Director Ruben Östlund announced in Cannes that he wanted one of the scenes in his upcoming airplane disaster movie The Entertainment System Is Down to prompt the biggest walkout in the history of cinema.
Seven months on, the Swedish two-time Cannes Palme d’Or winner is getting closer to realizing this ambition having completed the screenplay for the film.
“It’s being translated into English. We’ll be going everywhere for the casting… The aim is to shoot in early 2025,” the director told Deadline at the Les Arcs Film Festival in the French Alps earlier this week.
As previously revealed, the social satire will be set on a long-haul flight which descends into deadly chaos when the inflight entertainment system goes down.
“Modern human beings are used to being able to distract themselves with screens, we’re never bored. Soon after take-off on this long-haul flight – I was thinking something like London to Sydney – the passengers get the horrible news that the entertainment system is not working. As their iPhones and iPads start charging out, they’re doomed to analogue boredom,” recapped Östlund.
“It’s been a great challenge to write the script because you’re very limited when it comes to creating dynamic, nuance, and energy in one closed environment like that. So, it took a long time but I think I’ve managed to do something dynamic, even if it takes place in one place,” he added.
The site of the shoot has yet to be set but Östlund says the plan is to build a life-size replica of a modern airplane in a studio.
“I don’t want to limit myself to working in small sections… I want to be able to do long tracking shots. It will be one of the biggest studio builds when it comes to airplanes that has ever been made,” he explained.
Östlund expanded on plans for the ‘walkout scene’, which he has previously revealed will revolve around a young boy’s 10-minute wait for his turn to look at the family iPad.
“We’ll go from a dynamic film to a real-time shot where we see this kid dealing with restlessness for 10 minutes… After a bit the kid will ask how much time has passed and the answer will be, ‘There are nine minutes and 30 seconds left’,” said Östlund.
He recalled a scene in Ingmar Bergman’s 1968 psychological horror The Wolf Hour, in which Max von Sydow’s tortured artist character takes out his watch and declares how long a minute is and then proceeds to watch it pass in real-time.
“It’s a very strong moment… It will be super interesting when the audience comes to understand it’s being challenged by director and starts thinking, ‘Are we going to sit and watch this kid for 10 minutes?’ I think it’s more provocative than any other content… You can create something spectacular, out of something that is not spectacular.”
Östlund has also taken inspiration from Maastricht University’s 2016 ‘Self-Inflicted Pain Out Of Boredom’ experiment, in which participants were made to sit and do nothing for 15 minutes with the option of self-administering small electric shocks.
“Three-quarters of men pushed the button and one-third of all women. One guy pushed the button 190 times,” says the director.
Not worried about spoilers, Östlund reveals that the aircraft will go down and everyone on board will die.
Quizzed on whether he has been watching other airplane disaster movies as part of the development process, Östlund brings up the poster for the 1980 spoof picture Airplane! showing a jumbo jet twisted in a knot.
“It’s the best poster. I really want to buy the rights and use it for The Entertainment System Is Down.”
Östlund was at the Les Arcs Film Festival in the role of ambassador to its Talent Village initiative, mentoring eight emerging directors working on their first feature-length films.
The director, who is also a professor at Gothenburg University, says teaching fits with his filmmaking style.
“I’m open about my process. When I’m working on the film, I have no problem talking about it. I never feel like I’m wasting energy by meeting people. For me, part of why I enjoy filmmaking is because it’s a social process. When I meet people, and they tell me about their project, I learn something myself.”
One piece of key advice he had for emerging filmmakers is to always have one standout scene on which they can sell their project, in the vein of his planned scene for The Entertainment System Is Down; the spectacular avalanche scene in his 2014 Les Arcs set drama Force Majeure, or the vomiting sequence in Triangle Of Sadness.
Force Majeure, ©Magnolia Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection
“There’s so such competition, your project really needs to pop out. For me, a big part of the process is pitching my films and thinking about how I’m going to catch the attention of the person who is listening. On Force Majeure, I said, ‘We’re going to do the most spectacular avalanche scene in the history of filmmaking.’ When someone says this, it makes the listener sit up,” he said.
Östlund has a strong relationship with the Les Arcs ski domain, having shot Force Majeure there.
“I first visited in my 20s, when I was a ski bum in Val d’Isère,” he said, referring to the famed ski resort in the neighboring valley.
Östlund recalls how he was immediately struck by the modernist architecture of the Arc 1600 and Arc 1800 stations.
They were designed in the 1960s by former Le Corbusier collaborator Charlotte Perriand, who took an egalitarian approach to ensure all the apartments enjoyed the same space and views on the surrounding mountains.
“I knew about the resort and its very specific architecture and that feeling of these high-rise buildings put up in the wilds of nature,” says Östlund.
A chance meeting with producer and Les Arcs Film Festival co-founder Pierre Emmanuel Fleurantin, who hails from the neighboring town of Bourg Saint Maurice, brought Östlund back to Les Arcs.
“He was the connection, even if I already knew about it. I looked at other places with similar architecture like Avoriaz, but decided Arc 1800 was most interesting.”
Östlund says he still loves being in the mountains, but more for the sense of risk than a continued passion for skiing.
“In these times, risk is completely built out of my life except for when I go skiing,” he said, before acknowledging that making a $13 million picture like Triangle Of Sadness is not an entirely risk free affair.
That film gathered nearly 40 different production companies led by Plattform Produktion, Östlund’s company with long-time producer Erik Hemmendorff, and Philippe Bober’s Coproduction Office, which also handled sales.
Östlund said the new film will likely be financed in a similar way with distribution rights being sold territory by territory to long-time theatrical distribution partners.
“European art house distributors have been a part of building my connection to the audience. I like that way of of slowly progressing and slowly building,” he said.
“Selling five million tickets in the cinemas was quite an extraordinary success [on Triangle Of Sadness] and this was because of the work of the different distributors in the different territories. I want to continue that path, which means it will be a European co-production.”