Lukas Moodysson has been to the dark side. The 45-year-old Swedish director charmed our socks off with coming-of-age tales ‘
Show Me Love’ (1998) and ‘
Together’ (2000). Then something snapped. Moodysson’s third feature, ‘
Lilya 4-Ever’, was an unrelentingly bleak story about human trafficking. He followed that up with intense, experimental films that hardly anyone watched. But now he is back on heart-winning form with ‘
We Are the Best!’, the story of three girls in a punk band. So how did the filmmaker get happy again?
‘Sometimes you need to focus on the great things in life. I worked as a professor at a film school in Helsinki, and set my students a task to make a short film about the idea that life is shit but can also be fantastic. A lot of movies say that everything is either terrible or great. But to find both, sadness and strength, vulnerability and energy, that’s what I’ve always tried to do.’
‘I said a few years ago that I was sick of filmmaking. Part of what brought me back was this script, and the idea of working with children. But also, teaching really inspired me. I had so many discussions with my students about how to make films and why to make them, and I started to get that happy fever back that you feel on a film set. You’re working out how to shoot a scene and it’s like a chess problem. You’re not sure you can solve it but you really want to try.’
‘I’m very affected by things around me: there is so much I’m interested in, things I get upset by, things that make me happy. I find it difficult to focus on one project and maintain one feeling. In the middle of making a film I always want to change it! I have to be blindfolded, like a horse with blinkers. If I had total freedom, my films would be chaos.’
‘Maybe it’s just laziness, but there are a lot of scenes in this film where I didn’t really know what was happening during the filming. I was confused, and those were the best days for me. I don’t want to control everything so precisely that my actors turn into robots.’
‘I look at people with an affectionate eye. With some filmmakers, you can feel they have a lot of intelligence but the film is like a surveillance camera, too remote. I like my characters, and I want good things to happen to them.’
‘We Are the Best!’ opens in UK cinemas on Fri Apr 18.
Watch the ‘We Are the Best!’ trailer
