Babes and booze - Swedish Film Institute

20
PlaY
Ruben Östlund
DIRECTOR
PRODUCTION INFO P. 59
GoinG
For Gold
His feature film debut The Guitar Mongoloid and highly-acclaimed follow up Involuntary
prompted the critics to label him the new hope for the future of Swedish film. Ruben Östlund is
planning to live up to expectations on his latest film Play in one last spurt for the finishing line.
Ruben Östlund’s career is like that of a
talented sportsman. His first feature
The Guitar Mongoloid (Gitarrmongot,
2004) became a cult film that promised more.
The follow up Involuntary (De ofrivilliga, 2008)
marked his international breakthrough: it
had its world premiere in the official programme
at the Cannes festival and became
Sweden’s contribution to the Oscars. And his
subsequent short Incident by a Bank (Händelse
vid bank, 2010), winner of a Golden Bear
award in Berlin, only served to whet the public
appetite for his next, longer film.
wiTh The pending release of Play, expectations
are sky high: people take for granted
that Östlund will have developed further and
that the upcoming film will be one more step
in his rise from promising newcomer to fullyfledged
director on the international stage.
Demands like this can seem somewhat odd.
A sportsman can train harder and more efficiently
to produce results that are readily
measurable. But a film director..?
Well, Ruben Östlund himself seems more
stimulated than troubled by the world’s expectations.
And he thinks that parallels with
the world of sport are highly relevant.
“We’ve used sport references ourselves in
CannES
the run up to Play. Making a film is a lengthy,
tiring business, and now that we’ve reached
the editing stage we’ve told each other to hang
on in there. It’s like being a long distance runner:
it all comes down to the final spurt; it’s
now that we have to be better than the others.
I like playing the part of the promising director.”
Östlund welcomes Swedish Film to Plattform
Produktion’s modest offices in Gothenburg.
The editing room where he’s putting the
finishing touches to his film was once a sauna,
the thermostat still hanging on the wall.
“When financial backers come visiting,
we turn up the heat and make them sweat.
That usually does the trick,” he jokes.
Ruben Östlund himself certainly isn’t
afraid of sweat. His attitude is that provided
he works hard enough, a film will turn out
“You have to be
prepared to work
really hard, harder
than everyone else
who makes films”
TExT ULF ROOSVALD PHOTO HENRIK ANDERSSON
well. A similar mind-set seems to permeate
the tiny company that is Plattform Produktion,
which in just a few short years has become
one of Sweden’s most interesting providers
of documentaries – and features.
“It all comes down to how high you set the
bar for your own performance. At Plattform
we’ve said that our films have to be up there
competing with the best in the field. If you’re
going for gold, you have to be prepared to
work really hard, harder than everyone else
who makes films.”
With Play Ruben Östlund continues to explore
human behaviour, group pressures and
the roles we play – or are handed – in different
situations.
The film waS first spawned by an article
that his colleague and producer Erik Hemmendorff
had read in a local newspaper. A
group of black boys in their early teens had
systematically been robbing other kids – ethnic
Swedes as it happened – of mobile phones
and other valuables in the centre of Gothenburg.
The article revealed how the boys had
lured their victims into a trap based on an
elaborate social interplay between the perpetrators
and their victims. Östlund’s curiosity
was immediately aroused: he read the