You started as an actor, you directed theatre productions, how did you start to direct films and how did those prior experiences nourish your work as a director?
I felt all the time that I was going to make a film, I played in a lot of them and I felt more and more the need to do it myself. When I did my first film I thought “This is who I wanted to become”. You are asked this question all your life “what do you want to be ?” I never really knew but I found it and that’s why I’ve stayed there. I occasionally play as an actor and I do theatre once in a while as well ; this background gives me a different perspective on the storytelling. I’m mostly interested in characters and telling stories through characters rather than using the plot as a way to hang the characters on them. I don’t mind doing action or little effects if it’s needed -I’ve done stunts or stuff like that but it’s not what gives me a great close-up on characters or human behaviour, this is what gets me excited. I’ve been offered to do big Hollywood movies, it’s not because I’m against them, it’s just that they don’t get me going, I couldn’t do it well, I would need viagra to be able to direct these movies, my interest has to come from the inside.
Why did you choose to turn this bestseller into a movie?
First of all, when I bought it it was not a bestseller, it was the first book in line, he [Arnaldur Indridason] had made a couple of books that were not successful, this one was the first to become successful but I bought it before that. I read it and I thought it had very strong premises: it takes place in Iceland, it’s about characters, it talks about the old times in Iceland in a certain way -without going backwards but it’s connected to that- and how our modern society is going in another direction, maybe too fast, and the science of being able to find out your grandmother’s secrets when she was a young woman -probably playful like most of the young women like we want to have them but then you don’t want to know about that when it’s your grandmother! This is a fantastic story to work with but it took me a lot of time because it didn’t work straight from the page. It’s only when I found this new way of structuring it that it could work as a film. It took me six years to do that starting from when I bought the title -by that time the book had done really well. But it has no importance, the film has to work on its own.
How did you work on the screenplay? What was the adaptation work like?
I didn’t work linearly from the novel because the story is told from the point of view of the investigator finding a corpse until he finds the man he is looking for. Then you have the flashback of his story and then it continues. This didn’t work for me, it was just not interesting. Not until I kind of figured out it was the drama of two fathers losing a child and then I decided to tell their two stories in parallel, then I got really excited about this idea ; I tried to find other movies that were made the same way but I couldn’t find any. My co-producers thought it would be too difficult, that the people who had read the novel would not like it, that this would kill the movie, so I said “then I won’t do the movie”! It ended up my way and I think it was the right think to do. For some people it’s too complicated but you can never please everyone. I’m more worried about having people ahead of me in the cinema instead of a little bit behind, that’s ok, then they will have to go again to definitely figure it out! (laughter)
Did you want to make it easier for the audience by deciding with your cinematographer to use strong dominants to mark the different time periods?
This was always in our mind but I probably pushed that a little bit more in the post production. That came naturally from the story but I also wanted to hold people a little bit backwards, it’s a little different but people don’t realize it right away, it’s a part of how things come together and you understand it. I have been making films in studio, bigger budgets, but I wanted to do this one on location: no studios, no tricks, make it also for as little money as possible, the bigger the movies become, the more conventional they have to be. I wanted also to put a test on myself. So I used Fuji film, which is the cheapest. Not only for money but also for the colours: I really like its green tones and it’s more true to Iceland than Kodak. Kodak is more Hollywood -more yellow-, Fuji is greener, that’s why it wanted it. Then we decided to use old lenses and shoot it on 16mm but the wider shots are shot on 35mm -we used an old camera and it’s fantastic because we decided to use no tricks, it’s the best school I had as a director.
What were your influences while shooting this kind of genre movie? Were there clichés you wanted to avoid?
First of all I wanted to avoid as much as possible the clichés and pitfalls of thrillers, all the fake surprises. What I wanted to do is to build the tension inside, from the inside of your brain, not from sound effects. In my films, especially while working on this one, I want people to be able to watch it again and that everything makes sense too. It’s very easy to make the tricks ; there are movies that trick you and when you watch them again, you see the trick is not believable because the character wouldn’t be doing that at that time. I wanted to make the story slowly built up to raise tension, I’m not tensed in cinema with somebody running and shooting guns, there must be something else, something about relationships, about the things possibly happening more than when it happens. This is the kind of energy I was thinking about. There are also two ways that have become very overused in cinema today, like in old horror films: you use things to shock people for no reason, just to make it disgusting. On smaller films, more arty films, they have to create the cliché of only the reaction, you don’t see what you see, this has been done endlessly, it was original when it started but now “ok, you’re using that trick”. Like you do in theatre -it happens off-stage. But I really wanted to show when there was a reason to show. And then show it all. Not like hide for the old ladies because they can’t take a dead body, I really wanted people to smell the film, feel the film, almost taste the film, that’s why I never shy away.
The most disturbing thing in your film may be the scene when Erlendur eats his sheep’s head.
It’s exenstialistic -the death, the meat, the rotenning, this is life. When you go into a hotel like the one we are in now [Murano hotel], they try to hide the life, you sleep in a bed and feel like nobody has ever slept in it but of course people slept and had sex in it. But they’re hiding it, which is culture. It’s interesting in a film to embrace it. This is the thing these people eat and the actor loves it, it’s no faking there, it’s his favourite food. It’s like the old style of food and when the movie came out, it was on the cover of the biggest paper in Iceland that sheep heads sales had gone three hundred per cent up!
You said once in an interview that you were “sick of these Icelandic films with endless beautiful landscapes”. In your movie the landscapes are used to mark a frontier between a modern urban Iceland and a more archaic one?
The thing about landscape is that it’s almost like sex for me, if it’s not used for a purpose to tell you something it’s useless. In Jar City, it’s the memory of the cold wastelands, the endless distances between people and little villages, and sitting in your car on the road to visit your grandmother, sitting in your car forever and there’s nothing to see, it’s a different beauty, it’s also a way for me to show Erlendur’s emotions without having to give them verbally. You get his emotions through those pictures. It’s lonely, it’s almost biblical, he’s almost like a missionary, trying to correct things on his own.
Family relationships are at the heart of the movie, like it was in 101 Reykjavik and The Sea, is this something particularly important for you?
Relationships between parents and a child is something that you are one side of in the beginning of your life and then you go to the other side of it -or actually in the middle of it when you have your parents and children-, it’s something that is one of the biggest part of the journey through life, and when your child becomes your friend and stop being your child but is still your child, you have to learn as a parent not to interfere with your child’s life at a certain point -this thing nobody taught you, nobody taught you to be a parent. This is a journey you’re going through and part of that, in my case, is to tell stories about that. I think the brightest happy end I ever made is in Jar City, which is about him opening up to his daughter and sharing his thoughts with her instead of opposing and she actually caresses him. She really feels she needs to help her father, this is a turn in relationships, and for me an opportunity of growing from there. It’s not the end of the book, we decided in the editing room it should be the end.
Why did you choose the Police Choir for the film soundtrack?
This came for the fact that in a lot of films policemen are portrayed in a very negative way. But when you check the basis of the job, it’s actually very beautiful, it’s to help human beings walking through life without bumping too hard into each other, and when it happens: to find a solution. The basis of the job is very beautiful and I also started to talk to them, to investigate things and they were really close: “How does this affect you?”, “Oh we have no problem to deal with that” and then they start opening up and you realize they actually carry it up. All those family dramas they walk into ; they didn’ tell me but this is a unique thing in Iceland that the police sing, this is a big choir, they travel into the world to sing, and my understanding of that is that it’s a way to do something beautiful together. They’re always arresting people, fighting, and twice a week they sing together, in harmony. It’s not in the book but it’s something I really wanted, they’re like singing for all of us, trying to help us. It shows the police in a different perspective.
Interviewed by Olivier Gonord in Paris on September 5, 2008.