Ruben Östlund: ​‘I was inter­est­ed in beau­ty as a currency’

If there is a prob­lem in soci­ety, you will most like­ly find Ruben Östlund in the pan­ic room cack­ling at it. It’s a lit­tle futile to ask him whether any­thing is off-lim­its, because you’re only ask­ing for trou­ble. The two-time Palme D’Or win­ner (The Square in 2017, this year’s Tri­an­gle of Sad­ness) will say that it isn’t, and pro­ceed to edu­cate you on cap­i­tal­ism, Marx­ism, #MeToo, hypocrisy and phil­an­thropy. Which he did here, with a wicked smile and calm sense of con­trol, when we spoke to him dur­ing a rare moment of qui­et and seri­ous con­ver­sa­tion at this year’s BFI Lon­don Film Festival.

LWLies: Which lan­guage do you find it eas­i­est to be fun­ny in?

Ruben Östlund: I think it’s eas­i­er with Swedish, but my wife is Ger­man, and we speak Eng­lish to each oth­er. She was brought up in Aus­tralia, so I got some train­ing in the Eng­lish lan­guage to try to make her laugh. But then I also think the kind of sit­u­a­tions that I’m deal­ing with in my films, very sim­ple setups often, maybe I have to punch a lit­tle hard­er in Eng­lish. The Square was a good tri­al for me. But the first scene in Tri­an­gle of Sad­ness when Carl [Har­ris Dick­in­son] and Yaya [Charl­bi Dean] are argu­ing about the bill, it was eas­i­er for me to find the words exact­ly in Swedish.

I love that first sequence between Carl and Yaya, it’s excru­ci­at­ing. I’m inter­est­ed to know what you think of the gen­der pol­i­tics of the film indus­try, the way men and women speak about mon­ey when it comes to film­mak­ing in particular.

Since women are always paid less mon­ey than men, women become more like con­cerned about how they are paid when they get into the film indus­try. Many men going into the film indus­try don’t have any prob­lem work­ing for free for a cou­ple of years, because they don’t have this on their shoul­ders that they are not treat­ed equally.

I also think it’s a bur­den for women who can’t just go in like, ​‘This is a fun group of peo­ple, I real­ly want to spend time with them’ with­out think­ing about not being treat­ed equal­ly. But then, of course, this is the begin­ning that I’m talk­ing about. Because then when every­body start­ed to get paid, then it’s a dif­fer­ent issue, of course. I like to explore gen­der expec­ta­tions and the way cul­ture has trained us to behave, and how we’re deal­ing with it. #MeToo was a great move­ment, but you also could do #IGot­Billed, and the men could tell the sto­ries about when they were treat­ed like a wal­let. But when I bring it up, the men just say: ​“I can’t go there.”

Do you relate to that sen­ti­ment in any way? The sense of humour in your films is often risky – when is the point where you wor­ry and have to pull back?

There are some jokes in this film that I didn’t go for. When you get old­er as a film­mak­er and you’ve tried cer­tain provo­ca­tions, you realise that some areas bring about guilt by asso­ci­a­tion. For exam­ple, I don’t think I’d redo [2011 fea­ture] Play in the same way. It’s about five Black boys rob­bing three white boys and I was inter­est­ed in look­ing at what we project on skin colour. It was inspired by real events, and these boys were play­ing into stereo­typ­i­cal ideas of Black men as dan­ger­ous, and it was tak­en straight out of pop­u­lar cul­ture, so I was ques­tion­ing that rep­re­sen­ta­tion when it came to the movie and the way it can repro­duce a cer­tain behav­iour in real­i­ty. But if I don’t know how to moti­vate what I’ve done, I wouldn’t go into a provo­ca­tion. But if I feel there’s a con­sen­sus thought on top­ics I don’t agree on, I’m will­ing to go into it.

For Tri­an­gle, I was inter­est­ed in beau­ty as a cur­ren­cy. And it was writ­ten part­ly dur­ing the #MeToo move­ment, and I thought it was very inter­est­ing to have a man that has this cur­ren­cy in his sex­u­al­i­ty and his beau­ty, and to see in which way he would use it if he end­ed up being depen­dent on a woman who had all the resources.

I want to talk about Har­ris Dick­in­son and his per­for­mance as Carl. He’s men­tioned he doesn’t have much mod­el­ling expe­ri­ence, and you cast him oppo­site Charl­bi Dean, who is incred­i­ble, and obvi­ous­ly has such exten­sive expe­ri­ence. How much does authen­tic­i­ty and that prox­im­i­ty to the real world mat­ter to you?

It was good that Har­ris hadn’t done much mod­el­ling, because Charl­bi was so com­fort­able in pos­ing for the boyfriend of Insta­gram shots. I want­ed Carl to start doubt­ing his pro­fes­sion: ​“I don’t feel as beau­ti­ful as I did. I’m los­ing my cur­ren­cy and my looks.” But you could tell Charl­bi had a huge amount of expe­ri­ence of being in front of a cam­era, and that made her a real­ly skil­ful actor. She was not afraid of the cam­era at all – and it’s nat­ur­al to be afraid of the cam­era, because it’s going to depict you exact­ly the way you are.

What did Charl­bi teach you in terms of her experience?

I want­ed Yaya to be more expe­ri­enced when it comes to manoeu­vring peo­ple who want to maybe have sex with her. So we talked a lit­tle bit about these things and I said, ​‘Of course, you have to deal with thisa lot when you’re like trav­el­ling around, and meet­ing peo­ple in pow­er­ful posi­tions.’ And she said, ​‘I’m quite good at play­ing drunk, so I pre­tend to be drunk and that I have to go home.’

Much of Tri­an­gle Of Sad­ness, but one sequence in par­tic­u­lar, demands an extreme­ly vis­cer­al response from your audi­ence. It’s some­thing you’ve done often in your films, mak­ing peo­ple shriek and feel unwell. At this point in your career do you have a method to get these bod­i­ly reac­tions out of viewers?

I don’t know what it is, the char­ac­ters are either pee­ing or shit­ting in all my movies, I don’t know why. I think there’s a rea­son why we react to vom­it­ing. We are trained as ani­mals to be afraid of it, because it can be a dis­ease, an infec­tion, bac­te­ria, and we should avoid it.

I only knew that I want­ed Woody Har­rel­son to play this Marx­ist cap­tain that gets real­ly drunk with the oli­garch. They play with a micro­phone sys­tem, and they start read­ing all these polit­i­cal mes­sen­gers to the vom­it­ing pas­sen­gers. I fell in love with that set­up. I also knew that if I’m going to do vom­it­ing, I don’t want to do it just a lit­tle bit, I want­ed to push it fur­ther than what peo­ple expect me to do, and I want to the audi­ence at a cer­tain point to say, ​‘Please save them, they’ve had enough.’ And then after that moment, I want to go even further.

It’s quite desta­bil­is­ing the way you com­bine that very phys­i­cal, vis­cer­al, sil­ly cen­tre­piece with these polit­i­cal man­i­festos. How do you go about incor­po­rat­ing your pol­i­tics into films that are being released into soci­eties that just aren’t very left-wing?

I always want to ask peo­ple who watch my films: what is the polit­i­cal mes­sage? I’ve been com­plete­ly unin­ter­est­ed in mak­ing it into like some­thing that is sup­port­ing the left-wing social­ist move­ment only. I think there’s a lot of great things with the mar­ket econ­o­my and great things with reg­u­lat­ed capitalism.

When I was doing the film, I was almost want­i­ng to go into the world we were deal­ing with in the 80s, when we had a West­ern per­spec­tive of the world and we had an East­ern per­spec­tive of the world. The West­ern per­spec­tive is deliv­er­ing cap­i­tal­is­tic ideas, and the East­ern is the social­ist-com­mu­nist ideas. So I thought it was almost like these two dif­fer­ent ide­olo­gies have been bash­ing their head against each oth­er. And I thought, haven’t we left that behind us? And now we can talk about how to real­ly cre­ate a great, improved society.

So if you want to read some­thing, where I agree on a lot of the thoughts on how we should build a bet­ter soci­ety, I will rec­om­mend a book called Utopia for Real­ists by Rut­ger Breg­man. He is talk­ing about basic income. I think that all of us agree on is that it’s not okay to exploit oth­er peo­ple. And it’s not okay to pay them an unfair part of the prof­it. And if you look at Swe­den dur­ing the 80s, social democ­ra­cy actu­al­ly man­aged to reg­u­late cap­i­tal­ism in a quite good way, and we shared the respon­si­bil­i­ty of the soci­ety. But peo­ple have told me what’s going on in the UK now… I get sad when I hear that.

The polit­i­cal con­text in which Tri­an­gle Of Sad­ness pre­miered was some­what con­tra­dic­to­ry, where every­body loved the film in Cannes, but I felt this ten­sion between the audi­ence laugh­ing, think­ing we’re so unlike these char­ac­ters, while yacht par­ties are tak­ing place right out­side the screen­ing room.

Peo­ple work­ing in the film indus­try and work­ing with cul­ture are often very inter­est­ed in improv­ing soci­ety. Even if you’re a bil­lion­aire. When you meet this bil­lion­aire, what do you want to tell them? Give away your mon­ey? Is that the solu­tion? Do you believe in phil­an­thropy? We have now a soci­ety where very rich peo­ple are moti­vat­ing their posi­tion by also being great philanthropists.

Phil­an­thropy is a way of main­tain­ing pow­er, it’s the lux­u­ry of being on top. So when we look at the audi­ence in Cannes, there’s a word that I don’t like: ​“hyp­ocrites”. It’s such an easy way of dis­qual­i­fy­ing people’s engage­ment in soci­ety. There are cer­tain prob­lems that can only be solved on soci­ety and a sys­tem lev­el. We tend in our times to bring down these big top­ics and point fin­gers at the indi­vid­ual, say­ing, ​“Oh, so you’re fly­ing, you should be ashamed.”

Come on, if we don’t share the respon­si­bil­i­ty for this, noth­ing will hap­pen. It’s almost like con­sumer pow­er, which is the most absurd thing that I’ve heard, because what is dis­trib­uted to you is what you’re going to buy. But then you put the respon­si­bil­i­ty on the con­sumer and say, ​‘Well, if there is a com­pa­ny that is not deal­ing with the envi­ron­men­tal the cri­sis in a good way, you can buy anoth­er brand.’

I often think there’s the neolib­er­al­ist idea that we are free as indi­vid­u­als, and we can do what­ev­er we want. But what Marx also invent­ed was soci­ol­o­gy, and it’s about human behav­iour. And that comes from his spe­cif­ic con­text, and actu­al­ly point­ing fin­gers on the con­text and the sit­u­a­tion that cre­ates behav­iour, rather than putting shame on the indi­vid­ual. And I think we lack that kind of view on the world and our actions today.

Of course, I want to con­front myself, because I’m fly­ing busi­ness class, I live in a five-star hotel when I’m trav­el­ling, and I have mon­ey in my bank account. But what should we do? Should we lay down and die?