Winner of the Caméra d’Or as the best debut film at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, “Armand” begins as a tense classroom confrontation between ineffectual school staff and the parents of two boys who were in some kind of playground altercation. The film, which is Norway’s entry in the Oscars Best International Feature Film category, grows stranger, creepier and more stylized as it progresses, highlighted by a couple of disturbing dance sequences and an occasionally unhinged performance by Renate Reinsve (“The Worst Person in the World”).
It marks an auspicious debut from director Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel, whose grandparents were a pair of cinema legends, Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann.
Your movie includes one of the most amazing and unnerving scenes of the year, when Renate Reinsve’s character can’t stop laughing for a long time.
Yes. In the script, it was like, “She laughs for a very long time, and then she cries for a long time.” After reading the script for the first time, Renate asked me, “How long is a long time?” I said, “Like, seven minutes.” And she said, “Oh, my God, that’s not possible.” I said, “Yes, you can do it.” And she said, “OK, challenge accepted.”
And then we never talked about the scene again until she came on set and did it. And of course that was a very long day of shooting. We shot it for one full day, 10 hours. The first half of the day it was very good, but kind of mild. But after lunch, she kind of lost it for real. (Laughs)
Did you give her a few days off after that?
Five days. It was intense for her, of course. It’s amazing, what she did.
You worked with her on a short film many years ago, didn’t you?
Yes, we made a short film. It was only two shooting days, but when we were finished, it felt like we had known each other for a lifetime. We decided that we were going to make something bigger one day, and that was “Armand.”
And in between, she won the Best Actress award in Cannes for “The Worst Person in the World.“
When she won the award in Cannes, she sent me a text the same evening that said, “Imagine how great this is for our project.” I was at my lowest point, close to giving up because I couldn’t get financing in the Norwegian system. And receiving that text from her on her greatest night, it made me hopeful that maybe I should give it one more go.
What appealed to you about the story?
It started with the character for Renata. I had a very clear vision of how this character would be very strong and emotionally manipulative in one second and very helpless in the next. I thought that wide range was quite interesting, but I didn’t know which universe to place it in. But then I heard this story about one 6-year-old boy who had said something to another which was quite similar to what happens in the film. Based on that story, my imagination started spinning on who those boys were, who the parents were, everything. I’d been working in a primary school also for many years, so I took some experience from that as well.
One of the interesting things about the film is that it’s called “Armand” and it’s all about something that happened between these two kids, but we don’t see the incident and we don’t even see Armand until the last scene in the movie, when he’s asleep. As viewers, we don’t know what happened — all we know is what other people are saying about it.
The film is so much about prejudice and how you use very little information to make up big stories about other people. It made lots of sense for me not to show the kids and to have the audience make up their own mind what the kids were like based on what the parents were. I know from my experience at working at school that you mirror parents with kids and vice versa. I thought all those mechanisms was very interesting, and therefore it made a lot of sense not showing the kids. And also, I don’t care too much about working with kids. (Laughs) So it was a good excuse.
The movie lulls you into thinking it’s going to be a tense, talky drama exploring what happened between the two boys, and then it goes in a very different direction.
Yeah, yeah. I was never too interested in the case itself. I wanted to present the case and then go away from it. I also thought there was an interesting satirical element to it. We have this case, and we are starting to talk about it, but then we get distracted and start to talk about everything else. I feel it’s like that, especially in politics. So it made sense to turn it into a nightmare. (Laughs)
And I had a very clear vision of the school getting darker and more mysterious. I remember sleeping over at a school when I was 12 years old, and I was struck by the darkness and the silence and the mysterious atmosphere in the school. And it was 100 years old, so there was this feeling of the school coming to life with all the previous children running down the hallways.
I felt like there were some cinematic opportunities there. So I watched a lot of one-locations films, seeing how they did it and taking inspiration from “Rosemary’s Baby,” for example, or “A Celebration.”
Was it easy to find a building that could work with all those ideas?
It was almost impossible. We looked at 250, 300 schools in the eastern part of Norway, because for economic reasons we were going to shoot close to the capital. But I wasn’t happy with any of them because they were not like my imagination. But then we got a tip about a school on the west coast of Norway, and my producer did an absolutely fantastic job of moving the whole production to the west coast.
Did you shoot everything in that one building?
Everything was shot in the building. And we shot the film chronologically as well. So the whole crew and cast and myself went more and more crazy together as the story evolved. It was a very cool experience, shooting chronologically. And because we also have the dance scenes and strange sequences, I remember that at the end of the shoot, when some of the dancing comes in, the crew was like, “Is this in the script?” (Laughs) I don’t think they really understood it before they saw it, to be honest.
You initially resisted the idea of getting into film, didn’t you?
Yeah. Why should I make films? It had been done in my family, right? (Laughs) It was stupid even thinking about making films. So I tried a lot of other things, but it didn’t feel right. I ended up in this university course, and there was a little bit of filmmaking there and it wasn’t too bad. And then I applied to film school.
I didn’t tell anybody (about my family) the first three years, and I didn’t use the Ullmann name — not to run away from it. I can be proud of it, but I see what happens now, where every article is like “Bergman grandson” in the headline. I considered changing my name to “Bergman Grandson” so my name would always be in the headline.
A version of this story first appeared in the SAG Preview/Documentaries/International issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
