TEN years spent in a graveyard is not the most obvious apprenticeship for a film director, but it did give Fridrik Thor Fridriksson an affinity with outsiders and an oblique view of the world. In a droll funeral scene in his latest film, Cold Fever (now showing in Dublin), an aggrieved grave digger pops up, complaining that people are always in a hurry nowadays even in death. Fridriksson is definitely not in a hurry.
Yes, but 10 years? What was he doing? Well, thinking and making gravestones. "Now my films are my gravestones" the 41 year old Icelandic director smiles slowly, as a prologue to an enthusiastic discussion of death and its rituals. In Cold Fever a young Japanese man, Atsushi Hirata (Masatoshi Nagase) reluctantly travels to Iceland in mid winter to perform a memorial ceremony for his parents who died in a remote part of the country. The film, based on a true story, is as much a study of Hirata's changing attitudes to tradition and ritual as a humorous treatment of his encounter with the idiosyncrasies of Icelandic culture.
Together with the Oscar nominated Children of Nature and Movie Days (yet to reach Ireland) the film forms an Icelandic trilogy, dealing with tradition and change. As a child, Fridriksson spent his summers in the countryside where, he says, "the people were very different, they were storytellers, full of warmth. In these three films I wanted to capture that feeling of warmth, to portray this lost society"
In Children of Nature (which also includes a funeral scene), an elderly couple run away from an old people's home to return to die in the rural landscape of their youth. "I wanted to create an atmosphere, and to leave people with a good feeling," Fridriksson says. "I could have put across my ideas about life and death, but I don't care about that. I'm trying to look at death, yes, but not in a boring way. Death can be very funny. I'm using funerals in my films the way some people use music."
The script, which he developed during the shoot, is mainly in English, the common language between Hirata and the Icelanders he met. English is widely spoken in Iceland, thanks mainly to the American armed forces TV stations which were the first broadcast networks in the country in the 1960s and 1970s.
Of course, Fridriksson says, "people will invest in an Icelandic film if it's in English". However, he is committed to making as many films in his native language as possible even if this means working with tiny budgets (Cold Fever cost $1.3 million). Not surprisingly, money "has never been a big issue" in his life.
In the past year he has worked as a producer on six films made in Icelandic. The industry is so tiny that "producing" really means lending his camera equipment to friends "I don't interfere".
THE American independent producer Jim Stark initiated what was to become Cold Fever, having resolved to set a road movie in Iceland after a visit to Reykjavik. Despite the logistical problems of shooting in blizzard conditions, it was a fruitful collaboration which still allowed Fridriksson to have the final cut. "I could never go to Hollywood, because I would lose that," he says.
He is self taught, and his first films, made on 16mm, were documentaries, which he regards as excellent training for features. "In documentary it is essential to capture an atmosphere. If you can't do that, you can't go on to create anything." He also learned a lot from a spell working as a projectionist at the Reykjavik film club. "That was just like the graveyard, you know lots of time to think."
