Of all the films I've seen this year (and I see a lot), one of my favourites has to be the Swedish period drama Everlasting Moments, so when the opportunity arose for me to speak with its director, I was very excited. Jan Troell is perhaps Sweden's greatest living director and his contribution to the industry over a 47-year career has been immense. Yet he's a quiet, charming, unassuming man who still seems to enjoy talking about his work because it still excites him as much as it always did.
Everlasting Moments is the story of a working class woman whose experiments with photography provide her with a whole new way of looking at the world, changing the way she relates to her husband, her children, and the local photographer who takes her under his wing. I asked Jan if I was correct in thinking that the story is based on the life of one of his wife's relatives.
"That's right, yes," he says. "My wife worked on collecting material and interviews for six years and in that period I heard about the story and was fascinated by it. When my wife said that she intended to make a documentary together with a friend of hers she had worked with before, I said 'No, stop! You mustn't do this." He laughs. "I wanted us to make a feature film about it. So that's the way it started and then we worked closely together on the script and other things."
Jan has a longstanding personal interest in photography, so I ask if that was part of what drew him to the story.
"Definitely. I guess that was the more important reason for me to become fascinated by it. I had a similar experience when I started taking pictures with a simple camera. I was 14 and I also learned how to develop it in the closet at home. I knew what Maria must have experienced - the mystery when there's an image being born on a piece of white paper in the red light in the dark room."
It must have been very different then, I note, from the experience of growing up today in an image-saturated culture. Jan agrees. "I sometimes feel a bit sorry for young people today. When they take pictures they use a telephone and they have it everywhere and they take thousands of pictures in a short time, and each picture can means less than nothing. But when I started, every little shot was important in a way, and you had a period of waiting for the result which wasn't so bad because you were dreaming and hoping that something good would come out. Now you get instant satisfaction. It's good sometimes, but not always."
I wonder if that interest in photography and images is part of why he chose to shoot this film as he did, giving it a very distinctive look.
"I chose 16mm instead of 35mm," he explains. "I was offered 35mm but I prefer 16 for this particular film because you get more texture in a way. 35mm could be almost too perfect. Of course, life didn't look imperfect in those days, but when we look back to it we have a different memory of it."
So what were the most important elements of the film, for him?
"It's sort of a love story, with four components - Maria, the husband, the photographer and the camera. There's also the element of the working class history of Sweden. In Malmö - my home town - in those days there were several strikes and some of them spread to all of Sweden. I wasn't part of that but I grew up in a working class area. I was the son of a dentist, so we had different circumstances from my schoolmates. I was very much aware of that difference and I have felt many times that I would like the chance to use that in a film. This gave me part of that chance."
Working class history, and the idea of working class people reaching out beyond the mundane things in life to strive for something more. seems to be a common theme in his work. I ask how important that has been to his choices, but it seems it was mostly unconscious. "When I look back I can see that this is a common theme in my films, but it's not something I'm actually aware of when I'm choosing. You can see it in retrospect but not when you are doing it."
One of the things I really liked about this film is that it's an unusual love story which never develops in the directions we've come to expect in cinema. Its heroine is a very strong character, but she doesn't make the decisions a modern audience might be used to.
"I've been asked many times why she didn't leave her husband," Jan says. "The answer is really quite obvious, but first of all, I think, when the children were little there were seven of them and it would have been impossible for her for economic reasons. She couldn't do that without a husband to get them food and a house and so on. Also, in those days, divorces were not a common solution to problems as they are today. But I think she mainly stayed because she did, in some ways, love Sigge, her husband."
"Maria Heiskanen, who plays Maria Larsson, I have worked with twice before. The first time was in a film called Il Capitano, which was based on a true story about a triple murder taking place in Sweden. It was very different from this story. Two young Finnish people killed three members of a family in northern Sweden in 1988. When I was looking for the leading actress for that we advertised and Maria was one of many hundreds who showed up. She was special. It was actually my wife who first said, when she was writing down this story - she has also written a book based on it - all the time she had Maria in mind for the part. I agreed very much, so that was that choice. It was more difficult to decide about the other parts, but I was very happy with the final cast."
"It's not a documentary but it is also based on reality. It's about a Swedish newspaperman - his name was Torgny Segerstedt. He became very famous and controversial during the Second World War. He was the chief editor of a daily newspaper and he took up the fight against Nazism. From the beginning, when Hitler first appeared in Germany, he wrote about him and he warned the world that there would ultimately be a war. He became very controversial because when Denmark and Norway were occupied by the Germans there was a lot of pressure on the Swedish government to let the Germans pass through Sweden with soldiers, and when Torgny Segerstedt wrote very furious articles in his newspaper about the Germans and not giving in to them, he became a threat to neutrality, so the government tried to stop him. It's a film about him and I'm doing the script together with a Danish writer, Klaus Rifbjerg, whom I've worked with before. Many years ago we did a script called The Flight Of The Eagle."
So what is it that drew him to this new project?
"I guess it's curiosity. This subject was not my own choice from the beginning. I was asked by a writer if I would be interested in making a film based partly on his book. When I read more about it I was fascinated by it."
It's clear from talking to Jan that the whole process of filmmaking is fascinating to him, and both his craftsmanship and his passion come across clearly in Everlasting Moments, which you should be able to find in a cinema near you this week.
