At the BFI London Film Festival, we interview writer-director Rúnar Rúnarsson and star Elín Hall about their haunting film When the Light Breaks (Ljósbrot).
Una (Elín Hall) and Gunni (Mikael Kaaber) are in love, and having the time of their lives. But things are not as easy as they look in When the Light Breaks (Ljósbrot), from writer-director Rúnar Rúnarsson. Soon, things become even more complicated, when Gunni dies in a tragic car accident, leaving his friends and family devastated, including a girlfriend (Katla Njálsdóttir’s Klara) with whom he was about to break up. Which means that, while Klara has a support system to help her cope with her loss, Una, whose relationship with Gunni nobody knew about, is completely on her own with her grief.
When the Light Breaks, which opened the Un Certain Regard of this year’s Cannes Film Festival and was just screened at the BFI London Film Festival, is one of those films that get under your skin. Rúnarsson carefully chooses which scenes to show us, always putting his characters first, in a film that has no good or bad people but simply human beings who are just doing their best. It’s a movie that tackles grief in a very much real, devastating way, but also shows us the light, and does so in a healthy, beautifully subversive way.
At the BFI London Film Festival, Rúnar Rúnarsson and Elín Hall tell us about making the film, showing the “grey scale of life,” themes of sisterhood, grief and humanity, handling the movie’s emotions and establishing trust, and more. Read the interview below!
Rúnar Rúnarsson & Elín Hall on When the Light Breaks‘s Protagonists and Showing Audiences the Film
What a journey you’ve been on with this film! First you opened Cannes’ Un Certain Regard, then you won many awards at other festivals, and now the UK premiere at the BFI London Film Festival – with a release date set in many countries! What does it all feel like?
Rúnar Rúnarsson: The first thing that comes to mind is that it’s so good for the people behind this film to get recognition for their work. As a director, if things go well, people are applauding me; yet, so often, people forget that there is a whole army of people that are behind a film like this. I’m a writer-director, so I’m the one who starts developing something, but then gradually, more and more people join [the project]. It’s almost like Noah’s Ark [smiles]: I start to build an ark, and then just everybody comes in, and all of a sudden we have a crew. I’ve been lucky and privileged to have found people that are better than me in all departments, and who go the extra mile to take this journey together. It’s a group effort.
Elín Hall: It’s just been unreal. I think that’s the word I would use for it: it brings tears to my eyes to even think about it too much. I think, in a way, you just have to keep yourself grounded, but I’m just so incredibly happy that the story is resonating with people. When I read the script for the first time, I really, really believed in it. I just feel very fortunate to have been a part of it.
What was it in the script that drew you to the film, Elín?
E.H.: I just really related to the character, Una. She’s very different from me, but there was something very human about her, like the complexities of her situation and all the different emotions she goes through in just a span of, sometimes, minutes. And there’s this very isolated feeling in her, because she’s completely alone with her grief. It just broke my heart, in a way. Grief is something that makes people feel very isolated and very alone, and I think that’s what speaks to people about the film. People can interpret it in many ways, but to me, it’s first and foremost about friendship – you know, these two women coming together and focusing on what they have in common, and not [what they lost].
I agree. I also feel that this is such a subversive film, in the way it avoids a confrontation between the two women, Una and Klara. It’s something that we expect, when watching the movie, and then what happens instead is a very healthy kind of resolution – the kind that’s so important to show in movies, I feel.
E.H.: Yeah, I agree. I’ve heard people say that they wanted an actual resolution, but to me, there’s so much said in silences, and there’s so much said in not getting a closure.
R.R.: Yes, that was one of the key [aspects I wanted to have] when I was writing the story. I’ve also been asked, “Why is it two women in the main roles? Is that your story to tell?”. I feel that this generation, and especially young adults at this age, particularly within creative sectors, look at gender in a completely different way than their parents; it isn’t an issue for them. It’s still an issue for their parents and their grandparents, even though most of us in the Western world are trying to be open minded, but it’s a process. But for [younger generations], this isn’t an issue to begin with: we are all human beings.
But there’s one thing that women have and men don’t – we have a word for it, but it has a completely different meaning. We might have brotherhood, but we don’t have sisterhood. And sisterhood is a really special thing. What I don’t like in films and stories is that women are put up against each other. Most women that I know – and I’ve been privileged to have a great mother, three sisters, a wife, a daughter… My DOP [Sophia Olsson] is a woman, and so are my producer [Heather Millard] and Production Designer [Hulda Helgadóttir] – aren’t always competing with each other. It’s such a cliché. Women have more of a sisterhood: they understand each other. They can have different views on things, but that doesn’t make them rivals or enemies, because they have this mutual understanding of being a human being.
Elín Hall on Shooting the Last Scene of When the Light Breaks and Having Time to “Create Magic”
***The following two questions contain minor spoilers for the film’s ending***
Elín, what was it like to shoot that last scene?
Elín Hall: It was beautiful. We shot, like… ten different versions of it! Rúnar does that a lot. He really is an explorer. There was a bunch of dialog in the script, for that last scene, and we did so many versions of it, changing the dialogue, always kind of taking more and more away. And then he asked us to do one scene “with the dialogue, but without saying any words”.
Oh, wow! That can’t have been easy.
E.H.: It’s easy and not easy. He asked us not to be melodramatic about it – to try to hold our emotions in. And I don’t know what happened, but immediately, when there were no words, and it was just Katla [Njálsdóttir]’s eyes, and my eyes, and a minimal crew… I didn’t really notice them anymore. Both our eyes were just streaming, and I was thinking the whole time – “Sh*t, Rúnar asked us not to cry”, or at least to try and hold our emotions in. But that kind of backfired, in a way, because there was something so powerful about having no words in the scene. It’s quite dark, but you can kind of see that the pillow was completely soaking wet from this shot!
***No more spoilers from this point on***
Did having to hold your emotions in for so long help with the crying? I feel that you cry a lot in this movie!
E.H.: Something that Rúnar really stands guard of with his actors is time: he was able to give us a lot of time and space with with each scene, and that’s not something that is often possible on a movie set. He really made sure that we had silence, and we had time. He never says “action”; he says, “on your own time”.
That’s amazing!
E.H.: Yeah. Sometimes it takes a while to get into the moment, and [here] you never felt rushed with it. It’s very hard to create magic in a moment. It’s just something that’s very fleeting, and you can’t sometimes force it; I think Runar knows this, and so it wasn’t very difficult to cry at all. We just had so much trust, so much time, and so much space with it.
Our writer Claire, who reviewed the film back in Cannes, pointed out that the first time you cry, letting go of these emotions, we don’t even see your face because you’re covering it with your hands. Was this intentional?
E.H.: Everything is very intentional in this film! [laughs]. But yeah, I think I know what you mean. Rúnar isn’t very interested in the crying itself; he is interested in what leads to it, and the moments after it, like the emotions around it. [It’s also the reason why] I did a lot of “back acting” in this film [laughs] – like, acting with the back of my head. It was really, really important to Rúnar that Una had her hair shaved off, and to see me cry from the back [the way the camera frames that scene] puts audiences in a bit of a different perspective. You’re very, very close to Una but you don’t see her face; you’re there with her. It almost puts you more in her shoes, because you don’t see her face: when I’m crying, I don’t see my own face cry. It’s not as much about the voyeuristic thing of watching someone cry; it’s being in the moment with them.
Rúnar Rúnarsson on Throwing Rocks to Make When the Light Breaks, and Showing the “Grey Scale of Life”
One of the things I love about the movie is that it feels like you know exactly what you’re going to show us and what you’re not going to show us, and the key moments we do get to see really make the storytelling so powerful. What was your writing process like?
Rúnar Rúnarsson: Well, what is a writing process to begin with? I have this metaphor that I’m standing by a river bank and I want to reach the other side of the river, so I’m throwing rocks into the river that are different kind of ideas. It can be a visual, a poem, all kinds of things. Some stones just sink to the bottom, some stick through the water’s surface, some may become foundation for all the rocks that land on top… And when I have the sense that I can jump between the rocks and reach the other side, that’s when I start writing.
This rock-throwing process can take months, and then I’m quite fast writing the first draft. I don’t write step outlines [a detailed breakdown of every major scene] or treatments [in-depth summaries of the film’s story, characters and themes], because for me, it kills the nuances and the sense of flow that you can find in the instant. That’s the working document, which is used to finance the film, so it’s the blueprint that we need to have. But then, when more people are on board, we continue to write, to develop, to eliminate text. How are we going to use the narrative tools that cinema has? How do we transmit these emotions, tell these fragments of stories or even the whole story with sound, imagery, colors, etcetera?
I also really love how striking the imagery is in the film, visually speaking. There are so many mirrors – a scene in particular shows Una and Klara’s faces become one in the reflection of a building – and I feel that that reflects some of the themes in the film. For example, there’s a big public tragedy, but Una’s grief is internal. And then there’s the way we see or remember people – both those who have died and those who are grieving them – in a different way than the way they actually are.
R.R.: Some visuals are already [conceived] in the written stage: I try to think visually, and to be in locations as much as I can. In the same way that I try to eliminate a lot of dialogue when we start working with more and more people, to give it more nuance and make [a situation] more relatable, it’s the same with visuals. In a way, most things in life have more than two face to them. Something that can make you extremely sad can evoke a feeling of enormous beauty at the same time, and vice versa. A view can do that as well: it leaves more of a spectrum for the audience to come with their own judgment, within the premise in which it’s set. When I watch a movie, it gives me a wider feeling instead of being told exactly the one thing that it is; that’s too simple. It’s very rare in life that we’re in our darkest place, or in our brightest. Both can happen, but we don’t stay in neither places for too long; we are always on the grey scale of life.
I feel that the sound design and music also reflect this kind of idea.
R.R.: I like it when the audience get gets a sense of reality, but at the same time, the sound design is quite expressionistic. Normally, when you have expressionistic sound design, then it’s quite loud and not realistic, but we are in the opposite spectrum. Focusing on some real sounds but having a complete lack of others sounds gives it some kind of focus and simplifies it. We often use long takes in the film, or combinations of frames – starting as a white frame that leads to an over shoulder close up, for example, and we never never cut – but by only putting emphasis on certain things in the sound design side, there is cutting happening nevertheless. We gently guide the audience to look at a certain places within the screen without breaking time, because when you cut, then you break time, and then then you get a sense of construction.
We would like the audience to have a sense of reality, but the music is a little bit like a side plot. It comes somewhere towards the beginning, towards the middle, and towards the end, and it’s the same piece, but each time it has a different feel to it, because different things have happened just before. That way, it gives a different emotion each time; the general sound design is very low key, but we allow the music to fill a little bit space.
Rúnar Rúnarsson and Elín Hall on Establishing Trust and the Craft of Getting Out of a Character
Rúnar, how did you cast your actors?
Rúnar Rúnarsson: We started the casting process one year prior to the shoot. At first we cast the two young women, and then we built the group around them. What I was looking for was their ability of transmitting a spectrum of emotions on set, and also get a sense of what this actor is like as a human being. Can this be a good collaboration for us? It went really well in this film. It was a great group of young actors who were so open to experiment and check out different working methods than what some of them were used to. I felt from the beginning that they trusted me, which is so important for a film. If the actor choses the director, then they are willing to go to the edge and maybe fall off the edge, because the director is there to catch them. That’s what all of them did, and they did great work. They were so supportive to each other as well – it’s not always the case!
Speaking of falling of the edge, what an emotional performance you gave us in this film, Elín! How did you hold it together, and more importantly, how did you get rid of the character and shake it all off when shooting ended?
Elín Hall: I’ve been in the industry for maybe ten years, but I wouldn’t say that I’m a very experienced actor. I have a degree, but people have worked in the industry for decades, and what I learned in this process is that there is a practice getting into a role, but there’s also a whole craft getting out of it, and I kind of hit a wall with that. I actually needed to get help. The film isn’t very long: It’s just 80 minutes of this emotional roller coaster. But I stayed in that emotional roller coaster pretty much for three months. I used to work in a theater, and normally, when the the curtains come down, it’s this physical thing: the curtain comes down and the character just washes off. But it’s different in films, and often it boils down to putting on a costume and taking it off at the end of the day, which helps you get out of the character. But as we finished shooting the film, I still had my hair shaved off, no eyebrows, and a bunch of things that prevented me from just snapping into my old life, and my old self. I think I grew up a lot during the shooting period, and it really changed me as an artist.
It took me a few weeks, and even a few months, to just say goodbye to the film. I talked to Rúnar about it, but I also I have a mentor – an actress who is much older than I am – and I even talked to a witch! [laughs] I just did a lot of things, and finally, I was able to shed the emotion of it. You know, research shows that imagining that you’re playing a piano does the same thing to your brain as actually playing the piano. I’ve been really interested in this since doing this role. If you spend so much time imagining that you’re losing your love in such a horrific way, can your body and your system actually start believing that it happened to you? And I really do think that I tricked my body into it.
Rúnar, was it as difficult for you to “shake off” this very personal project?
R.R.: It wasn’t; I make films to “shake something off” and self reflect on something. It was definitely harder for the actors, because they are actually not being taught to do that. They are taught how to get there, but not how to get rid of it all.
Elín Hall and Katla Njálsdóttir are Best Friends in Real Life
Elín, how did you and Katla Njálsdóttir, who plays Klara, meet each other?
Elín Hall: We are actually kind of in the same circles. Iceland is very small, but she’s a successful actress, so I knew of her, but we had never really spent time together. So we met in the audition process, and we kind of “trauma bonded” in the sense that we were completely sure that we were not going to get the part after the audition, because we kind of felt like it had gone horribly! Rúnar can be quite difficult to read, so we came out [of the room] thinking, “Oh, he he doesn’t like us!” It turns out that he did, but we started becoming friends from that experience of having this audition that we thought had gone horribly. Then we both got the call, and she is my best friend today. We even started making music together! We started a band – a punk band that’s called “Mammaðín,” which means “your mom with an attitude”.
I think Katla just thinks very similarly to me. She is also probably the most talented person I’ve ever worked with: I am her biggest fan. I’ve never seen her off: I’ve never seen her say a word that’s not convincing on screen. She’s a very, very energetic and kind of chaotic person, but what’s weird is that she’s also such a genius. Normally, if people are very energetic and fun, maybe they’re not very disciplined. But she truly has so many colors. She’s very much a force, and we grew very close in the shooting period. She would stay at my house between shooting days, and now, you know, she’s like my sister.
This is such a serious, emotional film. Did you guys ever start laughing, or break out of character?
E.H.: You had a cast of energetic young people, so yeah, definitely. And Rúnar was the worst! He has a lot of humor, and he would joke around all the time. There were some very light and fun scenes that were cut – perhaps they didn’t like serve the main trajectory of the film – and also a bunch of scenes with a lot of laughter. I think it was probably hard for the boys, because of how much fun me and Katla had. We just bonded so, so fast, and sometimes, if you’re doing a film that’s has this heavy subject and a lot of crying, you kind of need someone to pick you up. Katla was always there for me to just draw me up again and, you know, help me down gently. But we were very naughty on set sometimes, yeah!
Rúnar Rúnarsson and Elín Hall on Shooting When the Light Breaks
Was the set as quiet as what the film looks like?
Rúnar Rúnarsson: Yes, most of the time. That’s how I like to have my sets. I want people to be focused, and kind to each other. And of course, people should have fun as well: there shouldn’t only be work, but we have to be focused nevertheless. What is important for me, even though sometimes we have to run fast – for example if we’re running out of light, or for all kinds of practicalities – is that I have to ground myself, and I try to ground the set as well. That way, we are in a similar atmosphere when we start shooting.
Elín, there’s a scene towards the end where you’re all dancing, and it looks so effortless, but it can’t have been easy to shoot.
Elín Hall: Yeah, there was a choreographer, and we did rehearse it a lot. We tried different songs, and a lot of discipline that went into it that was just like… practicalities. But then when it came to actually shooting it, and since Rúnar gave us a lot of time, and a lot of space, it was very special to go through it with the kids. It was very otherworldly. I sometimes say that I felt like I was doing some religious practice, or on hallucination drugs, even though I wasn’t.
Katla and I are both very physical actors. I really like to approach my craft in a physical way, rather than being too much in my head. And so we were doing physical practices to get into that: she was really pushing on certain energy points, helping me get into this vulnerable state where any emotion could happen. The aim wasn’t necessarily to break down crying; it was to find the space where you feel completely raw, and without any guards. There’s a special emotional state: it’s almost like… right before you start your period. There’s this emotional state of “I don’t know if I want to laugh or cry,” and you just feel completely, emotionally naked. That was very much that scene to me: to just find that space and go through the motions of how it was choreographed… And, you know, then the magic just happens, and the emotion comes out.
Rúnar Rúnarsson Makes Movies for the “Human Elements”
Rúnar, why do you make films?
Rúnar Rúnarsson: When I started making films, I wanted to change the world with my cinema. I started when I was a teenager, making things with really strong political messages, like equality and all kinds of stuff. But really, one plus one equals two, and those people’s views that I wanted to change… I was not changing anything. The first time that I allowed myself to go within and portray the human element was when I made a short film called The Last Farm. That was the first time that I tried to be honest towards myself, and therefore towards the audience.
The main character is an old man, and at the end of the film, a couple of people came over to me, thanking me for the film, and the payoff, for me, came when they said, “Well, I’m gonna go and visit my father. I’m gonna go and visit my grandmother”. Somebody was getting a visit because of something that we had made! And with just one of these visits, I was having more of an effect on the world than all the political Molotov cocktails that I had been throwing with the shorts I did before.
So since then, I still have my views on world matters, and how we should run societies and so on, but by preaching it, I’m not gonna change anything. But maybe, by exploring these human elements that we all go through, and look at the light, and the beauty that something horrible can lead to as well – that can lead to another visit to somebody, or somebody being kind to someone else.
Is there a film that you saw that had this kind of effect on you?
R.R.: Of course. The neorealists of Italy put a lot of emphasis on this human elements, and also affected Indian cinema like the works of Satyajit Ray. He got inspired by them and made the Apu trilogy. It’s just great cinema. And it’s this humanity: even though it takes place in… a poetry district of Mumbai in the 50s, like the first film [The World of Apu], as a young man in Iceland, I could relate to everything, because it’s these human elements that are being portrayed.
Elín Hall on the Roles She Likes in Film and The Stories She Likes to tell with Her Music
Did this film help you find out more about which kind of roles you’d like to do in the future?
Elín Hall: Absolutely. I’ve always been very interested in dance films, and films without a lot of dialogue, and the merging between music, theater, film, and dance. That’s where I feel like I gravitate towards. I also am a musician.
Yes! I was googling you last night and realized you’re also a musician!
E.H.: It’s a double life! [laughs] But you know, I see it as all being the same thing – creating music, or starting a film, or writing a script. I’ve never written a script, but it’s all the same thing to me. I’m really interested in this “space between,” and this “genre-less art” that just takes from it – all of it.
I don’t understand the lyrics to your songs, but the melodies sound so haunting. Do you think When the Light Breaks affected your music at all, or vice versa?
E.H.: Probably. Una, my character, is a very different person than who I am, but there’s a fragility to her, and this advantage in the delicate parts of her. I think that’s something that I explore a lot with my music, these juxtapositions. I know that I am small and I have a very bright voice, and people used to call me very cute; that used to be very annoying for me. So I started experimenting with writing very graphic lyrics. Like, one of my main singles from my last album is called “reckless homicide”. I just love telling stories that evoke a visceral feeling. I think Una is very much about these opposites as well – you know, the delicate stuff, and the big stuff, and mixing it together. I think you can hopefully find that in my music as well. I am working on music in English, finally, so hopefully you’ll be able to understand it! [laughs]
What do you think happens to Una and Klara in the future?
E.H.: I think they become friends and start a band! It’s what me and Katla did in real life, and I totally see them doing the same things: just becoming past friends and creating music together.
Thank you both so much for speaking with us!
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Rúnar Rúnarsson’s When The Light Breaks was screened at the BFI London Film Festivsl on October 16-17, 2024
Header Credits: Rúnar Rúnarsson and Elín Hall at the 2024 BFI London Film Festival (Millie Turner / BFI); A still from When the Light Breaks (Compass Films)
