http://www.horrorphile.net/exclusive-qa ... fredson/4/
TA Interview w/Cinema Blend:Swedish flick Let the Right One In (2009) is now considered by critics and horror fans (and even non-horror fans) the world over as one of the very best vampire movies ever made. Pretty much an instant cult classic. To coincide with its Australian DVD release I was lucky enough to get a short Q&A with director Tomas Alfredson.
Horrorphile: Both Kåre Hedebrant as Oskar and Lina Leandersson as Eli are extraordinary, delivering beautiful nuances in body language and facial expression (however, Oskar isn’t tubby as he is in the novel). In the screenplay Lindqvist removed Eli’s explanation to Oskar about his gender; in the movie there is only one very brief moment when you see Eli (after kissing Oskar) appearing like a grown man and revealing to the audience his true hidden self. Was it a conscious decision from you and Lindqvist to sustain Oskar’s notion (and the audience’s deception) that Eli is a girl, which is why you cast a pretty girl instead of an androgynous boy?
Tomas Alfredson: Yes it’s it was a conscious decision – if we had emphasised this fact it would easily have been the main topic, a sort of “young gay love” theme. To me Eli is androgynous, and a non-sexual creature. We cast both girls and boys for the part and I was obviously looking for someone like Lina, who gave a stunning performance.
H: Once Lindqvist delivered the screenplay was he involved in any way during pre-production and principal photography i.e. casting approval, on-set consultation?
TA: John was not a part of the shooting process or the preps, but he became a wonderful companion during the editing process.
H: The novel has numerous visually striking scenes, many of which you’ve translated effortlessly into cinema, yet still retaining a lyrical atmosphere. What do you feel you added as director that wasn’t in the novel or screenplay?
TA: All the things you can alight explicitly in a book is so much “easier” because the canvas is the imagination of the reader – and the reader only creates believable images for themselves. A filmmaker’s canvas is a sort of reality captured on film which is of course more demanding when it comes to veracity. My opinion is that you, as a filmmaker, should tease the audience and suggest as much as possible, rather than decide everything for the viewer. In that sense, the audience will become active and you’ll have a dialogue, which of course is much more interesting than listening to a monologue.
H: Why did you shy from showing any of the more explicit visual references to Eli being a vampire i.e. the claws for feet and hands, the webbed bat-like wings?
TA: As I previously mentioned, this was part of my general strategy as a filmmaker to encourage the viewer to decide for themselves.
H: There are rumours that Matt Reeves’ Hollywood remake (re-titled Let Me In), which he is scripting as well as directing, will follow the novel more closely than your version, what are your thoughts on that?
TA: The book is a fantastic piece, and the possibilities of finding new angles of telling it, must be countless. It will be interesting to see what Hollywood does with the material.
H: The movie is considered an instant cult classic, with frequent remarks that it is one of the best vampire movies in years. Were you aware at all during the filming that you were making something so special and distinctive?
TA: I’ve been working for twenty-five years with film, television and theatre and I do my very best every time. And I just work with material that I find special and distinctive. The big difference is that the audience doesn’t always have the same impression. It’s impossible to anticipate a success like this.
H: And finally, what are some of your favourite vampire movies, or at least ones you’ve found to be memorable and inspiring?
TA: None. Believe it or not, I haven’t seen any!
That last answer surprised me, but then the more I think about it, perhaps that's why Tomas Alfredson managed to make such an unfettered, unique and poetic take on the vampire genre, simply because he was only referencing the literary source material and wasn't at all influenced by any other cinematic interpretations of the vampire mythology.
http://www.cinemablend.com/new/Exclusiv ... 10607.html
Exclusive Interview: Let The Right One In Director Tomas Alfredson
By Katey Rich
Published: 2008-10-22 00:48:30
Exclusive Interview: Let The Right One In Director Tomas Alfredson Tomas Alfredson has been working in Swedish film and television for over a decade, but only now is he having the very specific experience of screening his work for an American audience. His movie Let the Right One In, a teenage romance/horror movie/coming-of-age tale/vampire drama (however you want to put it), debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival, and has been praised by virtually every critic who has seen it. Alfredson says he enjoys sitting in with the American audiences; "It's fantastic to go to American screenings to listen to the audience. American audiences, they show what they feel. Swedish audiences are dead silent."
That silence, both in movies and everywhere else, is something Alfredson says is "very Swedish," and is just one of the things that makes Let the Right One In such a strange, invigorating film. Alfredson intentionally set the movie during the deep, dark Swedish winter, surrounded by snowdrifts, in order to capture-- you guessed it--the silence. "It's a very special sound after a heavy snowfall," Alfredson said, adding that he paid special attention to the smallest sounds that the bodies of the actors made. "[We had] a scene where we micced their eyes. A lot of human body sounds."
What silence and snow have to do with vampires and teenagers is beyond me, but Alfredson has linked them inextricably with his elegant film, which starts when lonely 12-year-old Oskar meets Eli, the girl next door who turns out to have been 12 years old, ever since she was bitten by a vampire and became one of them. Alfredson said casting the two main characters, played by Kare Hedebrant and Lina Leandersson, he was looking for kids who were "opposite sides of the same character." Finding Hedebrant and Leandersson after a year of open casting (there are no professional chlid actors in Sweden), Alfredson said he appreciate that "Both of them are very old, sort of." He continues, "Behind [Lina's] eyes I could see an old woman."
The movie is set in 1982, as was the original novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, which is when Alfredson says he was a teenager, like Oskar. Though he said he "couldn't imagine anything more blushing than making a bad horror movie," he also wanted to avoid playing too heavily on his own nostalgia for the time. "I really don't like when films are too nostalgic. It becomes cheap when you play an old hit record. I tried to hold that down to a minimum."
In a story in which people are systematically murdered or attacked by a young vampire, Alfredson had to make careful choices about when to show violence, and how often. "With violence, it's like striptease. you really cannot take all the clothes off first thing you do. You have to keep the audience interested." He also noted what the best horror directors realize; that for the most part, what the audience imagines is far worse than what the director can show.
We can only hope that same sensibility will translate in the movie's American remake, which is being prepared by Cloverfield director Matt Reeves. "You get feelings of jealousy," Alfredson said about the remake. "I've been dancing with this material for three years, and now somebody else is dancing."
Let the Right One In opens this Friday, and is guaranteed to be the most interesting, thought-provoking Halloween release this year. Alfredson doesn't care if you call it a love story or vampire story or horror movie or what-- "That's for the marketing people." Bu see it regardless, for the sake of this emerging international talent, his brilliant young actors and your own spooky enjoyment.
Tomas Alfredson - interview by darrynking on Mar 11 2009, 08:00AM
http://www.thevine.com.au/entertainment ... rview.aspx
TA Interiew w/Timoeout.comWith our screens set to be generously smeared with more tales of pale, moody, blood-guzzling Transylvanian tourists this year, it’s easy to be cynical about the vampire bandwagon. But Tomas Alfredson, the director behind Swedish vampire flick Let The Right One In, remains philosophical. “It’s interesting that suddenly we have this synchronicity of this theme,” he says. “It happens from time to time. Obviously we have a need for this kind of story, and I really cannot say why.”
Big bucks may have something to do with it – but this isn’t the case for Alfredson, who embarked on the project in early 2007. Taking a friend up on a recommendation, he read the original novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, and was struck first by how believable it was. “It was such an original mixture between the very social-realistic tone and the very fantastic style,” Alfredson says. “Usually I find it hard to get into stories if they’re too fantastic – I lose interest. But this mixture made it convincing.”
The title Let The Right One In is nabbed from a Morrissey lyric, and turns out to refer to an interesting morsel of vampire ethics. “It’s a little reflection of something that happens in the film. In order to come into a home, the vampire has to be invited… It also has the double meaning of letting the right one into your heart.”
Alfredson makes no bones about it. The film is, above all, a love story between its two characters: Oskar, a quiet twelve-year old who is relentlessly bullied by his classmates, and Eli, a mysterious young girl who turns out to be a 200-year-old vampire. “Oscar is a person who needs nearness and wants understanding and love, while Eli has a life where love is the biggest threat. That is a very interesting conflict I think.”
Having said that, there is certainly no shortage of moments of flesh-tearing, jugular-spurting vampire brutality in this particular love story. Alfredson approached the scenes, and their placement, very carefully. “I think the film as a whole contains so much graphic violence – so you have to think of it as a kind of striptease. You lose the energy if you come too close too early. It’s much more interesting having the audience lean forward to see more than lean backwards to avoid what’s happening on the screen.”
It’s the rendering of the characters’ relationship that really makes the film something special though – and it’s clear that Alfredson has a soft spot for the character of Oskar especially. “Bullied children are depicted as very sad people, but I think they are actually very angry… They can become very dangerous if they can’t find a way to get rid of all their anger.” A pause. “They become filmmakers.”
- Interview by Darryn King
http://www.timeout.com/film/features/sh ... ne-in.html
The secrets behind 'Let the Right One In'
Tomas Alfredson, director of excellent Swedish vampire film 'Let the Right One In' discusses the weird ways he approaches filmmaking
The Graduate
‘I try not to inspire myself through other films. Too many filmmakers today, they watch other films while they are doing their films and one is often tempted to copy. It’s much more interesting to explore other art forms, or life itself. So for this film I studied a lot of painters and music and literature and I tried to look in my old picture books which I read when I was a kid and tried to find what kind of images scared me. One film that has been very important for me as a person and as a filmmaker is Mike Nichols’s "The Graduate". That is one of the most important films for me as a filmmaker and maybe there are traces from that film in this one. I think as a comedy, it’s very funny, but it’s also very serious at the same time.’
The work of Elsa Beskow
‘We have this national artist who died 60 or 70 years ago. Her name is Elsa Beskow and she’s like the Beatrix Potter of Sweden. Everybody has read her books and can relate to them. I found one image that horrified me when I was a kid and that is a key to my work in this film. It’s a picture of two little children who are at their uncle’s house and they are playing a ghost game or something. It’s a dark room, and the only light coming in is from the street outside, very pale blue-grey. Behind the door, the uncle is standing with a sheet over his body and the children are looking in to the room and they have not seen him yet. There is a promise in the image that something will happen in ten seconds or 20 seconds when they find him, and that is what it’s all about when you try to create horrific situations. It’s when you play with the audience’s fantasies about what is going to happen.’
Hans Holbein
‘Another big source of inspiration for me was the German renaissance painter Hans Holbein. He created portraits that used very strange angles and perspectives. The most common thing in his work is that the person who is portrayed is often looking at the spectator, or at the artist, but Holbein very often painted this person looking out of the frame. I find this very spooky and very original for that time. There’s a very famous portrait of a young British prince, he’s ten-years-old or something and he’s wearing this fantastic outfit, but he’s looking underneath the frame which to me is terrifying.’
Secret music
‘I have a technique where I try to find a piece of secret music that I think correlates to the material that I’m working on. Then I use it as a mantra. With this, I listened to this piece of music every day, and when I don’t know what to do or how to do it, I ask the music. You find the answer in the music. In this case it’s a classical piece in a jazz interpretation, but I can’t tell you what it is, in case you think, "Why the hell would he choose that song?" I would lose something.’
Animals
‘I try to inspire myself from animals. When I do the casting process, I ask myself “Ok, if this character was an animal, what animal would he or she be?” Then you get much more open to different kinds of ages and bodies and faces of actors. It’s too narrow to decide that this mother is 35 and she’s blonde and she’s this and she’s that. But if you say, “Well, the mother is a cat”, you could choose from ten very different actors and they have this kind of energy that you relate to or that you associate with a cat.
‘When I was talking about the part of Eli with Lina Leandersson, we were discussing the animalistic elements, when she’s raging, when she’s attacking, when her body is reacting. We watched a lot of National Geographic films together, especially ones with lions attacking so we could find that kind of force inside you without blending it or confusing it with anger, because her attacking is not about anger.’
Childhood
‘It’s always much easier to work with material that you can relate to. “Let the Right One In” is set in 1982 in a suburb outside Stockholm. I was brought up in a suburb outside Stockholm and I had some problems with bullying when I was 12. I know all about this world and that is very good for a director to know the specifics. But if you look at this particular story it could be told anywhere at any time; it could be told in Africa or Tokyo. They’re doing an American version of the film, and I really hope that the director makes it very specific to his country and his feelings.’
Author: Interview: David Jenkins