Triangle of Sadness [DVD]

RUBEN ÖSTLUND

Ruben Östlund was born in 1974 and grew up on an island on the West Coast of Sweden. He studied at the University of Gothenburg where he met Erik Hemmendorff with whom he later founded Plattform Produktion. An avid skier, Östlund directed three ski films, alluding to his taste for long sequence shots, a taste he structured and developed throughout his film studies.

TRIANGLE OF SADNESS is his sixth feature and premiered in competition at Cannes 2022.

INTERVIEWER: Let’s start with the title: what does "triangle of sadness“ refer to?

RUBEN: It’s a term used in the beauty industry. A friend sat next to a plastic surgeon at a party and, after a quick look at her face, he said, “Oh, you have a quite deep triangle of sadness… but I can fix that with Botox in "minutes”.

He was referring to a wrinkle between her eyebrows. In Swedish it’s called ‘trouble wrinkle’ and it suggests you’ve had a lot of struggles in your life.

INTERVIEWER: Your films are rooted in European cinema, but this is your first English-language film. Did you find the process challenging?

RUBEN: Yes, because there are nuances that I don’t know about in the English language that I know in Swedish. Having said that, my scenarios and themes are simple, and they have a universality, so it is easy for the actors to relate to them. I always work in the same way: during casting and rehearsals, I improvise the scenes with the actors; and I later use some of that material in the script when it is better than the original dialogue.

INTERVIEWER: Directors often talk about having ‘good’ or ‘bad’ luck when shooting – do you feel that you were blessed with TRIANGLE OF SADNESS?

RUBEN: We shot the exteriors on Christina O, the old Onassis yacht, which turned out to add quite a fun meta layer when we blew her up. That yacht is such a strong symbol of the elite of the 60s and 70s, and myriad famous, powerful men like Churchill have spent a lot of time on her.