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Director and producer Erik Hemmendorff discuss Cannes Competition title The Square.
It was the memory of his father's boyhood stories that helped to spark the ideas behind Ruben Ostlund's new film The Square. "When he was six years old, he would be sent out in the street in Stockholm to play and his mom would put a tag on him with his name and address," Ostlund recalls. "You would trust in these other adults to take care of your child if anything happened. That's a huge attitude shift in how we look at the public now. There is a paranoia."
Ostlund's producer Erik Hemmendorff, with whom he founded Plattform Produktion in 2002, says the pair began to explore these ideas about trust and responsibility with Ostlund's 2011 feature Play.
"The idea that adults were there to help you -- that's not there any more," Hemmendorff suggests. "This is something we confronted when we were making Play. Ruben interviewed these young kids who meet each other in public spaces, and there were so seldom any grownups intervening."
The Square is not about children, but very much about modern society. "The foreign way of looking [in] at Scandinavia is [that it is] this social democracy, an idyllic society," Ostlund explains. "But there is a change going on here and I was interested in that."
Ostlund's last three features have increasingly identified him as one of the most talented and provocative auteurs in cinema today. Ahead of its premiere in Competition at Cannes, The Square has already racked up impressive sales for Ostlund's longtime sales partner, Philippe Bober's Coproduction Office. Deals done prior to Cannes include to the US (Magnolia), UK (Curzon Artificial Eye), France (BAC), Germany (Alamode), Czech Republic/Slovakia (Film Europe), Hungary (Cirko) and Switzerland (Xenix).
The Square's main plot is about an art museum...