Five Fun Facts About Force Majeure
Ruben Östlund’s 2014 film, Force Majeure, is an incisive examination on gender expectations that’s loaded with awkward moments that boil over with wry black humor. Through a very restrained anthropological lens, Östlund exposes and explores truths that make you think as much as they make you squirm. It’s easily one of the best films of the last decade, and now it’s inspired an American remake (which isn’t likely to appear anywhere in a best of list).
To celebrate the upcoming release of Downhill, starring Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, we’re serving up five fun facts about the Swedish film for which its based on!
YouTube was a key contributor to the film.
Ruben Östlund got a lot of inspiration for several scenes in the film, including the initial seeds of the idea, from real footage uploaded to YouTube. “Feature filmmaking is so focused on the storytelling, but the moving image has a fantastic ability to capture human behavior,” he said. “You don’t focus on the storytelling, you’re just focusing on a moment or a situation. On the characters, and what they’re doing. So we have to look at them more like we look at animals. I think that the most powerful moving images that I have seen in the last 15 years have been on YouTube.”
The key scenes included the avalanche scene that serves as the catalyst for the film’s events, the scene when actor Johannes Kuhnke hilarious breaks down ("Best Cry Ever”), and the scene with the bus going down the long winding hill near the end ("Idiot Spanish busdriver almost kills students”) — the latter is nearly identical to the original YouTube video. Even the repeated accordion score was taken directly from a YouTube clip of a 12-year-old playing Vivaldi’s “Summer”. Östlund reasoned that "...if someone captured an event or action or pang of emotion on camera and uploaded to the Internet, then it happened in real life. And it could happen in Force Majeure.
Ruben Östlund freaked out when his didn’t receive the Oscar nomination.
It’s true, and ironically, it, too, was uploaded to YouTube, creating an odd 360 back to the film’s initial origins, which you can watch here:
He even lost his shit again for The Square — only this time in celebration of receiving the Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language film, which it lost to Sebastián Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman — which you can also watch here:
Östlund actually had a friend who had a similar incident to Force Majeure’s central characters.
Östlund stated in an interview that appears in the film’s iTunes Extras: “When I told a friend of mine about [the avalanche video on YouTube], I told them that I wanted to put a family out on that restaurant to be in that incident in the film. He said, ‘Well, what happens if the father runs away and then has to come back to face the actions he’d done toward his family?’ In that moment, I knew that this [was] something that we [could] build a feature film on, and then make it take place on a ski resort. And then after that, I was telling this incident to different friends that I had, and there was this couple that I know that had a similar incident that [caused] some consequences between them. They went into a mall in Columbia, and then suddenly, someone was screaming in the mall that there was a gunman. They told everyone in the mall to throw themselves down on the floor. What happens next is my friend is throwing himself down behind a counter, and his girlfriend is throwing herself onto the floor in a dressing room, so she’s kind of exposed. As it turns out, there was no danger. Afterwards, when they’re walking back to the hotel, they’re going through the incident, and she’s quite disappointed that he ran away from her. They’re starting to talk about this when they reach the hotel room, and my friend is like, ‘What do you want me to be, an action hero or something? Do you want me to protect you with my body?’ And she’s very disappointed and says, ‘If you thought we were going to die, why wouldn’t you want us to die together?’ It took almost a half year or something, and they had quite a big problem trying to get over it. It was obvious that it was the expectations of the gender and the expectations of the man and the woman, and the roles they play were highlighted. That was also the same thing I was interested in in Force Majeure with the avalanche incident.”
The film’s avalanche scene has become an unexpected meme.
Although the film isn’t exactly the most obvious meme-making material, twitter was met with a flood of Force Majeure memes in June of last year. Here’s a few tweets we pulled from W Magazine:
Not surprisingly, a lot of internet dwellers weren’t aware that the clip used came from a film. However, Gizmodo surprisingly called the clip “totally fake”, claiming that “One of the things that’s probably created some confusion is the quality of the video. The viral clip is somewhat pixelated and not at all as sharp as the video that you see in the trailer… This, no doubt, is giving people the impression that it was captured by security cameras or a smartphone rather than professional movie cameras.” This really pissed off Guy Lodge, a film critic for The Observer:
Improv was a key aspect to the casting process, and it allowed Östlund to tweak and tighten the script during pre-production.
“I think it’s always a quite hard process to find the right actor, and what we do is try improvisations around the situation. So, for example, in the moment where Tomas is supposed to start the lie [and say], ‘I didn’t run. You can’t run in ski boots,’ and all those absurd arguments that he has to help protect himself. I tried this situation with a lot of different actors, and I just watch [and go], ‘Okay, who is dealing with it in the best way? Who is expressing all the things that we were talking about before, shame and guilt? Who is struggling the most to avoid losing face in front of the others?’ So, for me, the casting is a lot about me being in the scene also, playing against the actor, so that I get the knowledge about the scene and trying to improve the scene when we are doing the casting. [I would] save things that that the actors [would say] that I [thought] were good. And then you just compare this actor to that actor and [decide] which one makes it the most painful to watch — because I really wanted it to be painful to watch the film. I think those tragic moments are so close to humor. Like those long silences and long pauses between the awkward moments in the dialogue and stuff like that; who is performing that and making it the most wrong. When we were doing the shooting, we tried to [schedule a lot of] time to do each scene. We’d have one camera position each day, and we’d just repeat the same scene over and over again. At the end of the day, I would try to get everybody to perform the best that they had done during the day and almost building up energy like a football game; ‘Okay, now we only have five takes left. Everybody ready? All right, let’s go! Let’s perform the best we have today!’ So, yeah, I don’t think I have a special method for casting. The casting process is just trial and error, I guess.”
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