You may not know the work of Roy Andersson unless you are a cinephile, but the Swedish director counts filmmakers like Alejandro G. Iñárritu and Darren Aronofsky among his fans. In fact, Iñárritu and Aronofsky are lending their names to the promotion of his latest film, billed as the presenters of A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, which won the Golden Lion at last year’s Venice Film Festival and opens in theaters in New York City on June 3, with a national rollout to follow.
It’s the third in a trilogy of absurdist, almost inexplicable, comedies known as The Living Trilogy, “a trilogy about being a human being.” (In celebration of the completion of this trilogy, which includes Songs from the Second Floor and You, The Living, New York City’s Museum of Arts and Design launched a retrospective called It’s Hard to Be Human: The Cinema of Roy Andersson on May 28.)
Made up of nearly 40 vignettes, many of them focusing on a pair of salesmen selling fake vampire teeth and other novelties, Pigeon is humorous yet tragic. To wit: One of the film’s early scenes finds a man lying motionless on the floor of a cafeteria. When it becomes clear that the man, who had just paid for a beer and some food, has dropped dead, the cashier asks if anyone else would like his meal, still sitting on a tray near the cash register. An awkward silence follows before a fellow patron slowly raises his hand and claims the beer.
Other scenes aren’t funny at all but simply disturbing. In one, a lab monkey is continually shocked while a lab technician casually talks to someone on the phone, constantly saying, “I’m happy to hear you’re doing fine,” a refrain heard in other scenarios, too.
Reflecting Andersson’s signature style, every scene in Pigeon is shot by a camera placed in a fixed position, and on sets that have been painstakingly crafted in the director’s studio. It’s this meticulous technique and attention to detail that explains why the Swedish director has been making movies for 40 years but has only shot five. Andersson’s films, which he writes and finances on his own by shooting commercials, take four years on average to shoot. (It should also be noted that there was a long break–we’re talking 25 years–between his second and third films.)
Co.Create recently rang Andersson at his Studio 24 production company in Stockholm to discuss his influences, his idiosyncratic shooting style, and his reasons for casting mostly non-actors in his films.
Co.Create: Unlike with many of the movies I see, I feel like I could literally draw an accurate picture of so many of the scenes in Pigeon because of the way you keep your camera perfectly still and allow the audience to take in the visuals.