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The director and star of the film ,,Armand”, Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel and Renate Reinsve sharing the thoughts about the drama ,,Armand” – the winner of Canne’s film festival Caméra d’Or. The Worst Person in the World” star Renate Reinsve is a protective mother who comes under fire in Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel’s head-scratching drama.

Can you talk about why you chose this project, also as your debut film?

Halfdan: So for me it started with Renate’s character actually. I had this idea of who she
was and how she was like maintaining herself in a way. And before I even had a universe to place her in, I asked her if she was interested in playing this character, and she was. And then I got really excited from that. And this was back in 2016. And then I heard this story about two six – year – old boys and where one had said to another quite a dirty thing which six -year -old boys doesn’t usually say to each other and my imagination just started spinning on who those six – year – old boys were and who the parents were and I realized this was a good kind of setup for exploring all the things I wanted to explore in Renate’s character but also other thematic stuff that is really personal to me and also I’m really interested in. And for me also it was a really, like logistically, made sense to make this as a debut feature because it was one location and the moment I decided to do the whole film in one location I was just like overwhelmed with inspiration for what we can do in this school like cinematically, so it was a lot of things.

Renate: And for me, because even before that, before you had the idea for the character,
we did a short movie in two days, but we had this very great, profound experience of having this, you know, we had the exact same taste and we had, back then we didn’t have words for anything. We were young and just started our careers. And I think it was just really aligned in what we wanted to do and how deep we wanted to go into something unknown and something uncontrollable. And I think, yeah, we actually had tears in our eyes the second day, when we wrapped on the short film, on the short film.
And, we decided or we knew that we had to do something again. And it’s taken so long because, because you almost got funding. But in Norway, it’s really, really hard to make your first movie, especially in this genre, or in something that I feel Norway is now getting to a place where they’re getting confident in their own filmmaking and not trying to replicate someone else’s model of making a movie. So it’s, it’s a very good place to be right now in Norway, making movies.

Now, another question we have, this is for Renate. What were the challenges in portraying a character who is both vulnerable and potentially dangerous?

Renate: Yeah, it’s actually that dynamic was extremely hard. And it’s very physical,
actually. And, and also finding the detail and the truth in someone who is manipulative without really knowing it sometimes, and then maybe deliberately being it sometimes, it’s, it’s really heavy, because I, I because I needed to go into it, you know, respectfully. And I loved her, but she, her pain, and everything that she has been through and her grief was hard to carry mentally and also like the scenes where she gets her breakdowns or the other in this dance sequence when the other parents kind of both from that place of wanting to have her and then attacking her. That dynamic everywhere in the movie is of course the greatest gift to get to do as an actress, but it really pushed my limits. Of
course, that’s something that I wanted to do and we talked about it for a long time. All
those years we talked about the development of this character and you know, you kind of I, I always want to do something even more extreme for the next one and the next one. So yeah, it was very challenging just her whole vigilant state the whole time.

Now, for both of you, what does this film say about the power of rumors and the impact they can have on individuals and/or communities?

Renate: I think, yeah, we talked about, and you’ve said that very good too, like, how little information that you need before you actually, things blow up and your reputation is on the line and your social reputation, it has, it has such a big impact and it’s, it can break so easily and of course that’s something that you see happening both.Someone using it both for their own intentions, bad or good intentions, it’s a very powerful tool. Halfdan: And we choose which information we use all the time. The kind that fits the world we want to see and the perspective we want to have and I feel that a lot of this film is about the stories we tell about ourselves and about others and what kind of information we are using to tell those stories. So in this way I of course you can say it’s rumors but it’s also like a very different characters choose really choose their different kinds of perspectives and standpoints. And they use fragmented piece of information to make that the way they would see the world and there’s themselves fit with that and that kind of information. So it’s really like human, but it’s also really damaging for everybody around.

Now, following that, is there any conversation you would like to spark from this film?

Halfdan: Yeah, I mean, this film is also a lot about prejudice. And it’s, it’s a lot about traumas as well. And how to handle traumas. And it’s, it’s about you know how you mirror parents and children and I’ve kind of removed in recent years I feel like
responsibility from children and like autonomy from children and parents take so much,
they take so incredibly much like ownership in their own child and for better and
worse because I mean, when a kid does something, you kind of go straight to the
parent and judge them. And when a kid does something good, the parent takes credit
for it. So I mean, it’s about all these things. And, but first of all, I think it was very important for me to make a film where you can reflect on your own prejudice because the film also quite uses those same mechanisms. For example, with the role of the cleaner because he is the one who has actually observed the whole incident you know and nobody asks him and that was really inspired by something I experienced when I was working in a school because there was an incident and the cleaner was and I wasn’t involved in the case I just heard about it but the cleaner had observed the incident but nobody asked him because they didn’t feel He was credible enough. And so it was a lot of those kind of things, those kind of prejudiced thoughts I wanted people to reflect on.

And how do you both feel this sort of reflects on the challenges of parenting in a modern society with digital, with information passing so quickly, as well as overriding implications at times. Meaning, that we tend to care more about what we think than what was said sometimes or what was done.

Renate: I think that’s a part of the first thing that you said like how we kind of not trauma but how everything that we carry is put out on other people and I think that happens in social dynamics everywhere and social media is also like this social dynamic but you’re more hidden behind something I think it can get even uglier or you can
use it for something good or you can use it for something bad it carries a lot of
bad things but I think not to have a solution or a moral or anything. This is a satire on also the structures of how we build up structures, you know, schools or structures around these social things that we do or need to learn. So I think that, especially Elizabeth is putting all her stress and everything that she carries onto other people and that is kind of her big sin that you need to learn to regulate and be more in tune with yourself and it’s a balance between focusing on yourself and what’s important and of course being there for other people but in a healthy way.

Halfdan: Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And in regards to that, what I said about mirroring parents and kids and also talking about traumas, because like you say, I feel that you project so much of your own pain onto your kids or onto other people, but the kids kind of suffer the most from it and this film also wanted to explore in a quite subtle way how traumas move in generations, you know, how one trauma can follow in different generations and is that like a genetical thing or is it just like that someone in has to break the bond somehow and not project all their pain into their kids. So it explores a lot of these kind of things and mechanisms. And of course, I don’t have an answer for how to, what the solution is. But, I wanted people to reflect on that.

Now, what did it mean to you both at Cannes to win the Caméra d’Or? What did it mean to you both to be on this journey and start to get this love and these
accolades like that.

Renate: I was very proud. That’s what it means to me. I mean, I’m so proud of Halfdan. It’s like his first movie. We’ve been friends for so long. We became really good friends after we made the short movie. And we had this, I had this strong feeling when I came into the school that this was going to be something really big and I’m just so proud as
a friend.

Halfdan: I mean I was in Oslo when I got the call to come back and I was with my son and I threw him to my mother to my mother his grandmother and run to the airport and I changed to my tuxedo in a toilet and I was you know thrown in a car on my way to Cannes and I was actually talking to Renate the whole time in the car and suddenly I got messages from friends congratulating me because word had gone out but I was still in the car.

Renate: On the way he didn’t know that you were going to win and you were 15 minutes late.

Halfdan: Yeah so but of course yeah that was like an anecdote, but it was it was it was it was a great feeling as you can see.

Your grandparents are legends of the movie industry. Halfdan, did your grandmother have any advice when you were ready to direct your first film?

Halfdan: No, I don’t think she had. I think she was quite cautious about giving me advice.
I mean, we have a really special bond, me and my grandmother. And we have, and I think the biggest gift that she has given me is that she has been talking to me
like, like an adult since I was like four. And, as a kid, that is such a great gift, because we had, we had really profound conversations my whole life. And she also has a big fantasy and it was like a real adventure being with her and making up stories and having deep conversations but she never gave me any advice. She didn’t but so I have taken all the other things with me.

And Renate when it comes to your intense scenes, there’s a lot of things that were close and almost claustrophobic. How did you prepare for those intense scenes and the bevy of emotions that kind of you go through in them?

Renate: this scene of laughing for so long, the breakdown, it was actually just three sentences in the script, but we knew it was like a turning point for the character and also very important for the movie. So I knew I had to do it, but it was impossible. It’s an impossible task for my director. But of of course, that’s also a gift too. And we had a lot of time. So I had, of course, just built a very thorough, detailed analysis of how to possibly get there from everything that she had been through in her life, to everything that was
going on, like how does a catastrophe look for her, how does she respond usually, what is the difference between this and other things, and to get to that place you have to be very, very detailed, at least for me. And the sound guy, he’s a very funny guy. And I asked him to tell me a joke that it’s impossible to translate. And it’s not really that funny. But I was so nervous. So I started laughing. That kind of got me going. And then eventually, we did it, we did that scene for 10 hours, we had 10 hours to do it. So eventually I would actually lose control and everyone, we were prepared, everyone knew that it was gonna be very challenging. So you gave me five days off after to kind of get back.- Recover. – Recover. And, but I think that was an extreme one and the dance sequence is also an extreme one, but I think to have that kind of state through
the whole movie you have to be very physically strong and prepared and because it’s very hard actually for an actor to lose control, to get to a state where you lose control, but it was kind of the only way I felt for that character to be where she was in truth.

Halfdan: And I have to just like also say that the amount of emotional, the technical, physical stuff that Renata does in this film is quite incredible. There was not one day that was easy and that was also because she only had 16 shooting days on this film. So every day was super intense in terms of like seven pages of dialogue or a lot of physical stuff were really emotional, intense stuff. So, yeah, I was so impressed.

Speaking of that, you know, for her to, I guess, relax and allow herself to be there, the atmosphere needed to be right in so many different ways. Can you talk about the atmosphere of the school, of the rain, of different things to allow her to kind of be in that moment, but also to kind of transport us into those those areas in that time because I feel like aschool is one of those things that automatically opens you up to just raw emotions.

Halfdan: I had a really clear vision of of the school and the character of the school both like visually and sound wise from before I even wrote the first draft. It was so clear for me how it was gonna feel it was actually quite inspired by one time I slept over in my my school when I was like 12 years old and that too was a really old like a hundred year old school building and I was so struck by the contrast of the school in the evening when it was so silent, so dark, so mysterious compared to the school in the day when it was you
know where kids running around in this light and it’s so much sound and life and that contrast it was like the the 100 -year -old kind of soul of the school came alive and and that was really the feeling I was trying to you know get into to the school we were shooting in and of course the school itself that the school we found was amazing and I looked at 250 schools or something and when we saw this it was like oh this can actually be something because the school in itself was so beautiful and I wanted to create this kind of mazy claustrophobic mysterious School where you can feel the ghost from the past running around in the hallways.

Renate:There was actually a ghost in the attic. [Halfdan] Yeah, and you also mentioned the ghost in the attic.[Renate] Yeah, I invited him to come join us. [Halfdan] And it was
actually quite amazing because Renate came to set two days before her first day and immediately something happened to you it was, you felt kind of it and you put on the costume of the character and you kind of just like so uncomfortable felt so uncomfortable with the whole thing.

Renate We’ve talked about the intensity of your scenes but there’s so many different levels to just being a parent at times too, because you question everything you’ve done and everything they could be or are and when it comes to a parent, everything is personal, how did you see those conversations and almost being attacked while also just been given straight you know facts or innuendo or different you know things they suppose that it happened?

Renate:I think for Elizabeth, I think the only thing she has left that is real and is
true and is that she loves her son and their relationship.So I think she’s actually fighting for the one thing that she finds valuable that is left. And to lose that would mean worse than death kind of it would mean that she had, yeah, it would be the greatest grief and just her under what is the name in English, I don’t remember, but and I also, yeah, yeah, but I also also think that she’s also fighting for, I believe that something that is most important to us is also our truth. If we lose our truth and lose contact with ourselves, then we also are in a very great danger of losing kind of our mental health and everything that we have in our reality. And that is also a really, really big threat. So when this other character, Sarah comes in and in her way, and she knows how powerful Sarah is. So I think when she comes in and the school kind of joins her narrative and so she needs to fight for her truth. And those two things were the things that I kind of held on to in her fight.

I know many teachers actually, and one of the things I’ve learned from them and also knowing children as well, is that children don’t have filters in action, in words, in emotions too. How did that affect someone who worked in a school? How did that affect the unknown of these children when it came to your story?

Halfdan:I didn’t think about that too much, to be honest. Because kind of the genesis of the idea was where did a kid learn something like that. So I immediately went into this project almost with a little bit of prejudice of, you know, this not being a natural thing for a kid to do, even though when I did start research, I also saw that, you know, this is not so unnatural, as you might think. But my first impression was that the kids kind of take from their parents or from their big or from their siblings, and they try to replicate
it. So that was actually my first instinct, and not that the kids themselves had a no -filter kind of thing, but what I was thinking was of course that when Jolm, which is the victim or the alleged victim here, was telling his parents about what happened, I kind of knew that he was being not manipulated, but kind of directed for his story to kind of fit Sarah’s mission to eventually take down Elizabeth.

At several points in this movie, you play with viewers expectations of how ar you can push something or push a scene. Can you Tell us a little bit about what attracts you as a filmmaker to go so far to make the everyday seem intense or abstract?

Halfdan: I mean, I kind of wanted to make something that lasts. I didn’t just want to make a little school drama. I wanted to make something a little bit bigger even though it was a small film and then just in a school. I wanted to make something bigger and for me it’s a very natural thing to to go places where I kind of hold things for a very long time because,for example, with the laughing scene you kind of get the point after the first 25 seconds you know, the scene is old at that point. But if you keep holding it, then the audience will go through so many different emotions, and they will reflect on new things and their perspective and their sympathy will probably change throughout the scene also because we’re holding it so much. Even though it doesn’t happen, anything new, we just keep it longer. And for me, It’s a great way to change perspective or to even make people bored. Because when people are bored, maybe then they will kind of turn off. And then when they turn back on again, I think new things can happen. And also, because I wanted to create this claustrophobic feeling in the film, the worst thing in the world
would be to be stuck in a scene that we can’t get out of. So that in itself, it’s claustrophobic.

Thank you.