Interview with Ruben Ostlund
Thursday / October 1, 2026
About Ruben Ostlund
Swedish director and screenwriter of Force Majeure, The Square and Triangle of Sadness. The Square and Triangle of Sadness each won the Palme d'Or at Cannes.
Source: BAFTA on YouTube
These answers are taken from Ruben Ostlund | BAFTA Screenwriters’ Lecture Series on BAFTA's YouTube channel. You! Backstage did not conduct this interview.
What was your very first experience with filmmaking?
I didn't start out as a film director or a screenwriter. I was actually not very interested in cinema or the history of cinema when I grew up on a small island in the archipelago of Gothenburg, on the west coast of Sweden. It was rather the opportunity that me and my friends had, that we could borrow a VHS camera recorder and editing station from the commune, that made us start filming our hobbies. We were filming windsurfing and mountain biking and skiing, and we did this with great passion.
What drew you to a career as a filmmaker?
The day I started at the university was the same day as I got interested in cinema. The school and the teachers had their inspiration from the 60s movement of the French New Wave. They taught us students that filmmaking is political and personal at the same time. And they taught us that a filmmaker is an author: someone that is writing his or her own script and is always putting the films in the context of the society.
The teachers were also encouraging us students to use the development of the technique. The French New Wave in the 60s started basically when the small 16 millimeter camera arrived on the market, and therefore the French directors at that time could do completely different film productions. The same thing was when I was in school. The small DV camera came, the camera that was used with the Dogme 95 manifesto that the Danish directors did. And the internet started to be something that we used more and more. We students started to look not only at all the films of film history, but also at moving images on the internet.
How did your filmmaking career unfold?
In my early 20s, filming skiing became my profession. For a couple of years I was traveling around in ski resorts in Europe and in North America and in the Scandinavian mountains, filming so-called free skiing. During the summers I edited these ski stunts together with rock music, mostly hard rock music. These were half-hour films, basically, with no narrative at all, only the ski images and music, and we sold them through mail order in ski magazines called Powder and Skiing. So it was a very niche way of getting into filmmaking.
When I was around 25 years old, I easily had my 10,000 hours of practice in camera operating, following small skiers on a big wide field in the mountains. But I had also gotten really, really tired of spending my days in ski resorts. At this point I applied for the film school in Gothenburg, the Valand Academy. And the second time I applied, they were free-thinking enough to accept someone that had ski movies as work samples. I have been working as a filmmaker for 27 years now.
What advice do you have for new filmmakers?
Since we have YouTube, and we have access to basically all the moving images in the world on the internet, I have to compare myself and my expression to the expression in these very unique moments that someone has uploaded. I'm just as much inspired by moving images that come from the internet as by the moving images I see in film history.
We human beings are much more imitating than we actually are rational. The images that we see are influencing us in a way that we are not a hundred percent aware of. I don't believe that we are always aware of the kind of consequences of the images that we are creating. Therefore we have to be very careful with the kind of images that we create, because it's hard to realize what kind of behavior they will reproduce. We that work with mass media, there's some kind of responsibility that we are dealing with, and that's why I think this profession is very, very important.
Describe your filmmaking style.
My favorite YouTube clip is the cab driver on the BBC, where a person has been mistaken for an expert on internet rights and all of a sudden he's put in the chair in a live news broadcast. Why I think these moving images are so interesting: there are many aspects to it, but one of them is that it managed to capture the moment when someone is trying to avoid losing face in such a beautiful way. And I've been trying to do that in many, many of my fiction films, and I've never managed to make such a powerful image of that as this clip is. What he is doing is starting to imitate what he believes an internet expert would do. He's not being rational. We do something in order to fit into the group, and it's our group behavior that creates a lot of these consequences.
My experience when I witnessed a robbery attempt was, first of all, that there's no one that is the main character in life. All the things are happening in parallel.
Tell me something I may not know from reading your filmography.
Maybe 12 years ago, I was together with my producer, Erik Hemmendorff, in Stockholm, because we wanted to apply for money for my second feature film, Involuntary, and we watched a robbery attempt on the other side of the street. Two men take out two guns and run into the corner entrance of a big luxury mall, and 10 seconds later the robbers come out on the street again, looking up very confused at the building, and it turns out that they have been going to the wrong entrance. When the guns go off inside, people are getting very curious, so they're getting closer and trying to look. There was a tourist that had an ice cream in his hand, trying to see what is going on.
Everything that plays out in this event was so different from my expectation of how a robbery attempt should happen. All my reference is something that I have gotten from fictionalized and mass media communication. After this happened, I wrote down every detail that I remembered, and I created a short film, Incident by a Bank.
A year later a friend sent me a link to an American TV show called the Top 10 Dumbest Criminals in the World. On position number seven on this list was a clip from my short film. They had used the fictional material and claimed that it's authentic, and a narrator was saying, "These robbers got away with a fortune." Completely made up.
Ruben Ostlund's Full Biography
Ruben Östlund is a Swedish filmmaker, screenwriter, and producer known for his sharp satirical style and incisive examinations of social behavior, class, and contemporary culture. After beginning his creative career making skiing films, he studied filmmaking in Gothenburg and later co-founded the production company Plattform Produktion with producer Erik Hemmendorff. Östlund first attracted international attention with The Guitar Mongoloid (2004), Involuntary (2008), and Play (2011), films that established his distinctive blend of observational realism and dark humor. His international breakthrough came with Force Majeure (2014), which won the Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival and brought him worldwide recognition. He achieved even greater acclaim with The Square (2017), a provocative satire of the contemporary art world that won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, followed by Triangle of Sadness (2022), which earned him a second Palme d'Or and received Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay. Widely regarded as one of the leading European filmmakers of his generation, Östlund has received numerous international honors, including multiple European Film Awards, and has served as Jury President of the Cannes Film Festival.