DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT & OTHER STUFF:
I’m a film editor and because of that I’m often sitting for a very long time working on a film. It can be from four months up to nine months so I wanted to do something now. Not next year, not two years from now. But now. And COUNTRY WEDDING became the now.
I didn’t want to write a script but wanted the actors to improvise their dialogue in situations happening during their trip from Reykjavik to the country church. Half of the actors in COUNTRY WEDDING come from the theater group Vestuport and they were used to work like this the other half – even though some of them said that they couldn’t improvise at all, quickly picked up with the others and all of them turned these wedding guests into real people with their own way of talking.
I’ve heard from actors and directors and producers that half of the shooting day is spent on waiting for this and that to be ready and while waiting the actors can easily forget not only their lines but what film they are in. So I took all that out. No set decoration, no lighting, no make-up, no costumes, no marking on the floors. Four cameras would be running during the shoot and it was the cameramen’s responsibility to follow the actors and be sure to grab every movement they made.
Before lunch on our first day of shooting I could see the cameramen’s confusion written in their faces but after lunch they had got it. I was not going to tell them what to do and how to do it. Why bother to have creative people around you if you are going to tell them what to do how to do it all the time? But of course we talked.
Did you get everything you needed? What part of the scene need more cover? They told me what they had got and what they wanted to get and we shot the scene until they were happy with the material and they didn’t let me down. I got every frame I needed to put the film together.
The sound recorders got the same treatment as the cameramen. They had to figure out how to record 16 actors with no boom but 16 radio mikes on 16 channels on two computers that were located in the buses during the shooting. This is insane. It’s like recording Rolling Stones playing while on the run, said Kjartan the sound designer shaking his head and then he went out and recorded every breath from the actors.
The film was shot in chronological order in 7 days. The actors never knew when they were on camera or not so they had to be in the characters from the beginning of the take to the end. One take was one scene and the length of the scenes was from 5 to 16 minutes.
I was working with Thomas Vinterberg two months before we started to shoot COUNTRY WEDDING and we were talking about how he worked with the actors and how he researched. He said: I sometimes rehearse the scene before the scene I’m going to shoot and the scene that comes after but not the scene I’m about to shot. I get extra energy out of the actors of doing it that way. Interesting, I thought and decided to take it one step further. No rehearsal of the scenes that would be in the film. Instead we would focus on the past.
Every actor made the background for his character from birth to the wedding day. Then we met and talked about their personality and their relationship with other characters in the film and played out scenes from their past. For example when the parents of the bride tell their two children that they are going to get divorced. When the bride invite her parents to dinner to tell them that she is going to get married and the mother brings her unwelcome new boyfriend with her. The groom telling his mother that he doesn’t want to work in his fathers business and two unexpected guests at the wedding in the groom’s family talked about how they met in Edinburgh. The only actor that didn’t want to know a thing about the families and didn’t want to meet them until the first day of shooting was the friend of the bride’s friend. He wanted to arrive to the wedding totally blank like every other stranger.
Most families have one thing or another they like to keep in the dark and the two families in COUNTRY WEDDING are no exceptions. We planted out secrets to some of the characters that no one else knew about until they were exposed little by little during the journey and the actors had to react by the nature and feelings of their characters. No written help there.
You are who you are and I wanted the actors to become the characters. I wanted them to know their character’s feelings and behavior, their heart and soul from the bottom of their own heart before we started out. And on the dawn of the wedding day they would know who they were and what they had lived through but not what they were about to experience on the road to the wedding ceremony. Just like in real life.
