A kidnapping to remember

Based on Emmy Award-winning crime journalist Peter R. de Vries's account of what has been called "the most notorious kidnapping of the 21st Century, Kidnapping Freddy Heineken explores the abduction of Dutch billionaire brewery magnate Freddy Heineken (Anthony Hopkins) and his chauffeur, Ab Doderer, who were kidnapped in 1983 and held for a ransom of 35 million Dutch guilders (the equivalent of about $50 million USD today) for an individual at the time, and captivated the nation and became front-page news.The film does not focus on the manhunt or the police solving the crime, but on the lives of a group of friends who want to get rich quick, and take on a task they are not capable of.

If there's one reason to see the film, it's for an excellent cast. When Anthony Hopkins accepted the role of Heineken it had huge appeal to the younger actors, with Jim Sturgessdelivering a strong performance as Cor Van Hout, the ringleader of the kidnappers and the focus of De Vries's book; he was an incredibly intelligent man, and could have literally run a Fortune 500 company, but because of circumstances, his education and background, he ended up pursuing crime.

Ryan Kwanten, best known for his work on True Blood, is totally unregognisable as family man Jan "Cat" Boelaard, and garners empathy as the man who had the most to lose. Equally memorable is Sam Worthington (Clash of the Titans) as the stroppy and hot-headed Willem Holledeer, with great support from Mark van Eeuwen (who won the 2012 celebrity dance contest Strictly Come Dancing) Frans "Spikes" Meijer, and newcomer Thomas Cocquerel as the youthful Martin "Brakes" Erkamps.

Kidnapping Freddy Heineken is not an action packed adventure, but a strong human drama that focuses on the impact the crime had on the lives of ordinary men. If you are looking for a gentle and emotive film to escape into, you won't be disappointed.

Behind the scenes

Peter R. de Vries pursued the kidnappers and gained their trust, which resulted in an exhaustively researched, bestselling account of five friends and business associates who banded together to carry out one of the biggest kidnappings in history.

The producers turned to UK-based screenwriter William Brookfield to adapt de Vries's book. Brookfield's biggest challenge was to maintain the integrity of the narrative as he pared down the eight-hundred page translation into a one-hundred-and-ten-page screenplay. Fortunately for Brookfield, de Vries's richly detailed account of the kidnapping had all the elements of a great crime thriller.

"The material really appealed to me, because it is very hard to find a true-life story that fits into the demanding parameters of dramatic thriller. This one did. It had tragedy. It had the human heart conflicting with itself. It had the overreaching," Brookfield explains.
Brookfield met with Simpson in Amsterdam to discuss the book's dramatic possibilities. Perhaps most compelling to Brookfield and the producers was the fact that kidnappers were not hardened criminals and were not part of any organized crime group.

Says Brookfield: "They had a legitimate construction business, but they weren't smart and they didn't put reserves aside, and there was a recession. They decided, 'Let's do a crime, but let's do a really big crime. They weren't serious mafia gangsters, and they weren't upstanding citizens, either. They were in the gray area in between. They were young."

The presence of a conscience allowed for Brookfield to entertain the idea of writing the screenplay around the experiences of the kidnappers. "They never wanted to hurt anybody. That's the interesting part about it. They were more like kids. They weren't what they were pretending to be, and the police smelled it."
"We always found it ironic and sad that these guys were such good friends, and by the end of this adventure or misadventure, the five of them were never in a room together after they split up the ransom. It destroyed everything between them," says Simpson

Filmed in Brussels, Antwerp, Amsterdam and New Orleans in the fall of 2013, the challenges in recreating a more economically unstable Amsterdam highlighted an element of the story that appealed to Simpson: "There were similarities and parallels to the economy at that time and the world economy today. They had just gone through what was the most severe recession, both in Europe and the United States, that there had been since the Great Depression. They were coming out of this gritty economic time. There was a lot of stagnation in the economy. People were having a hard time getting jobs. Jobs weren't paying well. People couldn't get bank loans. This sounds like a story that happened yesterday. The parallels were just striking."