The Big Picture · Interview

Ruben Östlund Is Trying to Provoke You | The Big Picture (Ep. 31)

October 27, 2017/ 28 min/ Sean Fennessey

Ruben Östlund walks through The Square, the dinner-party ape scene he built out of a GG Allin YouTube clip and a Terry Notary demo reel, the bystander-effect idea that runs from Play through Force Majeure, and the pitch for his next film, a modeling-world satire called Triangle of Sadness.

4 films across 1 segment.

AI-generated This episode was transcribed and analyzed with AI models. The matches aren't perfect — expect the occasional misheard title or a link to the wrong film.

Ruben Östlund on satire, provocation, and playing the ape

Ruben Östlund on

The Square 2017

The satire of art-world pretension he'd just finished. Traces back to a real 2008 case: a Gothenburg mall where boys were mugged in daylight while adults did nothing, which he'd already used as the basis for Play. He turned that bystander-effect idea into an art installation, then built the film around a museum curator (Claes Bang) hosting it. The dinner-gala scene where Terry Notary's performance artist goes full ape came from two places: YouTube clips of the punk musician GG Allin baiting his own audience, and a demo reel of Notary (a motion-capture veteran) showing off his chimp and gorilla walks. Elisabeth Moss and Dominic West round out the cast, brought in partly to get the film more attention in the U.S.

Ruben Östlund on

Force Majeure 2014

His prior film, well received enough to make him think an Oscar foreign-language nomination was a lock. It wasn't. He and producer Erik Hemmendorff filmed their own reaction to getting shut out and posted it to YouTube as 'Swedish director freaks out when he misses out on Oscar nomination,' jet-lagged and eating apples on camera. Some viewers didn't realize the breakdown was staged.

Ruben Östlund on

Play 2011

His 2008-conceived film about a real string of mall robberies in his native Gothenburg, where bystanders never intervened. The idea of a marked-off 'square' as a symbolic pact to help each other started here, and it later became the seed of his next film's title.

Ruben Östlund on

Triangle of Sadness

The next project, still just a pitch at the time of this interview: a satire of the modeling and beauty industry centered on a male model whose career is cratering as he goes bald. Östlund jokes the title's an accident, following square with triangle and, eventually, an 'octagon of confusion' that never gets finished.

Also mentioned raised along the way

The last great thing he'd seen Weiner

Coming up on the show Thor: Ragnarok

Not films filtered out: TV, games, ads

YouTube GG Allin's Boston performance clipsSwedish director freaks out when he misses out on Oscar nominationTerry Notary's chimp/gorilla demo reel