Horsin’ Around: Benedikt Erlingsson on Of Horses and Men

In his impressive debut Of Horses and Men, director Benedikt Erlingsson deftly weaves a darkly comic portrait of the equine world within stunning, rural Iceland. Erlingsson’s film is a witty negotiation of the primal and the civilised; a meditation and critique of the capricious alliances that form between horses and humans. We catch up with the Icelandic filmmaker to talk beasts, sex, death and Shakespeare.  

What was the original concept behind the film?

Well, I want to say something new [with the film] but at the same time, I want it to be true!  What was the original concept like? It was very personal, in a way.  We sometimes talk about how filmmakers should make coming-of-age films, and in a sense this film is mine. I was brought up in the centre of Reykjavik, then, as a teenager, I’m sent to work in the countryside. It is a custom in Iceland to teach children how to work, so I am sent to this horse farm and I work there for three summers. Being involved in the Icelandic equine culture, this was a very strong experience for me so the film-making process has been very close to me. So, within the film, maybe the core idea is about an essence of animal instincts of human beings. It is a film with sex and death and a happy end. Not the other kind of film; there are only two kinds of films, and the other kind is a film with sex, death and a Hamlet ending. Everybody dies!

So it’s about the beast within the human, and the human within the beast?

Yes. I experienced this closeness with the horses, and when they are companions, we make a deal with them. Human beings are very simple: we are social animals, we have a hierarchy among us, we have the instinct to escape and we are very co-dependent on each other, and horses are too. So there are a lot of similarities between horses and humans, but in its essence, of course, this is a film about people. It is about untamed people. I became very fascinated by the concept of untamed people and the uneasy co-existence and fighting between these two species.

I have never been so relieved to see the “no animals were harmed in this film” tagline at the end cedits. With horses regularly killed and abused for cinema, from Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev to the recent Hobbit movie, how important to you was the welfare of your horses?

That was very important to us while we were making this film. We are horse people, we are horse men, we are horse lovers. A lot of the people in the crew are horse owners and horse lovers so you can say it was like we were working with our children. If you make a film about child abuse, you are not abusing a child on the set. We are making a film about horse abuse, how horses are used. This is such an important, basic principle for us. It’s almost for us as if we don’t even have to discuss it. If there was something even a little bit dangerous, we always had a vet on the set and the horse owners and trainers were there too. There were six trainers, so if anything had happened, everybody would have known and it would have been a brutal catastrophe! If you want to ask about any special scenes or sequences, about how it was done, we can do that also.

Well, there are so many moments in Of Horses and Men where it felt like the horses ostensibly were the actors. There’s the centrepiece copulation scene, or the tender, bleakly funny moment in which a horse nuzzles his fallen, dead rider briefly before returning to graze. What was it like to trust the horses with acting? How much can you direction them and were they specially trained?

If you know horses, you can manipulate them, you can manipulate their focus. The brilliant thing about horses are they are interested in other horses and they are more interested in other horses than human beings, so you can put another horse behind the camera and the horse in front of the camera is more interested in that horse than all of the crew and the camera. In that sense you can control his attention. But of course, it’s the audience that is actually linking what is happening on screen; the audience is making the assumption of what the horse is thinking, that’s the beauty of movie making. We cannot direct the horse specifically but you can expect something if the horse is put in the right situation – it’s all about preparation. We have good trainers and an excellent equine culture here in Iceland. Other cultures tend to ‘break’ the horse. We don’t break the horse in Iceland, we train the horse. Ultimately, directing the horses was about the easiest part. It was maybe the easiest part of this whole procedure. The Homo sapiens are always the problem.

Of Horses and Men has been selected as Iceland’s Oscar submission and to be part of MOMA’s prestigious New Directors New Films series. How do you feel about how well the film is doing on the world stage?

Well, I am most proud of the San Sebastian [International Film Festival] prize. For me, it was my first festival, my first film and I got this big prize there, and then the Tokyo [International Film Festival] prize for best director. After that, there have been lots of prizes and of course MOMA’s New Directors New Films comes with great prestige. But the Oscar thing… the Oscar is really passé! It is OK.

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“It is a film with sex and death and a happy end” – Benedikt Erlingsson

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UK audiences will recognise Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson from his wonderful, powerful performance as a bereaved father in Metalhead (Malmhaus). He is emerging as a dynamic talent in Iceland, what was he like to work with?

It is beautiful to work with him. We worked in the theatre together, and we were doing two proper shows from 2010 and 2011, we did two big theatre productions. In Iceland, he is the alpha male in our films and our theatre.

Do you have any future projects in the works?

Yes I’m working on a future project.  In a sense, it is in a place where I cannot talk so much about it.  I have to keep it close but I think it will be exciting and have a lot of death.

So very Shakespearian again?

Exactly, using all the tricks in the book!  One thing I will have to have more of [in my films] is chasing, that of course is the essence of film making!  You know, when somebody is chasing another person, like a cop chasing a criminal?

The movement, the editing?

Yes, so there will be something like that. Also, I want to make a film about climate change, maybe it will be a thriller about climate change.

That sounds wonderful! Is that something very noticeable in Iceland?

It’s much more noticeable in Greenland, which is very close to us. It is very noticeable. We have birds that can’t live here anymore; there are new types of fish and other species are appearing. There are a lot of very serious things happening in our natural habitat and we are noticing it, but the general discussion in our society is so low key. There are a lot of possibilities; it is something that we can change. On this planet, we are the last generation that can do something, so in our lifetime, we owe it to ourselves. We should try our best to think about this.

Cinema can play a huge role in that. It can change minds and inspire people.

Films, show business are the most opinion making businesses of the world. It is politics, everything is politics