The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, an eerie thriller that opens here Friday (April 16), is the most successful film ever made in Sweden. Its director, Niels Arden Oplev, is from Denmark, but he had worked throughout Scandinavia and relished the thought of taking on something so particular to a country not his own.

“I’ve worked with several Swedish writers,” Oplev says, speaking in perfect English from tiny Cranbury, New Jersey, where he resides with his American wife. “And I made a TV series that was partially shot in Sweden. I firmly believe that if you do something high-quality and very local, it will eventually become global. We’ve all seen bad Euro pudding,” he adds. “Or even Scandi pudding!”

Best known for We Shall Overcome, about a Danish boy inspired by Martin Luther King Jr., the peripatetic director has specialized in films that (if not always aimed at them) evidence a lot of sympathy for young people. Girl focuses on a postadolescent Stockholm hacker (angular Noomi Rapace) who hooks up with a rumpled reporter (Michael Nyqvist) hired to figure out who made away with a rich man’s favourite niece 44 years earlier.

In Sweden, the new film’s title, and that of the book by Stieg Larsson, is Men Who Hate Women. This shifts the focus away from the tattooed heroine—who kicks butt in two sequels already seen abroad—but does help explain important plot connections, especially concerning domestic abuse, religious fanaticism, and an undercurrent of fascist sympathies in this famously civilized country. Oplev knows an alarming amount about proto- and neo-Nazi views in Sweden and throughout Scandinavia.

“I’m an infomaniac,” declares the voluble filmmaker, who just turned 49. “My thesis is that ties to Nazi Germany allowed Sweden to stay neutral in the war. My father, for instance, never forgave the Swedes for allowing Hitler’s Wehrmacht to use the Swedish railway system to transport troops and material to occupied Norway. Of course, there were Danish and Norwegian Nazis too, but that’s another story. Those countries were actually occupied.”

Oplev wasn’t able to fit in more than oblique references to this history, even in the three-hour Swedish version of the film. And he took a pass on directing the sequels.

“They haven’t done quite as well, but they are in the slip wind of the first, which did outrageously well, selling eight million tickets in Europe and the U.K. This was the first Scandinavian film to gross $100 million in box office.

“From the start, everything had to be shot in about 11 months. I saw that it would not be possible for one director to shoot all that and also have an intense role in overseeing postproduction. The first one would have premiered exactly as I was standing on the set of the third. So, with the two-and-a-half-hour version you saw, that was already enough work to keep me in the editing room for four months. The good things are that since I had total artistic control, I honestly feel that I got all the power out of that book.”