Reykjavík Grapevine - 05.06.2015, Blaðsíða 12

12 The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 7 — 2015
Film | Bahhhh!
Now, three years later, we’re sitting at
a downtown café to chat about his film
‘Hrútar’ ("Rams"), which tells the sto-
ry of two brothers who work as sheep
farmers. Despite living next door to
each other, they don’t speak, only com-
municating through notes the sheep
dog carries between the farms—and
things only get worse when a fatal dis-
ease threatens their sheep.
Grímur has just returned from the
Cannes film festival, where ‘Hrútar’
won the main award in the Un Certain
Regard section, the biggest prize an
Icelandic director has ever received.
“It’s a circus,” he says of his experi-
ence at the festival. “It’s really two
worlds—you get the filmmakers mix-
ing with intellectuals, people who just
want to talk films and ideas, and then
you have the jet setters.”
Some, of course, belong to both of
these worlds, such as Hollywood roy-
alty Isabella Rosselini, who was head
of the Un Certain Regard jury. “I chat-
ted with her,” Grímur says, “she’s re-
ally interested in sheep, and I hear
that she’s done some shorts about the
sex life of animals. She really liked the
film—and they all did, it was a unani-
mous decision. But it was great meet-
ing her—‘Blue Velvet’ is my favourite
film. She’s a very charming lady.”
From the ‘Summerland’
to ‘Little Moscow’
But how did it all begin? “When the
Super VHS cameras came along in my
teens I started shooting short films
with my friends and really enjoyed
myself behind the camera. In my late
teens, Rúnar Rúnarsson and I made
‘Toilet Culture’—it won some awards
in Denmark and in retrospect it was
the first ‘real’ short I did,” Grímur re-
calls.
“That was twenty years ago and
I’ve been in this business ever since—
and it was never really a conscious de-
cision. But I’ve had periods of doubt—
about this being too hard, impossible
to make a living from. It’s been a con-
stant struggle; for a while during the
boom years I just lived in the cheap
cities of Europe and got by on over-
draft.”
After that, he would make two
documentaries and continue mak-
ing shorts before going to FAMU, the
Czech film school, where he eventu-
ally made ‘Slavek the Shit’, which got
him to Cannes for the first time. He
followed that with ‘Wrestling’, which
was even more successful. Icelan-
dic film producers were increasingly
viewing shorts as a breeding ground
for new talent—and the superstars
of Icelandic shorts were Grímur and
his old co-director of ‘Toilet Culture’,
Rúnar Rúnarsson, who has also won a
truckload of awards for his short films.
The enormous success of his shorts
made his first feature film a bit like
making the difficult sophomore al-
bum. That film, ‘Summerland’, would
have been deemed a successful debut
in most cases, but was considered a
failure given the high expectations for
Grímur. Following that film, he took
time off from features to do two very
successful documentaries: ‘The Pure
Heart’ and ‘The Laxá Farmers’, which
he seemed to enjoy greatly. He raved
about documentary filmmaking when
I met him between those two films
and gave me the impression that he
wouldn’t be returning to feature films
anytime soon.
“I was actually already working on
the screenplay for ‘Rams’ at that time,”
he tells me when I bring this up. “But
‘Summerland’ hadn’t been a success
so I was far from certain that I would
ever find the money to film it. Howev-
er, ‘The Pure Heart’ was a crucial film
for me. I remade myself through it. I
did it all by myself for no money and
sort of found myself again—I found a
new beginning.”
The success of ‘Rams’ will not spell
the end to his documentary career.
“I’m already working on one in Nes-
kaupsstaður. It’s called ‘Little Mos-
cow’ and it’s about the socialism in
Neskaupsstaður [historically one of
the more red towns in Iceland] and
the new tunnel there–it’s a film I want
to make slowly, over a long period of
time,” he tells me.
“I work independently and have to
have many projects in development
just to survive. But I also just some-
times get sick of being in front of the
computer all day—then it’s great to
just go out with the camera and film
stuff. I couldn’t do that if I only did
features—the time between shooting
them can be years so I prefer to work
on documentaries in the meantime.
And to be perfectly honest I enjoy
making documentaries more. Feature
films are far more stressful—there was
a moment during the filming of ‘Rams’
when I hadn’t slept for five days and I
felt like I was about to have a nervous
breakdown. You’re in charge of a big
crew whereas with documentaries
you have a tiny crew, sometimes just
you and the subject.”
However, finding funding for doc-
umentary filmmaking can be limit-
ing. “To get funding from the Icelan-
dic Film Fund, you first have to write
a script,” he says. “That can be very
great for some documentaries, but if
you’re trying to catch the moment, if
you find something great, say, some-
one who wants to blow up parliament
tomorrow and is willing to let you film
it – then you just have to jump on it,
and there is no time to write a screen-
play to raise funds when that hap-
pens.”
Farmers revolt
The documentary that Grímur made
before ‘Rams’, ‘The Laxá Farmers’,
was actually about farmers blowing
up a dam, which happened many years
ago.
‘Rams’ is certainly an aesthetically
and thematically logical continuation
of that. “They both deal with a farm-
er’s revolution—farmers against the
system,” he explains. “I draw a lot on
the characters who blew up the dam,
the Hofstaðir brothers—although un-
like the brothers in ‘Rams’, they were
really good friends. But yeah, I’ve
made documentaries about farmers
and done my research on Icelandic
farms—I worked on a farm as a kid
and watched my grandfather clip his
toenails with those giant scissors. I’ve
also known some of those bachelor
farmers, men who get left behind in
the countryside—when the women
leave, the men wither away.”
He’s also familiar with scrapie,
the disease that kills the sheep in the
film. “It happened to farmers related
to me—I remember the shock, the sor-
row. It’s a story that has never been
properly told re-
ally, neither in films
nor literature, yet
it’s a big part of the
history of Icelan-
dic farms,” he says.
“This has happened
frequently, again and
again in some places.
But it’s not discussed
much.”
Brother rivalry
The rivalry between the two broth-
ers is certainly intense—and also
very comical, as they’re approaching
retirement age, yet still fight like ten-
year-olds. We don’t really know why
they are fighting, although there are
hints. In fact, one of the film’s main
strengths is how subtly suggestive it is
of the reasons behind the conflict—the
audience comes out with a number of
theories about it.
“Our distributor in France told us
he hadn’t talked to his brother for five
years—I told him to give his brother
‘Rams’ for Christmas!” Grímur says.
“Today you could usually solve a situ-
ation like this—the modern man goes
to a therapist, seeks help—but they’re
not of that generation. They don’t want
anything like that and so they are
stuck in a vicious cycle.”
While there are many actors in
‘Rams’, the screen is dominated by
actors Sigurður Sigurjónsson and
Theódór Júlíusson—whom the direc-
tor calls Siggi and Teddi. In their roles
as brothers they don’t talk much, so
the film really becomes about their
faces, shrouded by wild beards that
make them look a bit like the rams they
keep. “It was a big challenge for Siggi
to act so much with his face—Icelandic
films are usually more dialogue-driv-
en,” he says.
“Here he’s playing an introvert
who lives alone. You have to reflect the
feelings in the eyes—it’s something we
studied a lot together. We had a lot of
time—they had read the script a year
and a half before filming. I gave them
a book about sheep farming in Iceland
for Christmas and we did a lot of re-
search. We met a farmer who had dealt
with scrapie, they learned to deal with
the rams and there were three days in
which they learned to drive the trac-
tor. We made a back story and when
we filmed they were simply in charac-
ter.”
Sigurður is a famous actor in Ice-
land—but despite a handful of dra-
matic roles he’s been typecast a bit
after starring in one
of Iceland’s most fa-
mous sketch shows.
“I liked the idea of
Siggi as this sort of
introvert—a little
strange maybe,” he
says, “and Teddi as
the macho one—
much rougher and
bigger. I was actual-
ly determined to get him after watch-
ing him play the lead in ‘Volcano’,” he
adds, referring to the debut feature of
Grímur’s old colleague Rúnar Rúnars-
son.
During the premiere, Grímur con-
vinced the audience to take part in one
big bleating, echoing his other lead
actors—the sheep. “They were like
method actors—you just said 'action'
and they were in character,” he says. “I
had been warned about working with
animals and was a bit worried about
the big sheep scenes. The sheep at the
place we worked on were too grumpy
towards humans—so we got sheep
from a different farm, Halldórsstaðir á
Bárðadal, and they were really friend-
ly—they almost walked to you and they
usually needed fewer takes than the
human actors.”
They still had a rebellious streak in
them. “Once we were herding a hun-
dred sheep and they revolted and ran
all over the place. It took a while to get
them back, but we managed.” Those
rams are now running all over the
world—with the film's rights having
been sold to more than 30 countries
and counting, and its time on the festi-
val circuit just starting. “It doesn’t re-
ally get serious until the fall though,”
Grímur says. “We’ll probably only
go to a couple festivals this summer,
which is good, as I really want to find
a quiet place in the country to work on
some stuff.”
With years of struggle at least tem-
porarily behind him, the future is still
uncertain. “If it comes up I’d rather
go to Europe than to America,” he
says when I ask him if he’ll go abroad
to make a film. “I don’t think I could
make my kind of films in America.
Still, you never know. America, of
course, is not just Hollywood. There
has even been talk of remaking ‘Rams’
in different countries, but I can’t quite
picture it—I guess they would have to
change the species... camels maybe?”
'Hrútar' is shown every day at
Háskólabíó at 17:30 with Eng-
lish subtitles.
We chat with Grímur Hákonarson,
the director of ‘Rams’
I first met Grímur Hákonarson in 2012 at Skjaldborg, a
documentary festival in the Westfjords. I was reporting
on the festival for this very publication and he was on his
way to winning the main prize for ‘The Pure Heart’, a
documentary about an Icelandic country priest fighting
the authorities. It was made for next to no money and shot
with a tiny crew—in most cases just Grímur himself.
Words by Ásgeir H Ingólfsson
Photo by Brynjar Snær
From Cannes To
The Westfjords,
And Back
“When the Super
VHS cameras came
along in my teens I
started shooting short
films with my friends
and really enjoyed
myself behind the
camera. In my late
teens, Rúnar Rúnars-
son and I made
‘Toilet Culture’– it
won some awards
in Denmark and in
retrospect it was the
first ‘real’ short I did.”