From the outside, Studio 24 looks like a normal, neutral Stockholm townhouse. Step inside, however, and you enter the world of Roy Andersson, one of the most distinctive film directors working today, a master of long-take, left-field comedy, a humane advocate of the virtues of the absurd. Village Voice branded him the “slapstick Bergman”; his singular mix of bleak and bawdy has won him fans who, despite decades between movies, stay loyal.
The ground floor of Studio 24 is a vast space in which are shot almost all his films’ scenes – most of which are static, intricate tableaux. For the first time in four years, the space is almost empty, cleared of the debris and props featured in his latest film, A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence. Just a pile of shoes remains.
When I visit, it is just before the news that Pigeon will not, as had been widely expected, premiere at Cannes. “It’s a shame that we keep failing to make it in time,” Andersson says. “We sent the scenes in two different orders, but we still haven’t heard from them. If they cannot see the value of what they received, then there is no point of being in Cannes anyway. I’m not mourning at all. Hopefully, we will make it to Venice instead.” His hopes were realised: the film premieres on the Lido next week.
Andersson climbs the squeaky staircase that leads to his office and newly installed cinema. He is 71 now, and almost two decades have passed since he started work on his best-known film, Songs from the Second Floor, which was released in 2000, and seven from the release of You, The Living. In total he has made five feature films, starting with A Swedish Love Story in 1970, then Giliap (1975), and is the author of two books. He finances his films by making commercials – so far, he has made about 400 of them. His mission statement remains the same, whatever the year, whatever the medium. He wants to give a voice to “the small human being … [who] symbolises all of us. I’m trying to show what it’s like to be human and to be alive.” It is an aim at once modest and enormous.
As with all his work, Pigeon operates in the gap between pain and laughter. The initial scenes show three everyday encounters with death. A man dies of a heart attack trying to uncork a bottle of wine while his wife is distracted by the sound of an electric mixer. Three siblings visit their ailing mother in hospital, the eldest upset that she is still clutching her bag, which is full of jewellery. In the third, a man lies dead on the floor of a ferry cafeteria as the crew worry about how to divvy up the food he has ordered.
Behind the mordancy, there is a deeper message. “I’m one for solidarity,” says Andersson. “A society where one shares, and feels responsibility towards others. Unfortunately, we’ve had a period where to look after one another is seen as old-fashioned. This is the path Sweden has taken politically. But it’s evident that it hasn’t worked out. It is a painful insight, which I think people will start to realise more and more. Not least [current Swedish prime minister] Fredrik Reinfeldt.”
For such a surrealist, Andersson makes movies rooted in real life, which often riff irreverently on history. A Pigeon is no exception. One of its scenes includes a message to Swedish mining and smelting company Boliden, which sold thousands of tonnes of smelting residue to Chile in the 1980s, only to face a lawsuit claiming hundreds of people, including children who played on the waste sites, had been poisoned. In the film, people are led into a huge copper cylinder, made by Boliden. “But we didn’t use their typography,” says Andersson. He sighs. “They just keep saying business is business. Morally it doesn’t make sense. The world can’t go on like that.”
During our meeting, Andersson flicks through books stacked all over the room. He is forever referencing an author or a painter – Matisse, James Ensor, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Camus, Stig Dagerman, Hjalmar Söderberg, Balzac and Dostoevsky – restless to verify quotes. It is not just his distinctive aesthetic that bears the hallmarks of this education, but also his stripped-back, oil-black dialogue. As a child, he says, he wanted to be an author, despite being “raised in a family that was not intellectual at all”.
The personal and the universal are inseparable in his work; this latest may be more clearly autobiographical than most. One scene has sailors exchanging vodka for kisses with a singing waitress. It is, he says, a tribute to growing up in Gothenburg. “Working-class kids, including me, were taken to the seaside by the city of Gothenburg where we received a bun and milk. It meant a lot to me.” Such gestures instilled in Andersson a keen sense of civic responsibility that he wants to share through his films. “I’m trying to show we have to care for the little we have left. I want to show the vulnerability, and the weakness we carry,” he says.
All the locations in Pigeon, like those in his previous films, feel familiar, yet unrecognisable. There is something askew about that pub, something uncanny about that living room. “I’ve come to realise that I can’t shoot real environments. I prefer a hyperreality,” he says. This is achieved by hand-building each set in the space below us, and using trompe l’oeil. “It looks real but it’s purified and condensed. I’m fascinated by how life’s grandness, smallness and mortality appear much clearer this way.” This quest for authenticity means that Andersson works primarily with non-professional actors, people he spots out and about, at the petrol station or in a bar. “There might be 10,000 professional actors in Sweden, meaning that the choice is far larger in real life. I’m looking for something people have never seen before.”
Contrary to rumour, this will not be his last film, he says. “I feel like I can’t stop filming.” Nor can he stop trying to convey his message to the world, observing its madnesses, offering a commentary. “It’s me thinking about existence. I project myself as a pigeon.”
