After Battle Cries, Made in the USA and Stormy Weather, in which you worked on more “serious” subjects (even if it didn’t exclude a light tone), nobody expected you back on the side of the screwball comedy. How was born the idea of Back Soon?
Jean-Luc Gaget, my co-writer, and I had spent two years working on a script that never became a film -Patrick Sobelman, my producer, was the one who introduced me to him. Jean-Luc had just finished the writing of a TV movie produced by Patrick’s company and directed by Lucas Belvaux. Working with Jean-Luc is like playing ping pong: his thoughts help me progress and vice versa. So, we thought: let’s do something totally crazy where we’ll have fun. I actually wanted to let myself go in an extravagant script, have no limits and rush totallt fearless, write for people I love. I imagined roles for people I had met, especially some musicians from the Icelandic scene I met in Reykjavik. I took pictures, talked with many performers, actors, musicians, writers… and little by little, each one of them brought something to the script of the movie. Also, I wanted to make people laugh. In my previous features, people were often moved and they would come after the screening to talk to me about their emotions. Here, I wanted to hear their reactions, to hear their laughs. It’s the first time I work with this genre even though I shot many “comic” documentaries: Barbara tu n’es pas coupable (Barbara You’re Not Guilty), Nobody Move! etc… I think I want to keep on telling funny stories that are also sad in a way because it’s what life’s made of in the end.
The movie is an ode to Didda Jónsdóttir, whom you directed in Stormy Weather and even portrayed for the series Faces from Europe. Did you write the movie for her? Is Anna actually Didda?
Didda isn’t Anna but what they have in common is an energy, a strength and an enthusiasm that move people who surround them in a way only Icelandic winds can do. I met Didda five years ago, in a bar in Reykjavik. She ended up playing Loa, co-starring with Elodie Bouchez in my previous feature: Stormy Weather. She had never acted before, yet she won the Icelandic Academy Award for Best Actress for this role.
The characters of Back Soon look a bit like Northern “cousins” of the women burglars from Nobody Move! -some kind of “nice outlaws”. You seem to share a genuine tenderness for people living outside the social system.
Since always… Seeking inside a person, who seems far from us, what is, deeper inside, the same reason they are close to us. To connect. Maybe it’s because my origins are so “fragmented”, plural.
The movie seems to be very spontaneous, were the actors able to improvise or was everything already written?
There was an original structure as far as the script, the plot and the dialogues were concerned. And then I allowed myself some time at the end of the sequences to let improvisation jump on stage. For example by not cutting right away or by saying “I have what I need but let’s make one more shot, in which you guys can let yourselves go”. Even if these “free” shots are not always shown, this method provided a real drive during the shooting, a joy of being there.
How was born the idea of the musical theme?
It was one of the very first ideas, which was developed with Martin Wheeler, who composed the score of almost all my features.
Whether with my documentaries or my fictions, Martin follows the films as from the writing stage to work on the soundtrack. Not to emphasize the image but to move along with it, to trouble it, to disturb it, to make it vibrate.
The original idea of the soundtrack of Back soon was to weave different sound elements that will little by little assemble to create the final song of the film, an Icelandic/Jamaican song, a piece of Scandinavian reggae music, written and performed by Sigurdur Gudmundsson and his band Hjalmar…
Those different elements (voice, drums, bass line, etc.) spread out into the film space. The very notion of space is important because the movie is partly a road-movie, and the characters are displayed in large landscapes, where the road and the cloudy rainy skies contribute to the rhythm of the story.
The goal of this work is to create a very specific atmosphere around the main character, Anna, according to the principle and the rhythm of a pregnancy. So, that music we hear all through the movie will give birth to the Icelandic reggae song of the end.
I think that that desire to “gather”, for each film, musicians, whose roads wouldn’t have crossed otherwise is linked to my “fragmented” origins (Iceland, USA, Central Europe). The fact that those meetings and understandings are made concrete in a song played live in the kitchen where the different characters of the movie get together embodies that desire.
Olivier Gonord
SYNOPSIS
Anna Hallgrimsdottir a poetess, dish washer and marijuana dealer in her late thirties lives in Reykjavik with her two sons, Krummi and Ulfur. Anna is tired of her lifestyle and the coldness of Iceland and wishes to show her sons more of the world.
Finally she decides to do something about it, move on, and somewhat change her lifestyle. The first step in her revival is to sell her business which consists of her mobile telephone which includes her big list of clients.
The sale is an unusual one and the potential buyer promises her the asking price within 48 hours.
During those 48 hours Anna gets into all kinds of “Icelandic familial adventures” as her kitchen fills up with customers/friends, partying, while waiting for her to come Back Soon.
More details about Back Soon: http://www.zikzak.is/back-soon
ABOUT SOLVEIG ANSPACH
Sólveig Anspach was born in Vestmannaeyjar (Iceland) from an American father and an Icelandic mother.
She graduated from French film school FEMIS in 1989.
She directed many documentaries, among which Nobody Move!, Made in the USA, Faux tableaux dans vrais paysages islandais (Fake Paintings in Real Icelandic Landscapes). But it’s Battle Cries starring Karin Viard and Laurent Lucas that contributed to her international notoriety in 1999. In 2003, she directed Stormy Weather starring Elodie Bouchez and Didda Jonsdottir, which was selected at Cannes Film Festival in Un Certain Regard section.
Sólveig Anspach is currently shooting Louise Michel, a TV movie for France 2 starring Sylvie Testud, and also writing Soon Coming, the sequel of Back Soon.