Much to the chagrin of his detractors, Ruben Östlund has won the Palme d’Or twice, and he’s aiming to do it again when his next film premieres at Cannes.
The Swedish filmmaker of “Triangle of Sadness” and “The Square” will be shooting “The Entertainment System is Down” in early 2025 and he hopes it will help him achieve history at the festival (via Interview):
Winning one Palme d’Or put more pressure on me, but winning two Palme d’Ors took away a lot of pressure because that means I wasn’t a one hit wonder. But then also I need pressure in order to perform. So that’s why the goal with the next film is to win another one. It’s going to be the first time in the history of filmmaking that a director wins three Palme d’Ors in a row. I mean, it’s completely absurd to say these things.
Östlund credits being “cocky” as way of getting better as an artist.
For me, the goal is to create a bar that is pushed up and to create a goal. I think a lot of people consider me very cocky in a way, but for me, you say it because it creates something that makes it possible to push something […] I think also true creative confidence and managing to achieve something and working with feature films and traveling the world and meeting people also developed my self-confidence. So it’s something about getting confidence in a profession and then through that, experiencing the world and being put up in different social situations that makes you even more confident.
He also confirms having recently finished writing the script for “The Entertainment System is Down” The film, being produced by A24, is set to star Keanu Reeves, Kirsten Dunst, Woody Harrelson, Nichols Braun, Vincent Lindon, Daniel Brühl, Joel Edgerton, and Samantha Morton.
Östlund decided to buy a retired Boeing 747 for the project, with the plane to be used as the main set for the film which takes place on a long-haul flight whose entertainment system loses power as passengers become “modern human beings that have to deal with boredom and their own thoughts.”
Östlund has already teased a scene in the film where a young boy asks to borrow his older brother’s iPad and is told he has to wait five minutes. “I want to challenge the audience,” Östlund said. “You stay with the kid in real time. And he’s looking in the catalog, putting it back and the restlessness is coming. So he asks his mother, ‘How much do we have left?’ And she says, ‘Well, now it’s four minutes and 45 seconds, you have to calm down.’”
"When the audience starts to realise that this is a real-time shot, I think a lot of people are going to be very, very frustrated," he said, still chuckling.
Östlund added that he wants the film to provoke the most walkouts in Cannes history. “And I think it’s going to be more provocative than any violent, any disturbing content,” he says. “Because to be left alone with your thoughts and challenging the audience to do the same thing, then it’s going to be very interesting.”
In preparing the film, Ostlund is said to have been inspired by a social psychological study at Virginia University called “The Challenge of the Disengaged Mind.” The experiment found that participants did not enjoy spending 6 to 15 minutes in a room by themselves with nothing to do but think.