Ruben Östlund on Breaking Arthouse Tradition with Triangle of Sadness
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Interview: Ruben Östlund on Breaking Arthouse Tradition with Triangle of Sadness

The two-time Palme d’Or-winning filmmaker discusses his sociological imagination, the setup of his next project, and more.

Swedish director Ruben Östlund won his second Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in May, this time for Triangle of Sadness, a film which culminates his unofficial trilogy dissecting modern masculinity. The stakes of these works have only gotten bigger from 2014’s Force Majeure, where a family patriarch prioritizes his own safety over his wife and children during an avalanche, and 2017’s The Square, where a museum curator deals with all sorts of career-threatening indignities. Through the lens of two models aboard a luxury yacht, Östlund’s latest charts nothing less than a collapse of contemporary capitalism in microcosm, thus clearing the deck for a new socioeconomic hierarchy based on survival skills.

The targets of Östlund’s satire have gotten bigger, yet the filmmaker’s instincts and insights have only gotten sharper. The first of the film’s three chapters protracts an argument over who should pick up a dinner bill between models Carl (Harris Dickinson) and Yaya (the late Charlbi Dean), a romantic pairing where she’s the highest-paid member yet quickly approaching the end of her earning potential in the industry. As tensions remain unresolved over payment, Östlund finds revealing, evocative details in a cutting line or momentary glance.

That withering gaze only intensifies as social niceties begin to fade away on the yacht trip given to Yaya in her capacity as an influencer. It would appear that the assembled ultra-rich guests, who range from Russian oligarchs to British arms dealers, get their just desserts at a vomit-inducing dinner in rough seas courtesy of their sadistic and communistic captain (Woody Harrelson). But the punishment doled out in Triangle of Sadness’s comedic centerpiece pales in comparison to how Filipina toilet cleaner Abigail (Dolly de Leon) inverts the power structure when survivors of a Somali pirate hijacking wash up on a desert island.

I spoke to Östlund shortly before he brought his latest film to the New York Film Festival. Our conversation started by unpacking his sociological imagination, delved into why he broke his rule of not killing characters on screen in Triangle of Sadness, and even extended into discussion of the setup and ending of his next project The Entertainment System Is Down.

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Characters in your film talk about Marx as a political theorist, but I’m eager discuss him as a sociological theorist with you. How much of the struggles of Yaya and Carl really just boiled down to alienated labor?

[laughs] That’s definitely one of the takes that I had on the film. If we have this liberal, unregulated capitalism, we’re all going to look at each other as products. And definitely also the Marxist theories that our behavior is going to change depending on which position we have in a financial and social hierarchy. I think it’s interesting because if you talk about sociology, it’s not controversial at all. But when you talk about Marx, he’s controversial. Sociology is looking at the world from a materialistic point of view. I would say there’s basically no billionaire entrepreneur that doesn’t have a great knowledge about how the materialistic setup is changing our behavior because otherwise they would not be successful. For me, Marx, sociology, and these ways of looking at the world are very closely connected, of course, to his political viewpoint.

As far as the many comic set-ups in the film, I think there was none that tickled me quite as much as the American Marxist and the Russian capitalist trading quotes from their heroes…but, of course, having to look them up on their phones. What was the genesis of that?

I think it was a little bit because I’m brought up in a left-wing family. My parents got left-wing during the ’68 movement when the whole Western world became left-wing, but my mother is still one of the few that considers herself a communist. When you ask her about her political standpoint, she’s like, “I’m a communist!” She’s not going to give that up. My brother became a right-wing liberal, and my father would not consider himself a communist. We constantly had political discussions, which was really fun and very loud. That was one aspect of it.

But another one was, because I was brought up during the ’80s, the world was described through a Western and Eastern perspective. You had like the Marxist socialism ideas on the Eastern side, and then you had the liberal capitalism on the Western side. These were the two ways of looking at the world, and they were bashing their heads against each other. It was almost like the left wings of Europe forgot about how Marx thought capitalism is great to a certain point, so we can build up a society and so on. The left and right wing became like football teams rather than [asking] how do we build a great society. It was also fun, of course, to go into these old quotes. Reagan was much more fun than the boring socialists, and that’s what got me.

In The Square, you explore acting through the lens of monkeys and our primal instincts. Do you view the way that you analyze modeling in Triangle of Sadness as an extension of that, or is it actually the inverse because it’s so automated?

One aspect of the fashion brands and how they sell their products is very connected to the monkey performance. I heard about a study [with] a scientist looking at zebras on the savanna. And he was asking himself, “Why are they black and white when they are in the in the sandy yellow savanna?” And he tried to spot one individual in the herd and follow it, but it turns out it’s really hard because it disappears in the herd. Then what he did was spray a red dot on the fur on one zebra, and then it was immediately possible to spot it. But the consequence was also that lions took that zebra immediately! They could spot it, but they could also tire it out and catch it. You notice this in the monkey performance, which basically says that if you stand still, you can hide into herd safe in the knowledge that someone else will be the prey.

The thing with the zebra study was that the scientist was comparing it with how we consume fashion. Because humans are doing exactly the same thing. We’re trying to get a camouflage so we can fit into the herd and not be exposed. So it’s very efficient for the fashion industry to change fashion every fall and every spring because then we have to consume new camouflage all the time. So, to look at the human behavior from a little bit of distance, it’s still there for me.

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You aren’t afraid to work through your future movies in public. In Q&As for The Square, you even gave away the ending of Triangle of Sadness. What’s behind your lack of preciousness around your future projects? Do you want people to be a little bit distanced from the plot so they can engage with the issues?

Maybe. My strongest experience of moving images has been on YouTube. There have been so many clips where it actually says in the headline: “Buffalos and Lions on the Savanna Battle at Kruger.” I often know what is going to happen by looking at the headline or the name of the clip. For me, I get more curious if someone says, “You have to see the vomit scene in my next movie.” I will tell you, “I’m going to surprise you. I’m going to do the worst vomit scene in film history. Then I feel like, “Okay, I want to watch this! Does he succeed or not?”

For example, the dilemma in the end when [Abigail] is standing there with a stone: Should she drop it to the ground or should she kill her? I am curious to see: How will we get there? Will I believe in how we get there? I’m not so interested in filmmaking about what will happen. It’s rather what will it look like. And, for me, it’s also a way of practicing doing the film. When I’m pitching the film, and telling you how to feel, I get to know also about how to direct it.

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You are also fond of test screenings. Do you need to understand the audience and how they’re going to react to something in order to provoke them so ruthlessly?

That is also the difference between, like, looking at it as a screen like this [picks up phone and starts scrolling] when you sit alone and watch something because it has a very specific rhythm. For me, this is a very individualistic way of looking at images. But when you’re in a cinema and you look at images together, you also react in a different way because your reaction is also going to be evaluated by someone that sits next to you. The dynamics of a group of people watching something actually can give something to the content of the film. There’s a dialectic where these two are helping each other to create a great performance. If you don’t consider the audience when you’re making cinema, you’re forgetting what cinema is.

The only unique thing with cinema is that we’re watching things together. It’s basically the only unique thing. We have great big screens at home, the quality is fantastic at home, blah blah blah. That isn’t the unique part of cinema. The unique part is that we’re watching things together, and therefore also the films have to be fine-tuned with the respect to the setup of the venue.

Have you been following the rise of TikTok and watching those videos at all?

I’ve been looking a little bit now because I’m dealing with it in The Entertainment System Is Down, my new movie. I’m curious to see what happens when we don’t have this dopamine scrolling thing on a flight and, all of a sudden, there’s no entertainment anymore. I think it’s very interesting when you’re scrolling and what comes up in your feed. There’s something with that artificial intelligence selection that’s always playing on our core needs, like sexuality, food, housing. You can look at it from a sociological point of view, and you will understand it.

In the past, you’ve spoken about being proud of never killing a character on screen. Do you consider that Triangle of Sadness keeps that streak because we don’t really see the people dying up close, just from a distance?

No, but I’m happy that you picked up on that because I have been proud of that. I also had a statement that I have never experienced someone getting killed in this absurd way that people are getting killed in movies. But I’m moving to a wilder place where I am making cinema, and all of a sudden, I had the possibility to kill these two arms dealers with their own hand grenade. I can’t help myself, I had to do it! Too fun! So, you’re right, I’ve broken that contract now. In my next movie, everybody will die, actually. The airplane will crash, and everybody will die. You will get to know it already from the beginning, flight number da-da-da, and then we see these passengers dealing with the triviality of like, “I have no entertainment on my screen!”

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Are you going against your contract just because of the nature of the stories that you’re telling, or do you think there’s something that’s changed in you as a person?

It’s something that I’ve changed in my approach to making cinema. I think there was a point where I felt I almost became like an arthouse director, and I didn’t like that. I almost became a director posing that I’m dealing with an important topic. I had an experience where a friend was flying from Venice to the Toronto Film Festival, and he was looking at what the film industry is [watching] on their screens when they were flying. He realized we were not looking at the films that we’re making ourselves. They were looking at Adam Sandler—and he’s great, there’s nothing bad about that! But I felt there’s a way that arthouse and prestige cinema have become posing. If you look at the ’70s and European cinema like Luis Buñuel and Lina Wertmuller, they were wild and entertaining even if they were dealing with an important or intellectual topic. I want to break the arthouse tradition. I want to combine the best of American cinema with the European cinema in order to say, “Okay, come on, let’s go back to the cinema and enjoy it.”

Marshall Shaffer

Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based film journalist. His interviews, reviews, and other commentary on film also appear regularly in Slashfilm, Decider, and Little White Lies.

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