Reykjavík Grapevine - 24.06.2005, Side 16

16 Haukur Már Helgason interviews director Dagur Kári
Benign Carelessness
Dagur Kári is one of a handful of young feature film directors in Iceland (b. 1973), probably
the one to have reached most international critical acclaim, for his debut Nói albinói (2002).
His second feature, titled Voksne mennesker, in its native Danish (Grown-up people) but
Dark Horse in English, tells the love story of a graffiti artist in his mid-twenties and ... a girl.
Are you a better director now than when you made Nói Albinói?
No, not really. The period between takes is always so long – three, four
years-- that you forget everything in between. It’s almost impossible to bring
any luggage from your last film to your next. Also because the films are so
different … it’s more like debut film no. 2.
You’ve said that Iceland is too small and produces too few films for there to
be a specifically “Icelandic cinema”. Is debut no. 2 an eternal national fate,
or is it changing?
The size of the country makes this a perpetual situation, I think. It will never
be possible to make sense of big waves or common tendencies, when you
only have four or five films a year. It makes it all arbitrary and dependent
on individuals. But you can notice some developments, still. There are these
phases. For a while, audio was the main issue, the audio had to get better.
Then, lately, there has been an emphasis on making better scripts. And I
think we’re doing OK in scripts now.
And now you are the first Icelandic director to make a film with no
mountains.
Yeah, probably. Hm … Nói ends with a natural catastrophe, but Denmark
is such an innocent and toothless country that this is the closest you get: A
bascule bridge goes up and down.
It is tempting to see influences from various directors in Dark Horse, even
direct citations …
I am very much nodding my head to one film, Masculin, féminin from
Godard (1966). It’s my favourite film. There’s this spirit floating all over it
– of course there are many boring scenes in it, like in all Godard’s films, but
also an incredible amount of brilliant scenes … that film is always where
I start, when I make a film, it’s a guiding light. I always show it to my
cinematographer, even if we then end up doing something very different. But
this is the spirit I aim to work in, this sort of benign carelessness. And this
time I wanted to finally refer to it explicitly.
But then when you watch films from the period, you wonder if something
like that can be done today, at all … or if it was just the sixties. Everything is
so beautiful, the clothes, the cars … so I’m trying to capture both, our times
and some element of those times, the innocence and joy of simply telling a
story. Cinema has become such an oversexed slut, it’s hard to accomplish this
virginal effect. I don’t make commercials or music videos. Getting behind
the camera is like sleeping with someone, and in that sense I’ve only had sex
twice.
Godard spoke very strongly to his times and even became an epitome of
those times. How do you perceive the role of cinema and filmmakers today?
I’m not especially fond of Godard, even if he made my favourite film. He
works too much with his brain. He was a film critic and he always remained
a film critic, only he started criticizing with a camera instead of writing. The
ultimate goal of a film is to speak to the emotions, directly, surpassing the
brain. Like music, it should be experienced.
A good film has many layers, so if you can find criticism or social analysis in
my film … I didn’t put it there consciously, but you’re always in society. And
you’re functioning within that society, of course. So this can be one layer.
Another layer is humour. To entertain your audience. Fool around.
Religion and Christian symbols were a very apparent layer in Nói, as well
as your short films, but they seem absent in Dark Horse. Are you done with
religion?
The biggest identity crisis of the Western world, or the Christian world, is
this doubt as to whether God exists or not. Many things would be easier if
that could be conclusively proven or rebuked … but this doubt is interesting,
even if I am in no way religious. It’s fun to sneak that dimension into films,
but it cannot become too obvious. Must be an undercurrent. It was very
definite in Lost Weekend (short film, 1999) and Nói Albínói and I was aware
of it, very clearly. Then, I actually tried to find something of the same sort for
this one, but it just wasn’t in the cards.
Also, because I was writing with someone else. As soon as you mention
these things out loud they become too obvious. It has to be as unconscious as
possible.
Can you save someone with a film?
Naah … you don’t save anything except perhaps a day or a week … a film is
part of a cultural chain that can matter to some people or a community. But
my premise or ambition is not to save or change or teach people … I do films
that I would like to see in the cinema, films that would cheer me up.
I’m finishing a script now. It’s always hard to write a script, it’s scary,
fills you with anxiety. Text and images obey such separate laws. The image
demands less logic than words do … the classic example is, you know: a
character knocks, walks in, says good morning. In a film you don’t need all
that, the character just stands there and says: good morning. Making a script
work is very different from making a film work.
You co-wrote Dark Horse?
Yes, with Rune Schjött. We started with nothing in our hands, and the whole
process was an experiment, finding out how to work together. Mostly we
wrote separately and then sent what we had to each other, and worked on
each other’s writing. And this spins off humour, I know that he is going to
read what I write, and he’s my friend so I want to amuse him. And he me.
The day’s order was to permit a certain degree of carelessness, life, to be
open for the unexpected. Rather than see it as a disruption. It’s the biggest
challenge of directing a film, perhaps, to know what you want, and see where
you are going, but remain capable of accepting gifts.
A decade ago it was a recurrent theme in discussion of Icelandic films that
they were under the heavy burden of the written narrative tradition. Is it a
problem, is it a gift or is it irrelevant now?
Iceland’s literary tradition is not irrelevant or problem-free, no … the
advantages are in the blood, maybe. But the disadvantage in Iceland is the
language – people take it too seriously, with this awe, I do it myself. There
are words that everyone uses in speech that you cannot write in a script
because they look silly in print. And this is a challenge, something to work on
and fight your through.
My last film was in Danish, the next one will be in English … but that’s
rather just how it happened than any planned course of events. There is
freedom in working outside your mother language, but that doesn’t mean I’ll
chicken away from doing films in Icelandic.
Dagur Kári’s film Voksne Mennesker (Dark Horse) is currently showing at
Háskolabíó with English subtitles.
H
.S
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