Time is of the essence in Hlynur Pálmason’s films. For his extraordinary epic Godland (2022), the director spent two years photographing the decomposing remains of a horse; in the film, this is presented as a minute-long montage, evoking time’s inexorable passage. A few months before Godland premiered at Cannes, Pálmason screened Nest at the Berlin Film Festival, a 22-minute short that took 18 months to film. His latest feature The Love That Remains continues that trend, as Pálmason follows a single family over the course of a year, with the changing climate and landscapes being as integral to the film as any of the dramatic, humorous and surreal incidents that he captures during the course of the narrative. This is Pálmason's fourth feature and it further solidifies my belief that he is one of the most exciting filmmakers working today. I was delighted to have the opportunity to discuss the film with him shortly before its UK premiere at last year's London Film Festival.
One of the things I really appreciate
about your films is that every time it feels like you're pushing yourself in a
new direction. Is that something that you're consciously striving for when you
develop a new project?
I think you at least hope that it's a
natural step forward, that you're not forcing anything. I mean, I never think, ‘OK, now I'm going to do something completely
different,’ it's more like it's the process that dictates where we're going. When we moved back to Iceland, we bought a film camera because I had
this idea of wanting to make films constantly. I didn't want to write and
develop for four years and then shoot a film over two months, I wanted to shoot
every week. It was more like a painter’s process, just like being a painter in
a studio. I felt that if there was such a long time between filming, I didn't
feel like a filmmaker, you know? When it came to filming, I was rusty.
I also felt that by filming every
week, and by creating material and watching the material, I became much more
stimulated by it and the ideas came more naturally. The process for the last
couple of years has been working on parallel things rather than one thing, and
I've found it very satisfying and very exciting. Of course, I’m interested in certain things, I'm always interested in
how time passes and you can see that in my films, but I'm always trying – or we
as a group of collaborators, we are trying – not to repeat ourselves. We're trying
to make things that resonate with us, but hopefully also out there.
You work across a lot of different artistic practices. Do you see it all as part of a singular process?
More and more, I think it’s just the
same. Sometimes it's like, you just work, you just create a daily routine and
ritual so that you can be productive, and even that's hard sometimes, because
you have to somehow support your family and you have to be part of the world. If you can create a daily routine that is kind of productive, then I
have a very strong feeling that the ideas and projects kind of decipher
themselves what they want to be and I just have to spend time with it and work
on it. The project decides if it's a short film or if it's a little bit longer
or and has a bigger narrative. I just try to allow them to decide what they
want to be, and then I collaborate with others and try to get things financed
if they feel very serious and they feel like they are feature films. But yeah, it's very much about allowing things to just emerge
naturally for me now.
So, at what point did this story
start to emerge and begin to announce itself as a feature?
It's a long time ago. I mean, the
first image you see in the film was shot in 2017, so it's even before Godland. There are different kinds of triggers and different kinds of seeds
that I've planted over the years, but I remember that being the first image
that was created for the film. At that time I had the project The Love That
Remains, but I didn't know that I was creating an image for The Love That
Remains, that came later. I remember one of the most important places in
the process was actually when I was shooting this short film called Nest, which
was kind of like a COVID project. I was just filming my kids building a
treehouse and I wanted the elements and animals and everything to be part of
the film, so I had to build this kind of camera house around my camera so the
animals wouldn't see me. I ended up spending a lot of time in this small
shed, just sitting there and waiting, recording sound and reading and writing, and
I started thinking about what the parents of these kids are doing. I was seeing
these kids build a treehouse, so I started writing these narratives of the
parents, and I think that was one of the places where it began to be serious.
We see a lot of movies that are about
couples separating and going through a divorce, but generally, the movie is
about that subject, and it's the driving force behind all the drama. In this film, it's
not really about that.
The separation is just one thing
that's happening in the lives of these characters. Was that something you were
very keen not to emphasise?
I always have a very strong feeling
of what I don't want my films to be, but it's sometimes a little bit mysterious what I
want them to be. You start by saying, “OK, I don't want this film to
be another separation film where people are screaming at each other,” because I
know people go through those processes, we all know that, and we don't need to
always emphasise the most dramatic things. I think sometimes the more
effortless things are just as important. They're a little bit trickier to
capture, but I think if you really give yourself time, you can capture that
also and create a film that is as strong as the more dramatic film.
I also felt that I hadn't seen
it before. I was more interested in how you spend time with the people you love
when a family is fractured and separated, because you still have these kids
together. You see it too often in real life, the negative side of people not
being able to spend time together anymore, but they still have this history of
love and a relationship and all kinds of things that they went through. I just
felt there was so much to explore there and it was a very open canvas for
people to put in their own experiences, because I really
like work that is open for interpretation. I felt like this was a really
good concept and narrative that would allow people to put their own feelings
into it, instead of telling you exactly what happened, because often when you create
certain plots you tend to use a lot of time explaining these things, and that
means less time to just experience it. I think I prioritised experience instead
of explaining with this one.
Was it important to you to have a
maternal figure at the centre of it? Your previous films have been following
men and very much about male ego and tension and conflict.
I think it just happened very naturally because I was looking at a family, and in this family there's one female and
one male and then the kids. Then if you look a little bit further there's also
chickens and a dog and the horses, and if you go even further there's
grandparents and there's friends, etc. So I didn't really decide anything, it
was more like I was looking at this very typical nuclear family or this very
normal family where both parents are working, which is kind of the norm today,
and it was just about exploring them. I didn't have any preconceived
thoughts about what this family was, but there were some things I knew. I knew
that we would follow him and I knew that one of the threads was following
her and one of the threads was following the kids, and I had this feeling that
it would be interesting to see these threads weave into each other throughout
the film.
Very early on, I knew that he was a
fisherman. I had been documenting over three summers how you fish during these
modern times because it's changing very fast. I was doing this for a company in
my hometown, so I was spending a lot of time there and getting to know all
these people and seeing a lot of possibilities in capturing this, because it
was so beautiful, but it’s a very strange industrial world, not as romantic as
a lot of people think it is.
I really wanted to capture that, but then I also
wanted to spend time with her. He's working the sea and I wanted her to sort of
be working the earth, so I tried to find a process for her that could be a nice
dialogue with what he was doing.
Her artworks are a metaphor for the
filmmaking as well. It's about collaboration, it's about the passage of time, it involves the
natural world, so it feels like a very fitting choice of process for her.
My idea was not to use that at first
because this is a process that I've been doing for years. I've always found it
to be a very visual and physical process, so I knew that I wanted her to have
something similar. In the beginning, I did try to find an artist in
Iceland that could be both the actress and the artist herself, and as we go
through it we would get to know her work, but I couldn't find a process that
fit. I found an actress that I really liked working
with in Saga [Garðarsdóttir], so we decided that that she would collaborate
with us and would go through what I call a winter process
series. You harvest one series a year and you do it during the cold months. You
make these sketches and then these sketches become big cutouts in metal, then
you put them out during the cold months on top of linen or cotton, and it sort
of eats itself into the cotton and makes these paintings or prints. It was so
natural for me to do that because it's a process that I've done so many times,
but also it's a process that I think fits with the core of the film and it helped
to just lift the film.
Tell me about casting Saga Garðarsdóttir because
she's not someone who does a lot of movies. I believe she's primarily a
comedian, is that right?
Yeah, she wrote these TV sketches,
and she was also directing them and acting in them. She was just so natural and
funny, and she has a very striking look. I met her and we talked and I
immediately felt I could write for her, so it was a very easy process with her.
It took a little bit longer to find her husband, but I knew that I wanted
someone that was different, you know, I didn't want them to be the same kind of
type. It’s almost as if they met very early in their life and then maybe grew a
little bit apart, but I wanted to feel it naturally without explaining it.
How do you cultivate that kind of
intimacy between your actors? When you're watching these scenes of the family
together they feel very comfortable and she has to interact with your kids like
she's their mother. Do you create a rehearsal space and bring them together before
shooting?
That was one of the keys for the film
to work. I knew that this film was very playful and I knew that I wanted to
push it into places where it was very close to the edge, you know? Close to
catastrophic, close to not working, close to being too absurd or comical, but I knew
that none of these things would work if the fundament wasn't strong. You needed
to believe that this was a real family, that was the most important thing. I invited them to come to my hometown to stay over the weekend, and we made
this scene on top of a car in a river. We made it almost like a short film
where I just tested them together, and they played and they improvised a text
that I wrote. I felt very quickly that this is going to work because they're
interested in making the film together and they're okay with this very low-key
way of making films. I mean, there's no catering, there's no screens anywhere,
there's no chairs, it's just a couple of people making some things together, and
they were up for it so I felt it would turn out fine.
How is it for you directing your children,
because on set you have to be their director not their dad. Is that a different
kind of relationship with them?
I've always been the same with them
ever since they were born. I don't have many faces, it's just one, so it's very
natural and easy for me to direct them. I'm kind of blunt, just very
straightforward, and that's how I am with all of my actors and crew. I'm not
trying to sugarcoat it or I'm not trying to be nasty or anything, I just try to
be very clear. If something doesn't work I just say it doesn't work, and then
we try to figure out why and if we can fix it or do something else. I'm also
like that with my kids, and they have been doing it for so long they’re in all
of my projects. Right now with this film the boys have a much larger role, but
they're very used to a camera and they're very used to my friends, because it's
basically a group of friends that we're making films with, so they know all of
them and they love them. It's very easy for me to invite them into the process because
it's a very homemade. All of my projects, even Godland, are extremely homemade and
it's all very family oriented.
You need a considerable amount of time to make these projects that span the changing seasons. How do
you factor that into the production schedule and a budget? Whenever you talk to independent filmmakers they are always talking about running out of money or racing against the clock because they don't have enough days.
I know. One of the hardest things is
actually the finance. I'm not talking for everyone, but the problem of making
films for me is always money, and we have to go from film to film just to be
able to survive, because we're not getting enough money for making a film. I
mean, we'll never get the right amount of money for the hours we use in our
projects, that's never going to happen in my life, but we are enjoying
ourselves and we're making things that we really love, so we have been trying
to make a setup where we're always working on a couple of projects in parallel.
I just made a book called Lament for a Horse, with the horse I photographed in
the process of making Godland. This was a two-year process of photographing
and now I have a book probably five years later, so there are these different
processes, and for some of the projects there's no money that comes out of it,
but I think I'm really lucky that I have a very solid crew of my editor, my
sound designer and my producers and distributors. They're working with me not
on only one project, but they're working with me on a body of work, so whatever
we make they try to help us figure out how we make this so it's never about the
one project, it's more about the body of work and the direction. We have a
certain amount of time and we're going this direction, and then the projects
kind of decide for themselves what project wants to be made now, because I
think each project has its moment.
You're working without a
cinematographer on this one How did that affect your process?
I've always worked very closely with
Maria [von Hausswolff], who has filmed everything, but with this one I was
beginning to stretch time so much and I was filming so much of the material, so
it was strange to suddenly invite someone to come in a process where I already
shot 30% of the film. It was impossible for her to move to my hometown, I mean
it would be impossible for anyone to just move away from their family or bring
their whole family there, so it just didn't fit this film. The next one is kind
of like that too, but hopefully I'll collaborate with her soon because we still
want to work together. Some of the projects don't allow that because the
process is just so different, but it was quite natural for me. I've always been
very into the process and it's always been a very much hands-on process for me
to make films; I load the film, I do the technical stuff, I'm carrying a tripod.
It's all very hands-on and homemade, and it feels natural, but of course miss
Maria and I hope I'm going to work with her again.
You shot A White White Day
in 2.40:1, but you've since gone back to Academy ratio in
the last couple of features. The Nest was Academy ratio as well so is that your
preferred format? How did you feel about shooting wide?
I didn't like it. It's a very strange
thing because I really like to be excited about what I do, so when I'm setting
up the camera and putting on the lens it's something that excites me, but with
the wide lens – it was actually spherical lenses, it was only the opening scene
of A White White Day that was anamorphic and then we changed it into spherical
lenses the rest of the film – I was kind of annoyed the whole time. This wide
format doesn't fit my temperament and right now I see the whole world through a
lens like this 1.33 Academy aspect ratio, because both of my still cameras are
also this format. Maybe this will change, I'm not saying this is going to be my
format for the rest of the films, but it's like if you talk to people that
write a lot in notebooks [he holds up and looks at his pencil] it's really
important for them if it is a 0.7 or is 0.5. It's a huge difference for people
that really work with something, these details are really important, because to
enjoy the work you have to feel comfortable and you have to feel that it fits
your temperament.
There are loads of unexpected comical
moments in this film that I loved. My audience really enjoyed the guy on TV
singing a song about his mother-in-law. It's a really funny bit.
I was born in 1984, and if you were
born around that era these were kind of the comics that you really loved growing,
they were really radical and funny. There was this character named Helgi the Troubadour
and he had these sketches where he was singing about really brutal things but
doing it in this funny manner like a troubadour. He was singing about his
family, his parents, his ex-wife and his children, and he being brutally honest
about these conflicts he had in life. When I was writing, one of these songs
just kept repeating in my head and I had to have it. They allowed me to have it,
thank God!
The other thing I wanted to ask you
about is Joan of Arc. This is an hour-long film that's connected to the scenes involving the children in this film. Do you
know how that's going to be available?
We just finished it and we only
screened it in one place. We premiered it in San Sebastian so I have no idea of
its future because it's an odd little thing, it's not that long, it's not that
short, so it's kind of an in-between film. I'm trying to figure out what kind
of distribution it's going to have, whether Curzon going to take it or if they
find it a little bit too experimental. I don't know yet, but people are
getting a chance to see it now, so we'll know soon what kind of life it will
have. It will definitely come out but I don't know what format. I wanted to
make a trilogy of short films, Nest was number one and the second one
was supposed to be Joan of Arc, but it just became so big that it became a
feature. We are actually working on the third one, it's called Blue, so the
idea is that it's like a trilogy of films where we are working with
time in that way, but each time it's a little different. It's been extremely
fun to make these films, for me it's the most fun I have with films, and Joan of Arc was one of my highlights of the year. Just spending time with
them and just spending time with the weather, it's something that I really enjoy.
The Love That Remains is in UK cinemas from March 13th
