Interview Ruben Östlund (‘Play’)

Rotterdam, De Doelen, January 31, 2012

Director Ruben Östlund looks relaxed amid the hectic pace of the IFFR. His attitude is one that is equivalent to his third film ‘Play’, which visits Rotterdam after many festivals. He talks about his profession with enthusiasm: ‘it are the imperfections during filming that attract me so much’.

Östlund can be called a resting point in an otherwise busy building. Even though his day is filled with interviews and attempts to sell the successor to ‘Play’ to distributors, the Swede’s facial expression expresses nothing but passion for the intense drama full of stylistic camera work, in which we see children stealing each other almost nonviolently in long, well-composed shots full of impressive camerawork. ‘I want to have limitations in filming,’ says the director, who found an appropriate form for each of the sometimes minute-long shots. ‘I want the passive audience to think, to squeeze so that you imagine yourself between the characters in the film, after which the questions will follow. How did I react? What would I have said? I find that interesting.’

For ‘Play’, Östlund looked at numerous documents from court cases, although he maintains that this mainly served as inspiration, and not as a direct cause. ‘I have read almost forty cases and had interviews with the perpetrators and the victims. Some scenes from the film are the result of this, but the final screenplay was only written after the practice sessions with the actors. That’s important because you work with children. Casting had already taken nine months; it’s also been the toughest movie prep of my life. But by already asking forty takes from the boys on the first day of the sixty film days, they understood what they had to bring. They came to see it as a challenge, were ecstatic when a scene turned out well, which created a very positive atmosphere.’

The film was so successful that after its release in Sweden a considerable debate started. ‘The film was mentioned almost daily in the newspapers for two weeks. They called me a racist because in the movie white boys are robbed by black boys.’ Östlund emphasizes how nonsense he thinks that is. A racist is someone who puts one race above another. But the movie never judges! I responded with an article in the newspaper myself, but that only made them angrier. I said the reason people were concerned was that there is a mismatch in our society. Black people are poorer than whites, and as long as this imbalance exists, the subject will be controversial. It is controversial because it reminds us that we are all part of this inequality. So people get mad at the film.’

Nevertheless, the film is very successful, and Östlund was invited to the film festivals of Cannes, Venice, Toronto, New York and Tokyo. Not bad for a Swede who used to make documentaries and has his roots in ski films. For the successor to ‘Play’, the director will partly go back to his early days as a filmmaker. ‘It will be called ‘The Tourist’,’ says Östlund, ‘and it will take place in a ski resort. A family is on a winter sports holiday, eating something in a mountain restaurant. Then they – and everyone in the restaurant – see an avalanche start at the top of the mountain. It gets bigger and bigger, until it disappears behind a hill – and everyone is ecstatic – but the avalanche goes on and on – giving way to panic in the cheers – and just before it bursts into the restaurant and the screen goes black, we see the father of the family get up and leave the table with his family. Then everything turns black, but this turns out to have been just the snow cloud before the avalanche, and twenty seconds later it is a beautiful day again; the restaurant was not hit. But the father got up and left his family, and must now rejoin them.’

It seems that the Swede still likes to provoke, and that his fourth film – ‘including the most spectacular avalanche scene in cinema history,’ according to Östlund – will probably be just as interesting as his third.