
I love Echo Park. It's one of LA's oldest neighborhoods. It has glamorous periods and less glamorous periods. When I got here back in the early 2000s, it was not really an area that you would spend too much time in. There was a lot of violence, there was gang rivalry.

03:25
Gregers Heering
So, my fellow students — I came here to attend film school. It was mostly Silver Lake, Los Feliz and Hollywood — these areas were already nice at the time, but certainly not as expensive as they have become since.

03:41
Gregers Heering
Echo Park is a good fit for us because there's a big sense of community. There is a lot of history as I mentioned before. It's an area that's going through massive gentrification right now. A lot of old families are being pushed out. So, I'm sure there are many different opinions about whether Echo Park is still Echo Park, but I personally feel that it has a unique quality and sense of community that is very hard to find anywhere else in Los Angeles.

04:12
Gregers Heering
And also, since we are in the city of film and entertainment, if you look at the history of Echo Park, for instance, you can take a movie like Polanski's Chinatown and a big part of the action takes place in Echo Park. And it's a very different Echo Park from what it later became and what it is now.

04:32
Gregers Heering
You have Dodger Stadium. You can walk to most things. It hasn't turned into a shopping mall. And obviously as a photographer, I also really like the visual environment. You have hills and people are interesting. They dress interestingly, especially young people. Great parks. Yeah, I find it to be a fascinating area and we feel surrounded by great neighbors that have received us with open arms.

05:02
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Very nice. I understand that you worked as a creative planner in Copenhagen and you worked in mergers and acquisition in London in the UK. How did you end up there and how did you segue into the creative world and end up in Los Angeles?

05:21
Gregers Heering
Yeah, it's a very valid and good question. I got into advertising in Copenhagen with an agency called Grey when I was studying at Roskilde University and I just became very fascinated with the mix of business and creativity. I really found it super interesting, how you could translate, I guess what people would call data these days into creative briefs that would work as a blueprint for the creatives.

05:49
Gregers Heering
Yeah, I got very into both the creative aspect, but also the psychological aspect of what goes into making these campaigns. But at some point, I needed a change. I'd been in Copenhagen for a few years, and I've always had this — My parents always felt that I would be traveling a lot, which is why they gave me the name Gregers, but that's another story.

06:12
Gregers Heering
I went to London and my plan was to try to find a job in advertising there. My older brother had a friend there who was working for this insurance company. And he offered me to sit at his office and apply for jobs there. And I ended up working for him for two years.

06:32
Gregers Heering
Yeah, it was a great job. He was responsible for 11 market units across Asia and Europe. And I would harvest information from these different offices and brief him about what was going on. I felt almost like a spy at times — but I felt very — I never really fully understood what was going on with the business products, but I was good with people, and I was good at visualizing what was going on.

06:58
Gregers Heering
I remember he said that my brain was something that would at times float out of my head and someone would need to grab it and put it back in. I guess I was daydreaming already at that time about getting back to the creative world. So when 9/11 came and put a lid on all these activities that were going on, I realized I needed a change again.

07:24
Gregers Heering
I was reading Cubby Broccoli's biography, you know, the producer of the James Bond movies. And I was like, okay, I can become a producer. So I made the decision to apply for film school, but I had no intention or great motivation to move too far away. But a friend of mine said, oh, I have a friend who lives in Los Angeles. His name is Mikkel Bondesen and you should talk to him.

07:47
Gregers Heering
And I gave the guy a call and within three minutes he had convinced me that the only place to go to film school was in LA, and I should apply. And I just thought it was the craziest thing. But I did apply and ended up getting in. I left London and went to LA.

08:03
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And you got a Master of Fine Art from the American Film Institute. Was this a good foundation for your career as a filmmaker?

08:13
Gregers Heering
Yeah, it was everything. I arrived to this place that at first felt so big and ugly and, where's the city center and all the beautiful buildings — with my European slight arrogance. It didn't take long for me to realize that there was an energy and a creative energy here and the people I was lucky enough to meet at film school.

08:38
Gregers Heering
I don't know if home is the right word, but I just felt that something in me got opened up and I just had this endless appetite for learning as much as I could about filmmaking and so many other things as well, like literature and all creative aspects that go into both movie making and later photography and all that.

09:02
Gregers Heering
And I also had no experience as a filmmaker. There's that detail. So AFI was a very great place to learn filmmaking because that's what they do. They make you make movies all the time and it's the only way to learn it.

09:16
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Are you from a family of filmmakers? And where did you get this — how did you get this idea to become a filmmaker? You mentioned Mikkel Bondesen, but —

09:25
Gregers Heering
The answer is no. My dad was the fifth generation, I believe, of a family liquor business. My mom was at home until she started a ballet school in a city called Næstved in Denmark. But my dad wrote essays and these little stories for Berlingske Tidende. He had a piece there every Sunday. It's a thing I'm thinking a lot about at the moment that he had an artist in him.

09:57
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Berlingske Tidende is a newspaper in Denmark.

10:01
Gregers Heering
Yes, yes. He also had a little brother, my uncle, who was a bit of a mystery, but he lived out in the Far East for most of my upbringing and brought home these cameras that I just found myself fascinated with. So there were definitely lots of things that might have sparked the interest.

10:19
Gregers Heering
But ever since I was a kid reading, for instance, Donald Duck, I would always sit with the magazine turning it around and zooming in and out and trying to envision what it would look like as a movie. So I guess there was something.

10:34
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What was your experience with the world of filmmaking in Los Angeles like? Is it as glamorous as people think? Are you able to name drop a lot or is it like nothing people expect it to be?

10:48
Gregers Heering
I had my own missed opportunity for hanging out with a celebrity in my book. I was mentioning Echo Park before. When we had just moved into the house, the house behind us was getting a new owner. And there was a lot of mystery, who that owner would become. And there was some secrecy about it. It's not a super fancy area, but it was being kept under wraps who it was that would move in behind us.

11:13
Gregers Heering
I should preface by saying that in film school, and being so motivated to learn as much as possible, one of my favorite movies is Chinatown. And it's obviously a very famous script, and something that they talk a lot about in film school. I remember we watched it on 35mm print, and yeah, it's big in the world of movie buffs.

11:36
Gregers Heering
I sometimes fantasized meeting Robert Towne, the writer, because I was just so interested in how that script was put together. To me, Robert Towne would be someone I would really appreciate having a beer with, and just ask him questions about the writing process and all that.

11:51
Gregers Heering
Anyway, going back to the secrecy about who the neighbor was gonna be behind us. One really hot day — we had this little yard in front of our house, it gets really dry when it's hot here — I suddenly see this man sitting down there, smoking a pipe in work clothes. And I was like, okay, cause Echo Park has the whole range of different characters.

12:14
Gregers Heering
I was a little bit nervous, especially wildfires and all that. I wanted to just make sure he wasn't setting the whole house on fire. I went down there and there sits this gentleman with a beard and he's smoking his pipe. And I go over to him, introduce myself, and just say, okay I hope you are careful with the pipe, and he's like, yeah, yeah, no problem.

12:37
Gregers Heering
I asked what he was doing and he said oh, my daughter is moving in here, so I'm just helping out. And I was like, okay, great. And I went back inside. And as you may guess at this point, it turned out to be Robert Towne's daughter that moved in behind us. I pretty much kicked away Robert Towne. So that's probably my biggest Hollywood story that I messed up myself.

13:05
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And you never went back and knocked on the door and said, can I talk to your Dad?

13:08
Gregers Heering
I never, and his daughter was nice, but a very shy person who kept mostly to herself and she's no longer our neighbor. But yeah, I never saw her father again. And yeah, that was Robert Towne.

13:22
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Incredible. I introduced you as a photographer. You went from being a filmmaker to being a photographer. How and why did you decide that filmmaking was not your path?

13:34
Gregers Heering
I still love moving images. What happened was, I was trying to become a better writer. It was not as easy as I thought it would be, although I gave it as much as I could. And what frustrated me was that I wasn't completing anything. I couldn't finish anything.

13:56
Gregers Heering
There was this book from Taschen with Michael Mann. And there's a picture of him on the back of it where he's holding this Nikon camera. And I was like, oh, maybe I should pick up the camera again. At the time it was just starting to take off, digital cameras, and they were what you call full frame, which is the same aspect ratio as 35 mm film.

14:18
Gregers Heering
And I was like, okay, I'm just going to go out and photograph a little bit because at least it can train my eye and I can try to complete something. And moreover, I had also at the time just befriended, and he's still a very dear friend, Nicolai Fuglsig, who is one of Denmark's biggest stars to come out as a commercial filmmaker, he's also a feature filmmaker, he's a great friend, very generous. And he took me under his wing, and brought me to sets.

14:44
Gregers Heering
And he came from a photojournalistic background, and it somehow gave me an excuse to photograph. And the thing is, I have always been a photographer since I was a kid, I've been the weird guy bringing a camera around and those days it was like little film cameras.

15:04
Gregers Heering
It took a little extra effort to want to photograph because you had to get the film developed and all that. But my excitement to go to the lab and see the result is still as great today as it was back then. It was something that blossomed up in me again.

15:20
Gregers Heering
I think the first thing that I was really proud of doing was I had a great friend that gave me some access to photograph these homicide detectives and SWAT guys in the South and I just went and took pictures of them and it was so fascinating to me and I was good at it.

15:44
Gregers Heering
I felt very comfortable with it. And people around me told me that those were great images. So I think it gave me some hope to continue. But of course, my ego was telling me all the time, oh, you want to be a filmmaker, you want to be a director and all that. It took me some time to come to terms with, I was actually enjoying photography a lot more than I admitted to myself.

16:09
Gregers Heering
And there was just something really fascinating about a still image. So that's what was going on in my head. And I think the excuse was to show that I had an eye that I could in my dream world, get into doing commercials. Or someone would say, oh, you got a great eye, you should come and help us make this film or whatever. I don't even remember what I was hoping for, but yeah, it became my segue into a whole different chapter.

16:34
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And you mentioned you took pictures when you were younger. Do you remember what inspired you back then to pick up the camera? And was there any sort of picture that inspired you, that made you want to pick up a camera?

16:48
Gregers Heering
The answer really is a weird no. Those were the days where a lot of people had little pocket cameras. I had a pocket camera. When my siblings had friends over, whom I did not know, I felt an urge to go and get the camera and take pictures. Weird, but that's what I did. My mom had her ballet school. I wasn't very interested in ballet, but I was very interested in taking pictures of what was going on. I can't explain to you what the urge was.

17:18
Gregers Heering
I do remember my dad had one of these LIFE photography books, which was a mix of documentary war photography. And I remember there was this insane image of a great white shark opening its jaws up against his cage. And that book became this treasured thing that I would sometimes go and sit for hours and be mesmerized by these photographs, without knowing exactly why. I still don't know why.

17:48
Gregers Heering
Yeah, and then later I got to photograph these homicide detectives. Then, through my mom's connection to The Royal Theater, she had some people over from The Royal Danish Ballet one night and the artistic director Nikolaj Hübbe was there and I showed him these homicide pictures. And he was like, oh, you should come and photograph my dancers.

18:12
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Where's the link?

18:14
Gregers Heering
I have no idea.

18:15
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Homicide detectives and ballet dancers?

18:17
Gregers Heering
Yeah, I ended up making a couple of projects with The Royal Danish Ballet and had a great show there. Yeah, it's all been strangely linked and I've never been able to conceptualize or pre-visualize something. And I have since really started to worship the beauty in how things get linked along the way.

18:39
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And since you've worked professionally both with moving images and now photography, what are the differences in those mediums in terms of the stories that they can tell?

18:52
Gregers Heering
Obviously, deep down this distilled image is exactly that. As a viewer, the image itself only gives you maybe 50% of the experience. The rest is in your imagination, what's going on, because pictures can't talk.

19:09
Gregers Heering
And although they are very often accompanied by a little text, it's really interesting just to look at photographs without really knowing what the background is and see what it tells you and how it may be telling you something different from what is occurring in my mind.

19:27
Gregers Heering
So I think one could be a little bit pretentious and say that images or photographs, although they are not always like that, can have this more literal or poetic quality to them, whereas moving images are very often focused on telling a coherent story.

19:48
Gregers Heering
I don't believe that photographs tell a story. They may tell a story in collaboration with words, but they can't really speak for themselves in terms of where they were made or why they were made. That's a big part of the difference.

20:07
Gregers Heering
Don't get me wrong, I love films, but films are often a very constructed piece of work. The script has been rewritten 500 times, and take after take, and edit after edit, and so forth. It's what also very often makes a movie good because it's so depending on all these like parts of the process.

20:27
Gregers Heering
But there's something really beautiful about a photograph that doesn't have all that pre-story to it, that is just a little fraction of a moment in time.

20:37
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Today everyone feels they're a photographer and we all post on Instagram, Facebook, What would you say is good photography?

20:48
Gregers Heering
I don't think there's any difference between photography and so many other art forms. A good photograph touches you, awakens something in you. And I think it somehow hit some kind of truth in you. I don't believe that I necessarily make better pictures than anyone else with a cell phone. Photography is just one of several conduits of expressing something or experiencing something.

21:19
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You went to Greenland to take pictures in 2009. Why did you pick Greenland? And what attracted you to this part of the world? How long were you there? And what did you find there?

21:33
Gregers Heering
I didn't envision Greenland. I give full credit to my older sister, Kristel, a freelance writer, and she had been commissioned by Foreningen for Grønlandske Børn, I guess the — how do you translate that?

21:49
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
The Association for Greenlandic Children.

21:52
Gregers Heering
The Association for Greenlandic Children — to travel to Western Greenland for, I think it was about ten days, and write about what these kids go through and what their school is like and what it is to be a kid in Greenland. And she asked me if I wanted to join, which I'm very grateful for.

22:09
Gregers Heering
And none of us had been to Greenland before, and you know as a fellow Dane that although Greenland has always been a part of the Danish realm, now less so than what it used to be, it is so vastly different from the idea of Greenland that we grew up with, at least that I grew up with.

22:33
Gregers Heering
And it's often a little bit of a sad idea we may have of life there because the suicide rates are high and people from Greenland who try to move to Denmark end up being really unhappy. So there were certain expectations of seeing more of that when we got there.

22:53
Gregers Heering
And instead it was — I'm not saying that there are no issues there, but it was such a different energy that I believe we both felt there. So many of the young people had this incredible positive outlook on life that was not expected. The landscape is beautiful. We went to Nuuk. We went to Ilulissat and we went to Disko Island. And it was in April. It was just before a lot of the snow would be gone.

23:23
Gregers Heering
I literally couldn't sleep for ten days. I was so wired. I just had to be out in that landscape and take photographs. And again, at the time, I thought that the work was going to be used to pitch myself as a commercial filmmaker. All the filmmakers want to get into commercials at that time because it can pay the bills. And I thought I could make a special look with these images.

23:50
Gregers Heering
I came back with these pictures and I had just met my now wife. And I have no idea how she stayed with me because I was just sitting behind a computer screen for weeks trying to teach myself all the tools in photography to try to enhance these, playing with colors and playing with all the things you can do with the prints.

24:16
Gregers Heering
I was completely obsessed. I never left the apartment. I ate only pizzas and I was completely obsessed. And then when I was done with them, they just ended up in a box, and were in that box for two years until Nicolai Fuglsig, who I mentioned before, mentioned that I should try to get them shown.

24:40
Gregers Heering
This very fantastic Icelandic girl Ava Daniels, who unfortunately just passed away way too young, she wanted to do this pop up gallery together with other people and I was lucky enough that these Greenland pictures got shown at Soho House, which had recently opened in Los Angeles and was a hot spot.

25:00
Gregers Heering
Vanessa Prager was there, great painter, Patrick Holt, great photographer and yeah, I sold pretty much all the prints that night and that was really what catapulted me into wanting to do more. I guess that was the night I entered the world of art photography, which was probably the least or the last route to whatever I had ever envisioned. But I was so into the whole process of making prints that it stayed with me until this day.

25:39
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You also entered a completely different world. You are the co-creator and co-designer of a book called Majestic Maersk, 32 Days Aboard The Biggest Ship In The World. You did that in collaboration with Kirsten Jacobsen, the Danish writer. The book was published by Gyldendal in 2015. Gyldendal is a publishing house in Denmark.

26:00
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What was it like to go on a Maersk ship for so long? And what did you learn about this particular world, which is completely different from homicide detectives and ballet dancers?

26:12
Gregers Heering
Kirsten, who is a very talented writer and a dear friend, had seen my Greenland pictures and said, I have this idea. She was living at the time up in Skagen, which is the very northern tip of Denmark. And a lot of these cargo ships are rounding that point, far out on the horizon.

26:34
Gregers Heering
And she had been walking there and often thought about what life is like on these huge cargo ships, especially in these modern times — if it's still, you know, the sailor has a woman in every harbor and are they still drinking a Friday beer and all that stuff. So it really was her idea and initiative. And I was very lucky that she asked me to come along.

26:54
Gregers Heering
It was a once in a lifetime experience and full of a lot of blood, sweat and tears to actually get the access and I have to be also frank from a visual standpoint to make this ship look interesting. The ship was certainly interesting because it was the biggest ship in the world at the time, at least the biggest cargo ship.

27:17
Gregers Heering
And it was a very new chapter in the Danish shipping companies' story in the sense that these were not Danish made ships. They were made in South Korea, which was quite controversial for Maersk at the time. It was just humongous. And after three months of really hard work of writing back and forth, they allowed us to get on board for I believe it was nine days or something. And so we embarked in Hong Kong.

27:45
Gregers Heering
And to make a very long story, a little shorter, the captain ended up taking a liking to us and the crew, and they saw that we were not out to look for drama, we were just interested in making an authentic portrait of what life is like and try to bring some personality to the ship itself, which wasn't so easy because it's not the prettiest thing in the world, although it's the biggest or was the biggest.

28:11
Gregers Heering
It could simply not be done in nine days. You really have to almost melt together with it. We ended up being aboard for 32 days and sailed by the Somali Coast and the Suez Canal. And I don't think it's ever been seen in the story of Maersk. I'm not sure that it would ever happen again.

28:30
Gregers Heering
So the book also became a little bit of the bad boy when it was finally done. I'm insanely proud of the work we did. And I think Kirsten wrote a spectacular text and really gives you an insight into what life is like.

28:46
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How do you manage making a living from being a professional artist like you are?

28:51
Gregers Heering
How do you make a living? It's obviously a struggle, and just like any other artists, creatives, I am lucky enough to have other gigs. Like I do — I work with musicians, I work with magazines, I do what is considered bread and butter work. And I love doing that because it also takes me out of my own bubble and it forces me to do things that I wouldn't do in my personal projects.

29:20
Gregers Heering
It can be lonely to be out there photographing on your own, which is also amazing in many ways. I should also say that I have been fortunate to have people who follow my work and buy my prints, which is the biggest part of my income when it happens, it doesn't always happen, or it can be long in between.

29:43
Gregers Heering
And then lastly, I should say any artist needs support, if they're serious about their work. And I have a wife who is incredibly supportive of what I do and she's the main breadwinner in the family. I can only be insanely thankful and yeah, I'm super thankful to her for allowing me to do this.

30:07
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
In 2022, you started Mother's Finest. You call it an art collective. What is it? What do you do?

30:17
Gregers Heering
Yeah, it's still in its young stage, but the idea is that I've seen a lot, over the years, doing shows and anything from book designing, printing, to framing photographs. There's a lot of technical decisions that go into it.

30:33
Gregers Heering
The idea with Mother's Finest is to have a collective of artists and specialists that can help anyone from artists to galleries to private collectors in taking some of that workload and the time consuming part making these decisions.

30:52
Gregers Heering
For instance, let's say you're a photographer, you haven't had a show before, what photographs do you choose? How do you make them communicate together? What is a good size? Do you do all the same size or different sizes? Do you use expensive glass or not expensive glass? What kind of mounting and so forth? There are so many elements that go into it. Do you scan your negatives or do you do analog prints?

31:18
Gregers Heering
The idea with Mother's Finest is to take some of that workload by running the process and negotiate good prices, and hopefully have a dialogue with the people who care about their old negatives or prints or pieces they want to get framed. So that's really the idea of it. And speaking of income, it's an initiative to give these people that are so good at what they are doing another income source.

31:46
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And to return to Los Angeles, what does a week in your life, your work life in Los Angeles look like?

31:55
Gregers Heering
I do have a three year old, so there are some routines when it comes to getting her to school and picking her up. As I said, I am not the main breadwinner in the family, so I spend a little extra time with my daughter, which is such a privilege, so her mother can work in the afternoons, so that is pretty settled.

32:14
Gregers Heering
But aside from that, in my work, if it's about photography, it's either the day, the energy, the lights can be suited for going out to photograph. If not, I might concentrate on printing or website. And as I said, over the years, I have many different little jobs along the way, and I really enjoy that too. So again, no week is the same.

32:38
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
When in Los Angeles, do you gravitate towards the Danish community of creatives or do you have mainly American friends in your network, in your community?

32:49
Gregers Heering
It has changed over the years just because of life and what chapter you're in. Some of my best friends, when it comes to Danes, I have met in Los Angeles. And they remain very close friends, although a lot of them don't live here any longer. It's one of these cities where people are transient.

33:11
Gregers Heering
I guess it's pretty normal that when you are younger and it's earlier in your stay in a city like Los Angeles, you tend to gravitate towards fellow Danes. I've been here for 20 years. I have an American wife. She has a whole circle of amazing friends that have been super open in including me. And so I think my circle is extremely mixed.

33:36
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Sometimes expats find that they are torn between two cultures. How do you experience it?

33:43
Gregers Heering
Yeah, I think that's a fascinating question. In my opinion, it seems like it will always linger in our heads. I think Danes, we are very tribal. We come from a small country. We are used to deep close relationships. It's just a whole different vibe to be in Los Angeles.

34:03
Gregers Heering
I need to go to Denmark once or twice a year, to see my loved ones, to see my friends. It's a time machine I step out of when I come back to Denmark. I somewhat recalibrate and can see things from a perspective and then I can go back. So I guess that's the closest I can describe it. Yeah, it's about acceptance that you will always have, at least for my own sake, a foot planted in each country.

34:32
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You mentioned that you go back at least twice a year. I assume that you sometimes spend New Year's Eve in Denmark. When you hear the Danish Queen speak at 6:00 PM on New Year's Eve, what do you feel when she talks about the Danes living abroad?

34:49
Gregers Heering
I don't recall having spent a New Year's Eve in Denmark for I don't know how long. I've never been a big New Year's Eve kind of guy. That being said, yeah, Queen Margrethe II happens to be my godmother. I'm very proud of that.

35:04
Gregers Heering
When she does her speech, yeah, for sure, it's one of these moments where I can feel a great connection to the sense of home, a sense of roots and traditions, and I think we have a queen who is quite clever in her observations and her messages and I do get touched when she speaks, for sure.

35:32
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Which Danish values do you think you've taken along with you on your road to success here in the U.S. and which ones have you left behind?

35:42
Gregers Heering
When I got here, I saw myself as pretty confident, having no problem telling people what I was good at. But since I was entering into a field that was new to me and seeing so much success around me, I lost some of that confidence for a long time. And although I felt confident that I would get there in my head, when people were asking me, how's it going? What are you up to? Are you making money? That confidence very quickly vanished from me.

36:19
Gregers Heering
And I think again, crediting my wife especially, but also great American friends along the way. There is this expression here, you gotta own it. And I really believe in that. You gotta own it with your heart, right? My heart was in it, but my brain was like, Oh, you know, how can I say I'm so good at something if I didn't feel I was good enough?

36:43
Gregers Heering
It goes back to the Danish misunderstood way of being modest. Of course you shouldn't be saying you're super good at something if you're not. But at the same time, if you want something, you should go for it and you should believe in it and you should tell yourself that you own it.

37:00
Gregers Heering
Took me a long time to shed that modesty that we can have in Denmark. I think it's become a lot better, but it's still a society that is very much based on modesty. You don't necessarily entertain people about how good you are at something, cause it's considered bad style. I do believe it's good to keep some of it, but it's just to say that it took me many years to get rid of this guilt.

37:28
Gregers Heering
I think it was Ingmar Bergman who once said that in Denmark or in Scandinavia, Northern Europe, at least, we are very guilt-driven as a society, and in America you are driven by fear. And I think he's actually completely right. I have had a very good upbringing, loving family, loving parents, but I still have felt so guilty about going my own way many times.

37:57
Gregers Heering
Whereas here the fear, and there's a lot to be fearful about in the United States, for sure, maybe more so than ever, but the fear's also catapulting you to do great things.

38:10
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Queen Margrethe II is your godmother, and like you, she's very artistic. Among other things, she's made the costumes for Billie August's new movie. Can you talk a little bit about that, how you said you're proud of her, are you proud of that part of her too, as a Dane and as her being your godmother too?

38:33
Gregers Heering
Well, the reason why my family had the link to the royal family goes back on my father's side for generations, due to this company Peter Heering that is no longer in the family, but was founded in 1818 and became a kongelig hofleverandør — how do you say that? I forgot what it's called, but my dad's side of the family has had relations to the royal family for generations.

39:03
Gregers Heering
But my mom befriended the Queen in a different way because they found out that they shared this passion for ballet. And it was the Queen's suggestion when my family moved from Copenhagen to the southern part of the country because the company was facing severe challenges and we didn't have a lot of money and we had to give up the house we lived in in Copenhagen and move to the countryside.

39:31
Gregers Heering
My mom was trying to adjust to life coming from a job as a doctor's secretary and the Queen suggested that she start her own ballet school, which she did in Næstved. And it went on for 30 years plus, and the Queen would do the costumes for every year's final show.

39:54
Gregers Heering
And I think I can say that it became sort of an institution, it was a very unique place. I think also for the Queen — she could be allowed to be a part of a team and doing these costumes and doing a lot of the production design for these final shows.

40:15
Gregers Heering
And it was not the Royal Theater. It was an amateur school, really. But it was a very unique place where parents and kids could come together with the Queen of Denmark and obviously my mom is a teacher.

40:29
Gregers Heering
So all this is to say that I believe that I got a special insight into the Queen's way of working and she was super dedicated and very disciplined and got a lot of work done. And yeah, I've been fortunate to see that side of her, and it hasn't been through seeing her playing bridge with my mom or something like that.

40:53
Gregers Heering
They've always been about being productive together and it's been about the ballet school and so yeah, I'm not surprised that she's doing costumes for Billie August's new production.

41:06
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
On a different subject, what is your favorite Danish word and why?

41:12
Gregers Heering
My favorite Danish word is flyvemaskine.

41:15
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Okay, can you spell that please for our English speaking listeners?

41:19
Gregers Heering
Flyvemaskine, it means flying machine. So when you say here airplane or aircraft, we will say flyvemaskine. And it's spelled f-l-y-v-e-m-a-s-k-i-n-e. And the reason why I think it's really a great word is due to my wife Sarah. First of all, personally, I love airplanes, but secondly, my wife downloaded some app and she wanted to learn Danish.

41:51
Gregers Heering
And they started talking about all these maskine. When you think of it, everything is a maskine in Danish. Kaffemaskine, flyvemaskine. There are so many maskine, and it's just hilarious. And we just got a kick out of it and thought it was so funny. So flyvemaskine is probably my favorite Danish word.

42:10
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Do you think in Danish or English by now?

42:14
Gregers Heering
I think it goes up and down a little bit. I mean, dare I say it's probably a little bit more in English at this point. I don't know why. I don't know if it's just a little bit more room for expressing things in English. I think it goes up and down.

42:29
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And my final question to you, where would you like to grow old?

42:34
Gregers Heering
Oh, where would I like to grow old? I think I would like to grow old not too far away from friends and family, but it's also important that the sun is shining more than not. I can't believe I'm saying that because I've always been fond of the darkness as well, being the Scandinavian I am, but I think as I get older, it's pretty nice that the sun is shining. And I also really like nature and mountains close by.

43:02
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
So we're leaning towards LA, I can tell. The sun, the mountains.

43:08
Gregers Heering
Could be LA, could be somewhere in Spain, could be, I don't know. And who knows what the world looks like at that time, you know? It's crazy out there.

43:20
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Gregers, thank you so much for being with us today.

43:24
Gregers Heering
Thank you, it's been a pleasure.

43:30
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
For today's episode, Gregers Heering chose Niel Skovgaard's Troldeskoven from 1836 from the collection of the National Gallery of Denmark.