Well, when it came to the fashion world, I was talking a lot to my wife, who is a fashion photographer. What kind of research do you do in order to make a movie about those kinds of worlds? A dinner table scene in Triangle of Sadness. It’s always interesting when you look at it from the economical perspective, because so many things that maybe seem absurd from the outside then start to make sense. And then the same thing from the fashion world. I was looking at the art world from an economical perspective a little bit. I approached the world of fashion and the world of luxury cruises in the same way that I approached the world of art. Do you see your work as being connected, or do you see each of them as being separate from the others? I remember the moment in that film that shocked me so much that I couldn’t help but laugh. When I was at Cannes, getting ready to watch Triangle of Sadness, I started thinking about when I saw your previous film The Square in the same theater. So much of satire is about exaggeration that it’s hard not to laugh and to be horrified. It’s hard to only call it satire, but I have also used that because it’s the best way of communicating that the audience should be free to react both in a laughing way and maybe being horrified sometimes. It’s the easiest way to communicate that I am dealing with humor, or dark comedy maybe. For me, it’s not even important to communicate that. People want me to tell them, “No, that deep inside of us, we are actually good, all of us.” For me, that is kind of obvious. We also have the ability to do bad things. And also, it is too focused on individuals, with trying to find explanations - is this a good person or a bad person? For me, I try to look at all the characters from a neutral perspective, that they have the ability to do good things. We have so many movies that are dealing with humans being heroes, and where we also are simplifying hard topics to a “good guy” and a “bad guy.” I just don’t think that that kind of approach gives me so much to work with. What would I do? How would I react? I can identify with the bad behavior. I try to corner myself when I’m writing the scripts with the kind of situation that I’m getting interested in. I’m interested in sins, where we don’t live up to the idea of what it is to be a good human being. I am more interested in when we are failing. It creates a set-up and a situation where we can identify with failure. If you look at sociology, it’s beautiful, because it dares to look at human beings when we fail. I love discussion, and I think that my general viewpoint on human beings is that we are very good at collaborating.īut I have a little bit of a sociological approach to the content of my films. If you ask my friends, I hope they would say something completely different, because I love socializing. He probably hates other people,” and so on. Sometimes I hear people say, “Oh, I would never like to have dinner with Ruben Östlund. I’ve heard people say that they think the film is cynical. I talked with Östlund by Zoom about his approach, how to make a scene funny, and what zebras tell us about fashion. Now, with the film coming to theaters on October 7, he seems fascinated by the audience’s reactions. Triangle of Sadness - named for the patch of skin between the eyebrows, which a model might manipulate to express emotion or Botox to suppress it - is a wild ride, and it netted Östlund his second Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, where it premiered earlier this summer. None of us are inherently above the fray. Any of us, stuck into an existing societal system, might be these people, he says. Yes, his films make fun of humanity, but he sees them more as sociological studies than targeted polemics against the rich and ridiculous. This is not a film for the weak-stomached.)īut Östlund, who is Swedish, is not the sarcastic pessimist you might expect. And as 2017’s The Square took on the art world, Triangle of Sadness sets its sights on the worlds of modeling and high luxury, veering from a casting call to a cruise ship to something much more deranged. A master of satire, Östlund seems gleefully unafraid of horrifying his audiences, but every squirm is accompanied by a guffaw. To watch a Ruben Östlund film - like The Square, Force Majeure, or his new film Triangle of Sadness - is to plunge yourself into an unpredictable vortex.
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