Initiating the discussion, the moderator and TIFF’s head of programming Yorgos Krassakopoulos welcomed Ruben Östlund looking back on his origins and the family he grew up with. Born in Styrsö, a small, flat and almost snowless island outside Gothenburg, it sounds almost absurd that he started his career making short films about skiing. In fact, thanks to his mother coming from Northern Sweden, his family used to spend a large part of their Christmas vacations in snowy landscapes. “Growing up in an island, you can definitely see the constraints”, the director said about his hometown, explaining that these very constraints became his source of inspiration, helping him in their way to shape the aesthetic identity or the wider form of his works, mainly the first ones.
Östlund’s parents were the ones that implicitly helped him start to observe the human behavior, an instinct which is obvious in his films. “My father was a teacher and my mother was particularly interested in sociology”, he explained, describing them as politically conscious and having many interests. The influential relationship with his family was depicted in his student film project Family Again (2002), where he brings his parents together 23 years after their divorce, to depict each one’s version about their relationship and most importantly their divorce. “Both of them were singles at the time, so it was a little weird, as you can imagine. You were wondering whether they could end up back together. The camera became a third person that was just observing us and the film had a romantic comedy structure and dramatization”, he noted.
On his first attempt in fiction cinema, the film The Guitar Mongoloid (2004), the director stressed that was made with a lot of anger and energy, to show who he really was and “win a place in the Swedish film industry». He considers himself very lucky, since the advent of the small, digital and relatively cheap camera in the years that he was a student at the film school enabled him to shoot films with no grandiose production standards. Driven by the big creative influence of “Dogme 95” and together with a small group of people (the producer of the films The Square and Force Majeure Erik Hemmendorff was already one of them) he managed to infiltrate energy into his first fiction film. “What matters most to me is the auteur’s attitude, his behavior towards motion pictures. A certain critic who watched The Guitar Mongoloid said that it is not a movie, but rather a motion picture film. But after all, if you talk about motion pictures and not movies, changing completely the conditions, you find yourself more free to meditate on the essence of cinema”, he noted.
Trying to prove his point on the essence of motion picture, Östlund presented a video from YouTube, where a taxi driver is mistakenly invited to a TV show as an Internet specialist, and finally decides to play the role he was assigned. “We play roles as human beings. The expectations we burden ourselves with every day can hold down the real us. Watching these small videos with my partners and capturing these small motion pictures, we finally understand how it is to be human”, Östlund stressed.
Speaking about his relation with his films’ characters and actors, the director noted he finds it very interesting from a sociological perspective to see his characters fail. “In many cases you know what is right. But I like taking part in situations, even if I know I am wrong. I like to challenge myself, my morality”. For himself and his films, moral dilemmas are perhaps the most interesting situations. As for the actors, he thinks great pressure is futile. “The most important is to treat them with tenderness. Identifying with them means taking care of them, caring about them”, he said.
Speaking about the idea that bore his new film The Square, the director described an artistic project that he curated in Varnamo, Sweden. This project is a creative installation on the paranoia of human relations. It is the creation of a symbolic space (actually, a square in some place at the city centre), inside of which you must retain your humanity intact. “Such installations are now spread everywhere, e.g. in Norway, but each has its own particular use”, he added. According to him, his last film, which unfolds in a highly artistic environment, encourages the viewer to reflect upon cynicism in everyday life. “The film’s purpose is to give food for thought. To encourage you to agree, or even disagree with what you see. And thus change your attitude”, he noted.
Asked about the released video that shows him getting furious because his previous film Force Majeure was not nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Östlund said he was happy for having been able to turn his failure and frustration into success via this humorous and awkward video. And added that he has made a similar video with his success in Cannes, which he has not released yet.
As to his future projects, Östlund talked about his next film Triangle of Sadness, joking about its “geometrical” title. “Perhaps I’ll make the octagon of confusion later”, he said laughing. Anyway, the film will be about the fashion industry, focusing on the life of a famous model at the peak of fame and beauty, who starts to see the signs of time that goes by.
Concluding, Östlund noted that particularly the American actors he worked with for the first time in his last film The Square, had to adapt in a less televisual condition, and also stressed that we cannot do otherwise than imitate behaviors. “The point is to be aware of it. Create behaviors and learn from them. Maybe even the most romantic moments of our lives come from unwitting imitations of romantic comedies on cinema”, he said.
