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JAN TROELL: ART IS THERE TO CAPTURE THE EVERLASTING MOMENTS OF LIFE

15.03.2010

Humble and soft spoken Jan Troell shared with the journalists at his press conference yesterday that the actual material for Maria Larsson’s Everlasting Moments was collected by his wife who has been interviewing her father’s aunt for 6 years. The most interesting idea to him was that Maria’s life was changed when she started taking pictures, the same way the director’s life changed when he started taking pictures when he was 12 and he experienced the same miracle in the dark room when out of nothing images appear. Then, instead of his wife making a documentary, they made a feature film together about it. Although the story is that of a Swedish family, it appealed to many a people throughout the world. “It never happened to me for a film of mine to be accepted in such a similar way by audiences form Far East to Far West and I am really amazed by it,” noted Troell. No matter the success though it was a difficult film to make and it took two years for the producer to gather the money for the budget from 26 different financiers form Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Germany.

In an interview you say that you have always been fascinated by real people and real life, and this is what you always wanted to capture in your movies. Why not then become strictly a documentary director?

Jan Troell: I did documentaries at the beginning of my career and I still do. I mix documentaries with feature films all the time. And I see no contradiction in that.

Why is this element of reality so interesting to you? In cinema or in any other piece of art you have the liberty of writing your own story, you can make things up and you’re not bound to follow the reality.

Jan Troell: To capture reality is not something that I intend to do on any purpose. For example, Emigrants is based on a novel and the novel off course is to some extent based on reality - in looking for people in history and so on - but it was a made up story. My first feature film Here is Your Life (1966) was also based on a novel that to some extent was autobiographical. When I deal with that in a film I include also my own experience to some extent. Then there was the story of Andre who wanted to get up in the air and fly in a balloon in Flight of the Eagle (1982) which was a true story from real life. It was not my idea to make the film – I was asked to do it. What I want to say is that generally I like very much to know that the story that I film really happened, one way or another. Off course, I wouldn’t want completely to make it the same and I can’t. I use my own imagination to add things.

Like in Maria Larsson’s Everlasting Moments it’s not at all a real life, there’s fiction to it. But it is something that I have to believe in myself. One of my films, Bang (1977), which wasn’t seen by many people but it was at the Cannes festival at the time, has my personal memories as a base from which a completely new story was born. It is a fantasy and a fiction, so I am not against mixing them.

Maria Larsson’s Everlasting Moments is also a film about the opportunity that art gives to people living in harsh conditions to escape from them. It this the main purpose of art for you, not only then but today also?

Jan Troell: Yes, it is true, you have interpreted the main theme of the film right. It’s been similar for me – I could have continued being a schoolteacher for the rest of my life, but I don’t think I would have been good enough teacher. So art definitely changed my views on life and helped me make the transition to cinema.

In your latest film the moments that last forever are those captured by the camera. Is art the only mean of transmission and capturing of the moments that should not be forgotten?

Jan Troell: We all have a need to express ourselves, to tell other people of our experiences, of our feelings and that is the base of any expression in art. Everyone needs to share with the others what they think they know or feel or they wish they knew.

After Emigrants you made several movies in America. Why was your stay there so brief?

Jan Troell: I made only two films there, Zandy's Bride (1974), starring Gene Hackman and Liv Ullmann, and Hurricane (1979), which was produced by Dino De Laurentis and was shot in the South Pacific on the island Bora Bora. The latter was an enormous film with a lot of special effects and it was in a way very far away from what I would have deliberately chosen to do. I hesitated for a long time and I said “no” a couple of times. I finally said “yes”, mainly for two reasons: first, it was really exciting to try to do this and second, they give you much more money in Hollywood, and at that time I didn’t have a film to work on in Sweden because I couldn’t get a financing.

I don’t regret trying but it didn’t become a very good film, I didn’t feel I did a good job on it. The machinery in such a film is so big that it doesn’t give you much space for expressing yourself, does it? It was, on the other hand, a fascinating experience and I met so many interesting people and wonderful actors – I worked again with Max von Sydow, I met Trevor Howard, Jason Robards, Mia Farrow.

You are not only a director, but you are also involved in the scriptwriting and you are the DOP of your films. Does this give you more freedom to achieve what you actually want in a certain film? Isn’t there a bigger pressure at the same time because you have to work in three different directions?

Jan Troell: Yes and yes – everything has a plus and a minus. When it comes to operating the camera, which I do, on the plus side is that I can decide for myself in the moment if I suddenly want to pan the camera, or focus, or zoom into a person, I can work on impression. I don’t have to make all the decisions in advance and then give them to someone else. This is very important to me. At the same time though, when I am behind the camera, the good thing is that I see directly the composition but I have to divide my attention between some technical things, whether I am focused on the right person, etc. and this steals some time from concentrating on my work with the actors. This is a minus.

But to me the plus is so much bigger. And also today, the technique is so good you can connect the camera directly to the player and see what you got, even if you shoot in film. We used this for Maria Larsson’s Everlasting Moments, so whenever I thought I missed something in the take I could go back and reshoot it.

What were your influences when you started to work as a filmmaker?

Jan Troell: My father bought a 16 mm camera in 1928 and I was born in 1931. I grew up with home movies. We had a cinema across the street and when I was small I went to see a lot of movies and I had the influence of the film in a natural way, so to speak. The most important thing was when I started taking pictures myself when I was 14 and later when I borrowed a film camera and started shooting myself.

Everything influenced me – the French New Way, Fellini, Tarkovsky, Kieslowski, Truffaut, John Ford, Scorsese. Not that I’m trying to make it the same way but I have the experience of seeing their films inside me. When I see a bad film though I get discouraged and I want to stop making films!

Also, I started to make short movies while I was an elementary school teacher and I intended to use one of them in class to teach the pupils. A person from the TV in Malme, my home town, watched it and decided to show it on the TV. This was an important step for me. In those days the TV needed films to show, they didn’t have any productions and that is why not so very experienced filmmakers could get into the film business. We didn’t have a film school then either and we started from theatre, we moved to TV, or we started with a job in a film production and learned everything from inside, we had to go all the way. The climate was very different then.

Lora Traykova

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LESS THAN A MONTH TO SUBMIT YOUR FILMS TO SOFIA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2011.

11.11.2010

The 15th Sofia International Film Festival will be held from 4 until 20 March 2011 in Sofia, Bulgaria. Deadline for film submissions: December 1, 2010