Alfredson adds that it was the way Lindqvist wrote about Oskar's tormentors that drew him in the most. "It's very hard and very down-to-earth, unsentimental," he says. "I had some period when I grew up when I had hard times in school. . . . So it really shook me.
"Also, when bullied children are portrayed, it is always so sentimental. I don't think it's so sentimental for children being bullied. On the contrary, they store up a lot of very violent feelings. I think that this vampire is all the violent feelings he gets from his tormentors. . . . Maybe Eli is just a fantasy."
Because of this, casting the film wasn't easy. It took Alfredson nearly a year to find Kare Hedebrant to play the troubled young boy and Lina Leandersson to portray Eli.
"I think that Oskar and Eli are two sides of the same coin," Alfredson says. "So they should really be the same character, but mirrors to each other.
"It was very complicated. I wasn't just [trying] to find one boy and one girl; I had to find the perfect match to the same character. It is also very important they have good families and are stable persons. It is a big responsibility to carry a whole film on your 12-year-old shoulders."
The filmmaker quickly discovered his two young stars were old souls. "Both of them are really intelligent, and you see behind Lina's eyes an 80-year-old woman, very wise and very quiet."
Alfredson says the children were never allowed to read the script, so they had no idea how the story would unfold.
"I read the lines to them and they learned by hearing, not by reading," says Alfredson, who has directed children numerous times. "I think if they had read the script, it would have been too complicated for them."
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susan.king@latimes.com
