An Icelandic family in the midst of a separation is the premise of The Love That Remains [+lee también:
crítica
tráiler
entrevista: Hlynur Pálmason
ficha de la película], Hlynur Pálmason’s fourth feature and his third entry on the Croisette. Presenting the film in the Cannes Première section of the 78th Cannes Film Festival, Pálmason shared some thoughts on the creative process behind it, which was at times quite close to that of the visual artistry of one of his main characters.

Cineuropa: Anna, the mother in the film, is a visual artist. Do you see any similarity or difference between her creative process and your own?
Hlynur Pálmason: The big difference is that making movies is like a big, moving train that you can’t stop because there are so many people on board. Meanwhile, the visual artist is alone in the studio. But what I’ve tried to do for the last couple of years is to combine the two, to live less of a regular movie life where you write and develop your film for a couple of years, then you finance it, and then you shoot it for a very short period. Instead, I try to have several projects running in parallel, and shoot them on and off at the same time. Then, when something feels ready, I’ll finance it and then do the principal photography over a short time. That’s actually what I’ve done for the last couple of years, also for The Love That Remains. The opening scene, with the demolition of the building and the roof being lifted off, was actually shot in 2017. All of the things I’m working on now are sort of moving around and bumping into each other. It’s very strange, in a way.

Why did you choose to make Anna a visual artist?
For a long time, I didn’t know what she’d do. I started out with the need to explore a family. I did a female, a male, kids, a dog, some chickens and a car, and then their routines, rituals and habits, and decided who they knew and where they lived. And everything just emerged out of this process – very non-preconceived and organic. One thing that might well have triggered it was that image of the roof being lifted off. That was, in reality, my own old studio being torn down. Maybe something in my subconscious was at work there.

Did you shoot that tearing down with the purpose of later using it artistically?
No. I filmed it out of impulse, fear or panic, as a political act, because I wanted to stop the municipality from tearing it down. When I then saw the material, the images kind of hit me as a beautiful opening for a film. I often need mysterious things like these that create a desire within me to explore what kind of film this could be. And automatically, there was a connection to this portrait that I wanted to make, of a family splitting up and getting fractured. Another narrative thread I shot separately was the storyline with the children building the figure, shot two years prior to principal photography. I shot in the middle of the scriptwriting process, which, in turn, was greatly affected by this footage. It’s actually where the key scene is, as far as I’m concerned. When the knight figure – whom I call Joan of Arc – wakes up, I suddenly had the last chapters.

The early chapters are rooted in a realist tradition, not unlike Mike Leigh’s cinema. But as the film moves on, these fantastical elements take it in quite a different direction.
Very true. By adding these contrasts, I can strike an entirely new balance. But I totally connect with the Mike Leigh reference. He can be raw and impulsive but, at the same time, so tightly constructed. And he still feels so spontaneous, crazy and nice.

To how great an extent is the film autobiographical? Not least in light of the fact that your own kids play the children in the family…
And my dog plays their dog. And their car is my car. Not that much in the story is autobiographical, actually. I’m not separated myself, for one. But it’s happening a lot around me, it’s very omnipresent, so the concept of separation kind of crept up on the movie. There’s something very interesting in that you can feel how much you have if you lose it, if it’s taken away from you. And I think that connected very much with what I wanted the film to be. There’s this family, and there’s a lot of beauty, and you really need to take care of it. It’s so easy to take things for granted.