After several promising shorts and smaller features, Swedish director Marcus Carlsson enjoyed a good spotlight as his third feature, The Quiet Beekeeper [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Marcus Carlsson
scheda film], opened the 49th edition of the Göteborg Film Festival, where it is also competing in the Nordic Competition. Bees are indeed at the centre, as is their keeper and his family in this humanistic tale with several personal connections to the director himself.

Cineuropa: The film plays out in the colourful province of Värmland, in midwestern Sweden. What’s your personal relationship with this region?
Marcus Carlsson: My mother’s from there, and we shot very close to her childhood surroundings. Our family has a summer cottage close by that I share with my brothers these days. So, it’s a close personal connection.

The Quiet Beekeeper is your third film. The first two, Your Childhood Should Never Die and Love & Will, had limited distribution but also generated some positive buzz. How has the journey been?
They’re all indie movies with low budgets, including this new one. But my graduation film, Your Childhood Should Never Die, did get some attention and was also screened on SVT. Both played Göteborg, in the Nordic Lights section, and one of my shorts also won a prize here. The Quiet Beekeeper was made through the Moving Sweden initiative, for filmmakers in their early stage. The funding is modest, but the financing process is fairly swift.

Your leading actor, Adam Lundgren, is credited as co-screenwriter. Can you talk about that collaboration?
I often devise the main character together with the main actor – Mike Leigh is probably the most famous proponent of this method. Adam was involved in the project for a full year before we started shooting; we would sit and write together or communicate online, so he certainly deserved this credit.

We also delve into the world of bees. What drew you there?
I originally had a profession connected to road work in mind, something my own father also did, again for a personal connection. I’ll save that for another film. What attracted me with the bees was that the main character would be engaged in this absolutely crucial part of our ecological survival. Hives that are small communities, actually and metaphorically, where someone will fly out and start a new community, or family. It’s tremendously interesting on so many levels. Visually, it also felt very compelling. Personally, I have no connection to bees, but I certainly got educated along the way. A whole new world opened up.

Visually, it works well. There’s almost a small genre of “bee movies” out there; one that comes to mind is Theo Angelopoulos’s The Beekeeper.
Angelopoulos served as a certain inspiration here. But the one that really hits home is Ulee’s Gold, starring Peter Fonda, who walks around in a flannel shirt without saying much, not unlike Adam’s character. I saw it at a young age, and it made a great impact. I made a little director’s statement where I mention both Peter Fonda and also Kelly Reichardt, who can get the surroundings to breathe and almost speak, like a character telling a story.

You also thank Jan Troell in the end credits. Was he involved in some way?
We’ve enjoyed a little mail exchange and also spoken on the phone a few times. He hasn’t been directly involved, but he has, so to speak, given his blessing. Moreover, he has served as a guiding light to me, as he’s one of the very best, in Sweden and the world. I just rewatched his film Here Is Your Life, which still, after 60 years, makes a mark. I even named my main character after the main character in that film, Olof Persson. Jan and Bo Widerberg are among my big heroes, for their humanism and their almost non-existent cynicism. I really look up to them.

One of Widerberg’s big joys was casting professionals and non-professionals side by side. You seem to concur – which brings us to Hedvig Nilsson as Olof’s daughter, a true revelation. How did you find her?
She came to the audition in wooden clogs. Her test wasn’t great. “This just went straight to hell,” she said. There and then, my gut feeling told me, “This is the one – I couldn’t give a damn if she can act or not.” Long story short, I was right. She also turned out to be excellent in marksmanship, which I wrote into the story – originally, Lise was supposed to play basketball. She also kept all of the actors in check when it came to speaking the right dialect. She became the very worst, and very best, critic.