The Drama director Kristoffer Borgli is facing backlash after a resurfaced essay revealed he had a romantic relationship with a teenage girl while he was an adult.
In 2012, Norwegian filmmaker , the Dream Scenario director wrote an essay in D2 reflecting on May-December romances.
The piece resurfaced on Reddit on March 25 and was translated by The Hollywood Reporter the following day.
At age 27, Borgli noted in the essay that Wikipedia counted "266 films that deal with so-called May-December romances."
"The reason I know this is because I met a girl ten years younger than me whom I liked very much – a girl who wasn’t old enough to vote – and I had to find something that could recalibrate my moral compass," he wrote at that time, per the translation.
He continued, "The few friends I confided in about my situation responded that it was not 'within bounds.' "
As the outlet noted that Norway’s age of consent is 16.
Still, the outlet emphasized that, despite being legal, relationships between adults and teenagers “remain socially controversial” in the Northern European country.
In his 2012 essay, Borgli discussed a relationship with a high school girl and cited Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979) as shaping his views on age-gap relationships.
Borgli wrote that he was impressed by the girl’s advanced cultural interests and recalled sneaking out of her parents’ apartment after they returned early from vacation, sometimes meeting at bars that didn’t check IDs.
His essay resurfaced a week before The Drama premieres on April 3.
The film stars Zendaya, 29, and Pattinson, 39, as an engaged couple facing a shocking secret days before their wedding.
