Reykjavík Grapevine - 03.02.2017, Qupperneq 30

as private. He muses on how much
easier it would really be, today, for
a teenage boy to come out to an all-
male friend group in one of Reyk-
javík’s suburbs. He remembers
two friends who didn’t come out
until the third year of art school,
much to his surprise.
Guðmundur’s seen the conflicts
of ‘Hjartasteinn’ play out in the
lives of the young actors tasked
with enacting them—those kids
who made the choice he never
would have, back in a different
time. He’s seen his actors go back
and forth between being uptight
and open about the film’s themes,
whether they’re with their school
friends, or on-set with other art-
ists. Ultimately, Guðmundur
credits the ten-month rehearsal
process, and the kids’ own open
minds, with getting them to the
point where they were comfort-
able overcoming their shyness and
giving the raw, compelling perfor-
mances he speaks of with evident
pride.
“We trained them as a sport
group,” Guðmundur says of his
young cast, including several ath-
letes. “We kept them all together, it
was always about the team spirit,
no one was allowed to say that any-
one was boring... They realized re-
hearsal is like practice and shoot-
ing is the game. Sports kids, they
know it's not always fun… They
didn't have the responsibility of
making a great performance as
long as they would just try what
I asked, and never say ‘I can't do
that.’ I think we managed to take a
lot of the responsibility away from
them and make it more enjoyable
so they could be relaxed.”
“Relaxed” is not the first word
that comes to mind, watching
scenes unfold in long takes be-
tween boys and girls engaged in
the agonizing two-step of flirta-
tion and experimentation, but
it makes sense; Guðmundur de-
scribes blocking of scenes in ki-
netic terms, as a “dance between
the cameraman and the kids.”
That the young actors were free to
express themselves was key for a
film about youthful self-discovery.

Growing up
That’s the perspective Guðmundur
tried to stay within whilst filming
scenes featuring minors that are
as sexual as they are sweet. Teen-
agers, of course, do not think of
themselves as innocents, and nei-
ther did he. “I have one rule when
I'm working with kids,” Guðmun-
dur explains, “and it's to try not
to put my adult mind into what
I'm allowed to do. For example
the scenes of Þór masturbating,
I thought: What did I do when I
was this age, I did this, it was nor-
mal for me, so it's normal for us
to show it.”
After ‘Hjartasteinn’, Guðmun-
dur is finding that vividly youthful
perspective hard to shake. “I actu-
ally had decided to grow up, do a
film about grown-ups, but then
this story has been haunting my
dreams,” he says of the feature he’s
working on now. “It's very differ-
ent from this one, much more in
line with ‘Gummo’ and ‘Kids’—the
brutal behavior of teenagers. It's
a boys’ group dynamic. They’re a
little older... so I'm growing up.
Slowly.”
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