Riding the wave of his largest international success yet, Oscar-nominee Ruben Östlund has emerged this awards season as one of the most exciting contenders of the year. With Triangle of Sadness, Östlund has cemented his place among contemporary cinema’s most daring auteurs, clinched the Palme d’Or and Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay.
In the wake of this extraordinary success, we sat down with Östlund to discuss not only his latest acclaimed hit Triangle of Sadness, but the journey that led him from Gothenburg to the Oscar ceremony. Our conversation spans his early days filming action sports, the creative evolution that shaped his unique narrative style, and the personal and professional influences that continue to drive his work. Additionally, we delve into the making of Triangle of Sadness, the challenges of directing in a new language, and exciting tidbits about his upcoming project, The Entertainment System Is Down.
Thank you for coming on board, Ruben. Congratulations on your Oscar nominations, we’re so excited to see you getting the acclaim you deserve. What was it that initially inspired you to become a filmmaker?
Ruben Östlund: Thank you. Well, I was brought up on a small island outside Gothenburg (the second largest city in Sweden) on the west coast of Sweden. We had an opportunity to borrow a VHS camera from the commune, so it was something that the commune offered young people to borrow in order to have something to do in their spare time. I started to film climbing, mountain biking and skiing, which were my big interests. I was fanatically interested in free skiing when I was younger. So basically, I started out making action sport movies, and that became my profession. When I was around 20, I was traveling to the Alps, North America, Alaska and Canada, filming skiing in the winters, and then editing 30 minute long ski films with music. Then, we sold these movies on VHS copies to other skiers, to [international] ski magazines like Powder Magazine, and Swedish ski magazines. So it was because I was interested in skiing and that I loved the camera, I loved the opportunity to be able to capture a moment. After doing that for a couple of years, I applied for film school in Gothenburg, where we were studying fiction, direction and documentary filmmaking at the same time.
So what was your journey like, going from entering film school to your first narrative feature Gitarrmongot? How did you go about planning and getting the proper resources to make films independently, and what did that key transition look like in your life?
Ruben Östlund: In film school, I was only doing documentaries. I did shorter fiction films, but the longer films that I did were documentaries. After film school, I didn’t feel that I had any subjects to do a documentary about because the two documentary films I did in school were about my friends, and my parents. So I did documentaries that were dealing with very intimate subjects, with the possibility to film [them] because the technique was lighter. You had a small VX 1000 camcorder that was released when I was in film school, and all of a sudden there was a trend of filming things that were personal because you could create the camera team by yourself. After film school, I didn’t feel that I had another topic or theme that I wanted to explore through documentary filmmaking, so I started to make my first fiction film with the same kind of technique. The film was inspired a little bit by Harmony Korine’s Gummo, with a fragmented, not-so-strict narrative where it was the location, and a palette of different characters that you met in that location. I started to film a couple of scenes, and then went to the Swedish Film Institute, with Kalle Boman, one of the teachers from my film school, who had been a producer since the 60s, and he helped me get the right contact for one of the film commissioners. I got funding from the Swedish Film Institute—not much money at all, but enough for me to continue to film this feature. It was basically myself, sometimes I had a friend helping me with sound, but the film was a very, very small team, and I was shooting it for two years, then got distribution to cinemas, from a Swedish distributor called Triangelfilm. So I’d say that it helped me a lot that it was a cheap, cheap first production.
Moving on to the most recent period of your career, you have Force Majeure, Palme D’Or winner The Square, and now Best Picture, Director, and Original Screenplay nominee Triangle of Sadness, all receiving international acclaim for their bold narratives and your unique vision behind the camera. At this point in your career, what goes behind your creative process from initial inspiration and formulation of an idea to the final draft?
Ruben Östlund: It often starts with having a discussion with my friends, my wife, or someone that is close to me. We talk about something that we have experienced ourselves or an idea that just comes up. For example, now I’m working on a film called The Entertainment System Is Down. It’s a feature film that takes place on a long haul flight. The setup of the idea is very simple, which in this case was the starting point of the whole project. So I had this setup that is a long haul flight, and quite soon after takeoff, the passengers get the horrible news that the entertainment system is not working. You can think of a flight that is maybe 17, or 20 hours long, so when the iPads and iPhones are charging, we have modern human beings that have to deal with boredom, and not having this distraction of the individual screens that we constantly have in our contemporary times. So what I do when I have a setup that is around the flight and the fact that they don’t have any entertainment, then I look into human behavior and try to figure out what are the interesting aspects of this setup. I’m doing interviews with individuals working on airlines, I’m doing research in order to find out the right situations that can play out in the film, and I also look in my own life. What kind of things have I experienced myself that can be connected to the themes of the film? So it’s a long period where I’m collecting ideas, and it’s also a long period when I’m pitching the film. What I do is that I talk about the film to basically everyone that I meet, and when I’m pitching the film, I also learn how to direct the film, and learn how to write the film. When I can pitch the film from beginning to end, and I know more or less what is going to happen, then I sit down and write it.
That sounds fascinating. Are there any details or specific points of reference you’re drawing from in this initial stage of creating The Entertainment System Is Down?
Ruben Östlund: As The Entertainment System Is Down is a study on modern human beings, when I started to work on this project, I was inspired by two sociological studies. One of them is Timothy Wilson’s 2014 experiment, where they asked people to be in a room alone and do nothing. This experiment was between six and 15 minutes long, and the test subjects knew this. They’re walking into this room, and they’re going to spend between six and 15 minutes there. Afterwards, when they interviewed the test subjects, they said it was horrible, they thought it was torture. So the scientists added a feature where if they wanted to, the test subjects could push a button and give themselves an electrical shock. This was an option completely controlled by their free will, but over 40% of the test subjects that went into that room actually pushed this button and gave themselves an electrical shock in order to break that period of being alone with their thoughts. So, I’m investigating how come and why we have such a hard time with being present, and how painful we feel that is.
Triangle of Sadness seems to be your most ambitious work yet, in terms of scope, ensemble and technical setpieces. When directing the film, what parts did you find to be the most challenging or different to tackle compared to your previous directorial endeavors?
Ruben Östlund: I would say it’s a three part structure that was completely new for me to work in that way. The film starts in the fashion world, it goes to a luxury yacht, and it ends on a deserted island. The film starts a little bit over with every new chapter. And when the island started, it was tricky to create a dynamic experience for the audience. You have built up so much and invested so much in the two models in the world of the luxury yacht, and in the first part in the fashion world. Yet, you take away all the settings from before, and you take away the hierarchies from before and you start it all over on a deserted island, so that balance was something that I had to deal quite much with, both when it came to the script, and also when it came to the editing.
Did you have a specific sequence that you’d say was the toughest to execute?
Ruben Östlund: Yeah, the toughest one to direct was the storm and the vomiting sequence, because I’m a director that really wants to be in control. When I’m shooting, I’m not very used to not being able to adjust every little detail. When we were shooting the storm, and the captain’s dinner, we were in a studio and we’re shooting on a gimbal that we could rock up to 20 degrees, and it made it kind of chaotic to shoot. I mean, even part of the film crew got seasick when we were shooting it, they frequently had to eat seasick pills. We were spending 13 days on that rocking gimbal, and most of the scenes in that storm were shorter scenes, where you have someone vomiting or someone doing shorter scenarios, and I’m not so good at shooting shorter scenarios. I am very used to trying to push and maximize every single scene that I’m shooting. It was also hard to get an overview of how everything develops in the storm, how people are getting more and more seasick, and that was something that was created in the editing room afterwards. It took almost six months to edit that sequence until I was satisfied with it.
With Triangle of Sadness being your English language debut, were there any notable differences you found between directing in English versus your native tongue?
Ruben Östlund: The jokes are and the situations are maybe even more simple in its setup. If I’m directing in Swedish, then I know every little nuance that I can use in the Swedish language. When it came to English, I tried it out a little bit in The Square when I was working with Elizabeth Moss and Dominic West, so I felt okay. The kind of scenes that I’m dealing with, I am able to direct and to write them in English. Also, eight years ago I got together with my wife Sina, and she comes from Germany, so I started to speak English much more in my everyday life. I’m getting better at English and it’s getting more and more easy for me to direct in English, but I would still say that there are notable differences for me in Swedish and in English.
Coming off of the international success of Triangle of Sadness, what advice would you give to filmmakers hoping to break into the industry and make their mark?
Ruben Östlund: First, try to find a group of friends that you like to work with, and try to consider that group of friends as the center of the world. You’re not going to create anything better than what you create among that group of friends. Don’t feel that your possibility for a career in the film industry is somewhere else than exactly where this group of friends is. If you start to work together, and you start to push each other, and start to have fun when you’re making movies, I promise you that will lead to you working in this industry. As long as you find a stimulating group of people where you have fun when you’re working, that is going to lead [to success]. I’m teaching at the film school in Gothenburg, and what I always tell the students is that when you’re working on a project, pitch the project, talk about the project, and tell everyone you meet what the project you’re working on is about, because when you’re pitching, you’re learning how to tell the story, how to direct to film. As I said, my method for when I’m starting a new project is that I’m pitching it over and over again, and when I know how to pitch it from the beginning to the end, that’s the moment when I sit and write it down. So don’t be afraid to open up, be transparent, and try to tell people about what you’re doing. It will feel hard in the beginning, because in the beginning, you will, of course, doubt if this is the right project. You’re afraid of losing everything when you’re telling someone about what you’re working on, because if they don’t react in the right way, maybe it will decrease your motivation. But, have patience to pitch the product so other people get interested. For me, that kind of communication is basically the same kind of communication when it comes to movies. You have to get the audience interested in what you are telling them, and there are similarities between telling something verbally and doing it visually.
Triangle of Sadness is now playing in theaters!
Release Date: October 7, 2022
Directed by Ruben Östlund
Screenplay by Ruben Östlund
Produced by Erik Hemmendorff & Philippe Bober
Main Cast: Harris Dickinson (Carl), Charlbi Dean (Yaya), Dolly de Leon (Abigail), Woody Harrelson (Captain Thomas Smith), Zlatko Burić (Dimitry), Vicki Berlin (Paula), Henrik Dorsin (Jarmo), Sunnyi Melles (Vera), Iris Berben (Therese), Jean-Christophe Folly (Nelson), Amanda Walker (Clementine), Oliver Ford Davies (Winston)
Cinematographer: Fredrik Wenzel
Composer: Mikkel Maltha
Production Companies: Plattform Produktion, Coproduction Office, SVT, BBC Film, Arte France Cinéma
Distributor: Neon
Runtime: 147 minutes
Rated R.
