This is an audio transcript of the FT Weekend podcast episode: Oscar-nominated directors: ‘Everything Everywhere’ and ‘Triangle of Sadness’”

Lilah Raptopoulos
Hi, listeners. It’s Lilah. So the Oscars announced their nominations this week, and I would like to thank the Academy because it turns out that some of our guests from last year are up for the biggest awards. I’m talking about Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan, otherwise known as Daniels; they’re the directors of Everything Everywhere All at Once; and Ruben Östlund, the director of Triangle of Sadness. So today we’ve decided to reshare those two interviews. Before we get started, I want to quickly remind you that we have a survey running to hear what you think of our show. If you fill it out, you could win a pair of really nice Bose headphones and make us very happy. It’s at FT.com/weekendsurvey. That link is in the show notes.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

OK, let’s get into it. This is FT Weekend, the podcast. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos. Enjoy the show.

Have you seen that new movie Everything Everywhere All at Once? If you haven’t, just bear with me as I try to describe it.

Movie clip
Mrs Wang, are you with us? I am paying attention.

Lilah Raptopoulos
It’s about a Chinese-American family who own a laundromat and who are bad at communicating with each other.

Movie clip
I can see where this story is going. It does not look good.

Lilah Raptopoulos
But there are also multiple versions of them that exist in multiple universes. There’s an evil anti-hero. There’s a lot of kung fu. The characters switch easily between Chinese and English. It’s complicated.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

But this film is killing it at the box office. So we invited the film’s directors, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, into the studio, and I asked them how they define their movie.

Daniel Kwan
It’s about a Chinese immigrant mother who is trying to survive the chaos of modern life, who then gets pulled into the multiverse, which you know, becomes a metaphor for that chaotic life that we’re all trying to move through and exist in.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s Daniel Kwan speaking. Together, he and Daniel Scheinert are known as Daniels or The Daniels. Here’s another take on what this movie is about, this time with commentary from Daniel Scheinert.

Daniel Scheinert
It’s a family drama that gets interrupted by a sci-fi film, that gets sidetracked by a romance, that gets undercut by . . .

Daniel Kwan
 . . . an absurdist comedy.

Daniel Scheinert
An absurdist comedy . . . And then it becomes this blender of narratives, like a beautiful smoothie or a gazpacho of a film.

Daniel Kwan
Mmm.

Daniel Scheinert
Where ah . . .

Daniel Kwan
Cosmic gumbo.

Daniel Scheinert
A cosmic gumbo. Exactly.

Daniel Kwan
Was the question “Please give a short summary”?

Daniel Scheinert
Yeah (laughter).

Lilah Raptopoulos
The Daniels have also been getting rave reviews from critics. The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, they all loved it. And this is only their second feature. Somehow, with Everything Everywhere All at Once, these two young filmmakers have managed to create something strangely perfect for anxious times. To understand the story behind Everything Everywhere All at Once, it helps to know that the Daniels are best known for the music videos that they made in the 2010s. They worked with a wide array of pretty big names from rapper Lil Jon for Turn Down for What to the indie rock band The Shins. These videos, they never had anyone singing in them. They were little surreal universes, like little short films with families fighting or middle-aged people hip thrusting. Then in 2016, they came out with their only other full-length film. It was called Swiss Army Man. Could I pass that one to you? (Laughter)

Daniel Kwan
Yeah. It’s just a real simple feature film about a lonely man who discovers a corpse with powerful farts and rides them across the ocean to escape a deserted island to freedom as beautiful music plays. And that’s the first five minutes. (Laughter) And it’s kind of like . . . 

Daniel Scheinert
And it gets even weirder from there.

Daniel Kwan
Yeah, it’s like an existential buddy film about a man and his corpse best friend. And we like to call it a fart drama because genuinely our goal was, could we make people cry from a fart? (Laughter) And we succeeded with some people.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So the Daniels have always been ambitious, but how did they go from making a bunch of slapstick fart stuff, however deliberate, to making this emotionally nuanced film about familial love? Some of it was the cast. The cast is exceptional. It includes Michelle Yeoh, an actual kung fu movie star. It has Jamie Lee Curtis. Ke Huy Quan is in it, too. You might remember him from The Goonies. Stephanie Hsu — who plays Mei on the The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel — she’s the daughter, Joy. But I wanted to know what else went into it. I guess from the part that you started thinking about this is one film and not a bunch of ideas and started to sort of define what you wanted this film to be in the beginning to what the film became, how did it change? How did the puzzle fit together? Like, were you throwing ideas at the wall and then you found a cohesive theme? What was that process?

Daniel Kwan
Yeah, we’re our process is pretty messy. We throw a lot at the wall and a lot changes. But really, we kind of started with just a multiverse adventure of sorts. And we loved the idea that the protagonist would be our parents’ age.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Daniel Kwan
And kind of like our parents got sucked into one of our movies.

Daniel Scheinert
Yeah. I think one of the interesting things about what makes that so special within the context of the multiverse is the, you know, the multiverse as a beautiful and terrifying vessel for you to explore regret and just the questions of what if. And we knew that if we put someone our own age, someone who was 20 or 30 years old into that premise, it wouldn’t be quite as powerful as someone who has lived a fuller life, who has had many more years to ponder that question of what if? And then adjacent to that, another wonderful parallel was when we realised that the whole immigrant story is kind of already a multiverse story because you exist in three or four worlds. You exist in the world of your family. You live, you exist in the world of the new country that you’ve moved to. And then when you have kids, your kids have this other hybrid world, this third world that exists in either of those places. And the more we dug into that collision of narratives, the more fruitful and exciting it was. And so we just kept chasing that. We kept chasing away to turn this incredibly massive idea into something very, very personal.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mmm. I’ve heard the movie compared to so many things like The Matrix and kung fu movies, but I left it feeling like it reminded me so much of Sliding Doors, that 1998 romantic comedy.

Daniel Scheinert
Mm-hmm. Of course.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And you were talking about that “what if” moment. I mean, the reason that Sliding Doors is like so in the ethos is that question is in so many people’s minds all the time. Like, what if I hadn’t gotten on that train? What are all the paths my life could have taken? Why was that interesting to you?

Daniel Scheinert
I think now I know people have always asked that question. You know, in every moment in history, I feel like people have always asked, you know, what if.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Daniel Scheinert
But I think right now the reason why it’s really ringing true again and having another moment is because the internet almost makes you that much closer to all those possibilities because we are constantly seeing other, I guess, like proxy humans living out different versions of what could have been our lives.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Daniel Scheinert
When I go on Twitter or Instagram or Facebook and I see my classmates and where they are in their lives, knowing that we all came from the same town, that’s like one version of it. And when I see family members and cousins who, you know, came from the same blood as me and all the lives they’re living, it’s, you know, that’s another version of it. But we are just constantly being fed these narratives of other people’s lives that feel, in some ways, so foreign and so distant. But at the same time, something that like could have been. For better or for worse, you know, sometimes we pine for it and sometimes we’re grateful that we don’t have that life or whatever. Even though the movie never really mentions the internet once, it’s very much fuelled by this strange existence we have right now where we are, our lizard brains are trying to keep up with, you know, infinite technology.

Daniel Kwan
That is weird we have we never mentioned the internet, but the internet totally inspired the movie.

Daniel Scheinert
Right? Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Totally.

Daniel Scheinert
But you don’t even need to mention it because, I think, people, even the people . . .

Daniel Kwan
We all know.

Daniel Scheinert
Yeah, you can feel it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I, you know, our, my producer Topher said go into this film blind, like, don’t read anything about it. Don’t watch anything about it before you go. And so it was a real journey (Laughter). Yeah. And it was really cool. Like, you know, there were so many genres in this one film, and I just trusted you. I let go of the reins, and I just trusted you that you were just going to bring me, even when things got chaotic or weird, that like we were going somewhere. And I’m sure there were a lot of very deliberate choices you made to be able to pull that off because I left loving it, and so many people left loving it. So I’m like, what were the internal rules of your movie? Did you have rules for when you switched genres? Like, were there things that matter to get right and didn’t matter if they were right or wrong? Just like, how did we trust you so much? How did you pull that off?

Daniel Scheinert
Wow, thank you. First of all, it sounds like you had the ideal experience, going in blind (Laughter) and then the fact that you were able to . . .

Daniel Kwan
 . . . let go at some point.

Daniel Scheinert
Let go. I think, I think that people who really don’t connect with the film are the ones who, like, are stubbornly holding on the whole time, trying to, you know, reason with the film when the film does not want to be reasoned with, which again, it’s kind of, you know, the point of the movie too, is like sometimes you have to let go to the chaos of our existence and . . .

Daniel Kwan
And that’s like going on a rollercoaster and just like stiffening all your muscles as you go around the bends, you know, like I refuse to . . . 

Daniel Scheinert
Yeah.

Daniel Kwan
 . . . get moved by this.

Daniel Scheinert
And then the next day you throw . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Daniel Scheinert
 . . . out your back. Yeah, exactly. And so, yeah, it was very much a conscious decision to make sure that the audience member always felt like they were in good hands.

Daniel Kwan
Yeah, it’s hard to, like, pin down, like, the rules. Like we talked a ton about rules, but then at the end of the day, it was just a constant conversation about how we wanted the audience to feel each scene and to constantly ask ourselves, you know, how far have we pushed them out of their comfort zone? And is that too far? You know, but also, like if we made the rules too clear and too consistent, then we couldn’t get to where we were trying to get to, you know, which is like eventually we knew we wanted the audience to let go of the reins and have to surrender to the absurdity of infinity.

Daniel Scheinert
Right? There are a lot of moments, a lot of discussions where we had to figure out the difference between confusing in a good way versus confusing in the bad way.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Daniel Scheinert
We actually sometimes had to make things even more confusing to help the audience understand that they’re supposed to be confused, if that makes sense.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Is there an example?

Daniel Kwan
There’s a scene where Jamie Lee Curtis is fighting Michelle Yeoh, somewhat early in the movie, and we were struggling with how to do the leaps from universe to universe, and then we gave them abrasively different music in each universe, and, and something suddenly clicked, where it’s like, it gave you permission to be like for the audience to be like, “Oh, this is supposed to be.”

Daniel Scheinert
This whiplash is intentional . . .

Daniel Kwan
Whiplash.

Daniel Scheinert
 . . . and I’m feeling it.

Daniel Kwan
Yeah. To just be like sentimental music and horror music, you know.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I won’t describe the many different universes that you see in the movie because I don’t want to spoil it. But I did ask the Daniels to tell me about a couple of universes that didn’t make it in.

Daniel Kwan
We have a really obnoxious one. It never even made it into a draft. A lot of times early on, we just try to make each other laugh, and then if we laugh, that’s part one. And then we’re like, Is there anything deeper to that? Is that worth shooting? And sometimes the answer is “No”. Then that doesn’t make it into the script. (Laughter) There’s one universe where we communicate through silences instead of through sounds so like the base layer is constant sound. So it would just be like in this universe, everybody would just stand around going, “Hah”. (Daniels making continuous monotone noise) And like, so we thought, like, you might go to a wedding or a funeral (Laughter) and it’s just like 100 people just going, “Hah”.

Daniel Scheinert
While the person on stage is giving a eulogy, crying but silent (Laughter). Yeah, yeah. Very confusing. High concept. Doesn’t really work.

Daniel Kwan
It didn’t make the cut. Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
To me, though, the most poignant scenes are about family. There’s one scene in particular that a lot of reviewers are commenting on, and it really stuck with me, too. It’s the scene between Joy, the daughter, and Michelle Yeoh’s character, Evelyn. There’s a moment at the start where she looks at her daughter, Joy, and she looks like she’s about to say, “I love you”. And instead, she says, “You’re getting fat”. And I just like I think I felt that gut punch in the theatre from every child of an immigrant. I’m curious about that moment. If you have any stories of the moment, what that moment was about to you?

Daniel Scheinert
Yeah. I mean, you kind of alluded to the fact that it’s a very familiar experience for people who, yeah, who are the children of immigrants. And it’s very interesting to watch the film in a mixed crowd, for lack of a better word, where there’s some people who, you know, my wife, for example, has very loving parents. And so something like saying “You’re looking fat, you should eat healthier” is like so cruel and also very funny. And so some people will laugh at that moment.

Daniel Kwan
Laugh or gasp or go like, “Oh!”

Daniel Scheinert
Yeah, exactly.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Daniel Scheinert
And then, you know, the other half of the audience, the children of immigrants, can, like, feel it. And they understand the, the strange way that that line can both be cruel and loving at the same time. I think one of the things that we wanted to get across with the film is those moments are the way in which our immigrant parents show our love or show their love to us. They don’t have the luxury of showing emotion and being romantic and being, you know, just having this full-on emotional experience and connection that most people do because they’re so busy just trying to survive and trying to hold their lives together, hold their families together. There’s, just so much to do. And so this film became a journey of almost imagining another universe in which our parents were allowed to fully express themselves. Or they had the luxury to, yeah, to, to experience these Hollywood narratives of a romcom, of an action movie, of a, you know, all these, you know, people like to point out the fact that our film is constantly referencing other movies and genres and stuff like that and that we’re movie lovers. But ultimately, what’s so beautiful about that is, yeah, we get to see our immigrant parents experience all the things that people have already experienced in so many other movies and so many other genres.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That feeling of holding everything at once, no pun intended. That’s the thing that feels very hard for us to do right now. You know, that you can be good, but you can make mistakes. You can mean two things when you say one thing. And just because you said the one thing doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. You can want peace but end up, you know, a violent kung fu hero to get there. And I don’t know. How much did you want that to be a lesson or did it end up that way because of all the different things you were trying to do?

Daniel Kwan
I think it makes me think about like we’ve started self-describing ourselves as maximalist filmmakers while (Laughter) promoting the movie and kind of realising that that’s a unique thing as an, as a storyteller to be like, no, we’re going to do that. Like, that’s what we’re going to try to put too much in. And that’s kind of our, what inspires us and maybe our skill set. And I think like we did on a gut level want to make like an overwhelming movie for our overwhelming times, like a movie that kind of spoke to how we were feeling these days, which is kind of a little too connected and a little too sensory overloaded, and somehow while making it give ourselves like a vocabulary for some useful tools when we’re feeling that way.

Daniel Scheinert
Yeah, I think one of the things that you’re responding to and one of the things that we’re, we were reacting to as filmmakers is the fact that our animal brains are constantly essentialising, and constantly simplifying and trying to figure out what the easiest narrative is for everything, including humans. And so what that does is we are, we’re constantly making each other small and minimising each other in order to contain more and more information because, you know, evolutionarily that’s just how we survive, is we create these really quick narratives so that our brain can focus on, you know, “important things”. And as we get more and more connected, I think our primitive lizard brains are constantly going to be having to reassess how we look at each other. And this film is almost an attempt to remind ourselves of the multitudes that we all contain and the multitudes that any idea has — the, the complicated grey areas that exist, whether or not we choose to see it, you know. And, I think, in some ways, unless we as a society understand the way to communicate that constantly to each other, the fact that we all contain multitudes and despite the fact that we are constantly being barraged on all sides with different narratives, we constantly, we always have to be finding ways to do the opposite of minimising each other, trying to . . . 

Daniel Kwan
It’s an OK feeling to have.

Daniel Scheinert
It’s an OK feeling to have.

Daniel Kwan
Not a lot of you feel it.

Daniel Scheinert
But I think . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Daniel Scheinert
I think it’s something we’ll be exploring with a lot of our work, at least within the next couple . . . decades if we’re allowed to keep working. I feel like we’ll be constantly trying to play with this problem. And yeah, hopefully science, art, philosophy, all of this, journalism, all of it will help us figure out how to do that.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm. Well, thank you both so much for being on the show. We loved your film.

Daniels
Thank you so much for having us.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
Sometimes I like going to a movie without knowing anything about it. Just walking into the theatre, almost blind, sitting down, seeing what happens. I did this recently with a movie called Triangle of Sadness. All I knew is that it won the biggest prize at Cannes Film Festival this year, which is called the Palme d’Or. Triangle of Sadness is a dark comedy about a model and an influencer, and it’s a social commentary. But about a third of the way through, it gets very dark and very physical, and I was entirely unprepared. Basically, they’re on a luxury yacht, and there’s a storm outside and the boat starts rocking really wildly. And almost everyone on the cruise starts vomiting. It was approximately 18 minutes of vomiting so much that I actually thought I might vomit. So I had to get up and go outside and listen to it from outside of the door until it was over, and then I came back in. And the message to me was pretty clear. It was “the rich should be punished”. The director, his name is Ruben Östlund, and he seemed to take real pleasure in putting the 1 per cent on a boat and making them suffer. So when I talked to Ruben recently for this episode, I was surprised that he actually doesn’t think of this film in those terms at all.

Ruben Östlund
First of all, I want to say I’m not a fan of the, how do I say, advertisement of the movie as an “eat the rich” movie because what I actually tried to do was to portray everybody as nice. Everybody’s sailing in my movies, but everyone is failing. Not only the rich that ended up as failing; everyone is failing.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Actually, a lot of major critics read Triangle of Sadness as an “eat the rich” movie, and it is sort of being advertised that way in the US. So I wanted to know from Ruben what he thinks people aren’t seeing.

Ruben Östlund
If you look at the characters, who are really the nicest characters in Triangle of Sadness, I would say it’s the oligarchs, the Russian oligarchs, probably (Laughter). He’s a very simpatic guy. You want to spend time with him.

Lilah Raptopoulos
(Laughter) Yeah.

Ruben Östlund
And the British arms dealers (inaudible). They are the, I would say they are the most simpatic characters that I have ever made.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Interesting . . . in that they’re sort of polite even though they’re flawed.

Ruben Östlund
Exactly. So . . .

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Ruben Östlund
So, so I’m not I’m not agreeing on this kind of criticism because I think that people are reading it from a perspective of this is how conventional film is told — ah, the rich people are mean and the poor people are nice. No, look at the film again. It’s not true.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
Triangle of Sadness is a film that has three acts. In the first act, we meet a beautiful couple named Carl and Yaya. He’s a model; she’s an influencer, and they kind of love each other. But they also are clearly together because it’s good for both of their brands.

Triangle of Sadness clip
So is this runway casting for a grumpy brand or a smiley brand?

Lilah Raptopoulos
The second act you know about: Carl and Yaya are on a luxury cruise, and things go really, really bad.

Triangle of Sadness clip
Your looks paid for the tickets. Not bad ah? So what do you do? I sell shit. (sounds of people yelling overlaps with What the world needs now on the background as the ship sinks) The ship is going under.

Lilah Raptopoulos
In the third, they’re shipwrecked. The ship has capsized, and its surviving passengers are on a desert island having to fend for themselves (chaotic noise and music abruptly stops).

Triangle of Sadness clip
This is really bad. This is really, really bad.

Lilah Raptopoulos
By the way, all of this is in the film’s trailer, and it’s in all the reviews so haven’t given away much, but there might be some mild spoilers depending on what you consider a spoiler. So if you don’t like that, you might want to fast forward or come back.

Ruben, welcome to the show. It’s so nice to have you here.

Ruben Östlund
Thank you so much. It’s nice to be here.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Your film was really, I loved it. It was a total wild ride. I would actually really love to hear how you would describe what Triangle of Sadness is about.

Ruben Östlund
(Chuckles) Well, I would say, I got interested in the film when I met my wife eight years ago, and she’s a fashion photographer. So I got interested in her profession. I was a little bit scared of the fashion industry, the beauty industry. It’s scary and attractive at the same time.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.

Ruben Östlund
And I got very interested when she started to tell me about the models, and the fact that the models come from all different parts of society. And that their looks and their beauty have become a currency where some of them that coming from working class actually have climbed into society because of their looks.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.

Ruben Östlund
So I wanted to look in, in the, in the topic with the theme of beauty as a currency. So that was basically the starting point.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
So Ruben became really interested in this idea of the branded couple, that even our most private relations could be connected to economy. And he explores that through Carl and Yaya. We watched them strive to make it, and then we watched them interact with people on the cruise who have made it and staff who are below them on the totem pole until this whole precious balance is interrupted by that awful storm.

Ruben, I’ve been waiting to talk to you about this since I saw the film. There’s a storm and basically everyone starts vomiting, and it’s filmed tilting back and forth. So you feel like you’re on the boat in this storm. And it was really the most uncomfortable 30 minutes of film I think I’ve ever experienced. It was, I had to actually go outside the theatre and watch it through the glass because I was so nauseous.

Ruben Östlund
Interesting . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
And that isn’t to say it wasn’t effective. I will never forget it. Can you tell me about that? Like, how did you decide how far you wanted to take that scene?

Ruben Östlund
You know, I come from a ski filming background so I was making ski films, and I was travelling in the US and in Europe and filming my skiing friends when they were trying to do spectacular things as possible. And every day was about to try to push it a little harder than we have ever done before. So that is a little bit in my backbones. When I do a scene, I want to push farther than I ever seen anyone else do before. And when it came to the vomiting scene or the storm on the yacht, first of all, I have to say, it basically started when I was doing research because I went on one of these cruise, luxury cruise ships incognito. I didn’t tell anyone that I was doing research for making it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Oh that’s cool. Yeah.

Ruben Östlund
And then one night they had the Italian buffet. And that night, it was also strong winds coming in. And the weather got rougher and rougher and the waves got bigger and the boats started to roll. And, you know, in one of these fine dining situations where people don’t know which fork and which knife they should take when they eat and this etiquette is so strong, it was very interesting to see when the social contract was broken, when we all of a sudden have to behave in a way that we are not allowed to behave.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Ruben Östlund
And for me, the most interesting thing was not to look at people vomiting, it was much more interesting to look at people looking at people vomiting. So if I had someone in front of me, I was sitting and eating this dinner and they hear someone vomit in the end of the dining room, what will this person do? Will it . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Ruben Östlund
 . . . continue eat or I, should I leave? Or should I (Laughter) I’m just very, how to say, interested in when social contracts are broken.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.

Ruben Östlund
And then, you know, I had this idea that Woody Harrelson should play a Marxist captain.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right . . . 

Ruben Östlund
And I thought it was a hilarious idea, you know, a Marxist captain on a luxury yacht. And the idea was that he was supposed to get really, really drunk and have a political discussion with Russian oligarchs through the microphone system. To this vomiting guests of the luxury yacht. And I knew if I don’t go far enough, it’s not going to be anything. So I decided that I, if I really, really push it, there will be a certain point where the audience would say, like, you know, “Please save the guests. They have had enough”. And then I would go five steps further (Laughter).

Lilah Raptopoulos
Eventually, the storm dies down. The puking is over. The survivors find themselves on a desert island, Robinson Crusoe style. And on this island, the hierarchy of the luxury cruise has turned completely upside down because the currency here isn’t money anymore. It’s being able to survive in the wild. So a woman whose job on the boat was a toilet cleaner, her name is Abigail, she’s the only one who knows how to catch fish and make fire. So she becomes the most powerful person on the island. And at first you’re watching and you feel like, “Go, Abigail. Hell yeah, eat the rich”. But then, she starts to get power drunk, and she gets corrupted, too. And people are using whatever currency they have on this island, in a place where there’s nothing, to win her favour. Flattery. Flirting. Friendship. Beauty.

I’d love to hear a little bit about your thought process behind that because that is, that’s an example of like who is nice and who is mean.

Ruben Östlund
Yeah. Well, there’s a famous quote that says, “The abuse of power comes as no surprise”. And I think that when you are in the, let’s say, upper part of the hierarchy, you have to be very careful and see, look at your own behaviour and see what it brings out from you. And so for me, it was also something that I wanted to look at because I, parts of the film were written during the #MeToo movement.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.

Ruben Östlund
And I thought it was very interesting to give Carl, the male model, the currency of beauty and sexuality when he is on this island and there is a powerful woman on top. Will he use his beauty and sexuality as a currency in order to get a little bit more food?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.

Ruben Östlund
(Chuckles) And what will be interesting, will Abigail, then, twice as old as Carl’s character . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm. The toilet cleaner . . . 

Ruben Östlund
Yeah. Will she invite him? Will she take the chance? Will she, will she maybe start to think that, well, so much responsibility I have on this island — I’m fishing and cooking for everybody — shouldn’t that give me some kind of advantage?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Ruben Östlund
So trying to step away from a little bit of explanation that has to do with a man, woman, skin colour and so on and look at how our behaviour is changing because of which position we have in a financial and social structure.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. It’s sometimes felt a little bit less to me about wealth and more about advantage, as you say, sort of like how we play each other in order to get the most.

Ruben Östlund
You know, actually, sometimes it’s interesting to talk about this because I think that’s how we are using our pole position and how we are obviously manipulating in order to get what we want. It’s so subtle. Most of the 99 per cent of the time. And of course, we’re using an island, using a luxury yacht, using the fashion world that is, at least the fashion world and the yacht is, there’s so strong hierarchies in these worlds.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.

Ruben Östlund
And then I wanted to take away these hierarchies and then look, OK, what happens if we tip the pyramid over.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And, like, big picture, what is the moral question you’re trying to answer?

Ruben Östlund
I don’t know if I have any moral questions that I’m trying to answer, but you know what, I have always been interested in sociology.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.

Ruben Östlund
And what I think is so beautiful with sociology is that it doesn’t point the fingers on the individual and put shame and blame on the individual. It’s actually showing with this context our behaviour, I can identify with failing as a human being, with this context, with this set up, I can understand that we, humans, maybe don’t act how we have been learned, how to act when it comes to ethics and morality. So I always have been interested in trying to create set ups that is very hard to handle for the characters and very often they are inspired of things that I have experienced myself. So not put the blame on the individual, but show the context and try to explain something about our behaviour through a context.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm. Ruben, this was such a pleasure. Thank you so much for joining.

Ruben Östlund
Thank you so much for having me.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show this week. Thank you for listening to FT Weekend, the podcast from the Financial Times. Next week we will have novelist Gabrielle Zevin who wrote Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. And we’ll also have the story of the sketchy Rolex grey market. Again, we would love if you could fill out our survey to make this show even better for you. The link is at FT.com/weekendsurvey, which is in the show notes alongside everything mentioned today. Please also say hi in other ways anytime. You can email us at ftweekendpodcast@ft.com. We’re on Twitter @FTWeekendpod, and you can find me on Instagram and Twitter @lilahrap. I am mostly chatting with listeners on Instagram so come say hi there. I am Lilah Raptopoulos, and here’s everyone who worked on these segments — Katya Kumkova, our senior producer; Lulu Smith, our producer; and Molly Nugent and Zoe Sullivan as contributing producers; our sound engineers Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco; and our executive producer Topher Forhecz. Original music is by Metaphor Music. And special thanks goes, as always, to Cheryl Brumley. Take care. Have a lovely weekend, and we’ll find each other again next week.


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