In Norway, fairy tales about trolls are a normal part of childhood, but by adulthood, they tend to be forgotten. filmmaker André Øvredal decided to bring them back. Øvredal's resulting movie Trollhunter was featured at the San Francisco International Film Festival, and is now available VOD; it opens in theaters June 17. Trollhunter is a mockumentary, not unlike The Blair Witch Project, but with a more deadpan sense of humor. In it, a group of young documentary filmmakers accidentally meet the grizzled, apathetic title character (played by popular Norwegian comedian Otto Jespersen, in his film debut), and slowly learn not only about the existence of trolls, but also about the particular problems that arise because of them. Mr. Øvredal visited San Francisco in April and sat down with me to talk about the film. (Please also see my story in the San Francisco Examiner.)
JMA: I love the really in-depth history and detail here, endless fascinating details about trolls, mating habits, diet, sizes, and territories. Did you research the fairy tales, or animal kingdoms? How did you come up with all that stuff?
Andre Ovredal: There are some things that are from the fairy tales about trolls, like that they can smell Christian blood, and that they turn to stone. That and maybe one or two more details are from the fairy tales. The rest is made up. It's based on animal and biology research. The one thing I really had to make sure work was the idea of how they turn to stone; they turn to calcium. That was in-depth research.
JMA: It all sounds plausible. It's brilliant. What about all the names?
AO: Made them all up. In myths, it's just trolls. The fact that there are different races of trolls, that kind of stuff is all made up. In the fairy tales, mostly they're reasonably human-sized. But some of hte drawings, they were depicted as huge monsters. That's the stuff that scrared me when I was a kid. You see them as shadows breaking down the trees. There are some fairy tales that are really scary. And that mood is what I wanted to get out of the meeting with the trolls, but countered with the humor of how they actually function.
JMA: How do you get a movie like this funded in Norway?
AO: I just went into them blank. They didn't know who I was. They loved the idea and they saw the potential. Then, with a phone call they financed half the budget, without any script or anything. I didn't have a script at that point. That's half the financing, and then you have to get the other half from the government. That's an application process, and it took us about a year to get that money. There are two ways to finance a film through the government. One way is to base it on the artistic value of the film, which is usual personal, artistic films. And then the other one is the market potential of the film, which is more the Hollywood way of things.
JMA: So they decided that this was a money-making film.
AO: Yeah. So that's how we got the money.
JMA: With a government funding system, I would wonder if they actually give money to irreverent films like this?
AO: Yes. They split it. The only problem is that they end up having to give the money to sequels alone. When we first applied four of the five films that got funding were sequels, because they were proven.
JMA: The visual effects were terrific, although it feels like a low budget film. It could have been something like Cloverfield or Man Bites Dog...
AO: Man Bites Dog was one of the original references. Just the fact that it takes things seriously, to a degree. The budget is $3.5 million.
JMA: It looks so good. The final showdown with the Jotnar, the really big one. I love the way you were able to suggest the massive size of that creature. How did you shoot that sequence?
AO: We shot it very simply. We decided how big it was and we shot with empty space in the frame. You can probably see that it does vary in size throughout the scene, but not that much. We did a lot of rotoscoping, and simple tracking. There were some shots that we had big poles standing up with markers on them, but usually we didn't do that. The reality of what we shot made us choose.
JMA: There's one amazing shot that shows a troll running through the woods at night; he's shown via a hand-held camera, as well as night vision. That seems like a complex shot.
AO: It was complicated to integrate. It was a hassle for the effects company, to take away all the color from the creature they'd made. They were a little bit mad about that because they'd made all these wonderful details on the troll, and no one will ever see it. They had to degrade the image so much to make it match that footage. The footage is real. We shot it with imported American military grade equipment that we borrowed. We had to give it back as soon as we were done.
JMA: I'm always impressed inserting a computer-generated creature into a hand-held sequence.
AO: It's tricky, but it's so simple. Basically it's the idea of tracking things in. You have this amazing software and the people who use it... the program latches onto every little detail and latches onto it. It's amazing.
JMA: It's such a funny, deadpan comedy. I wonder if some American audiences may not get that it's a comedy...
AO: We think of things that are absurd, opposing a documentary. One thing I was preoccupied when I was writing was, what is funny before you know there are trolls, and what is funny after you know there are trolls? So a lot of the jokes I was shifting between before and after, like when they're discussing the fairy tales. It's just playing with the absurd idea. A lot of the audiences take it pretty seriously until they see the troll, and when it turns to stone right in front of them, then there's a relief of laughter because it looks so ridiculous.
JMA: Have you ever made a documentary?
AO: I shot a short film here in San Francisco when I went to film school in Santa Barbara, around 1994. I watched a lot of documentaries, to learn what goes into one. And then there are the moments of desperation, which we actually found a lot on YouTube, where people are being attacked by bears or wild animals in Africa, and they film it. It's fascinating to see what you would choose to do in that moment. Do you keep filming, or drop the camera, or throw it in the face of the animal?
JMA: Was this always meant to be a mockumentary?
AO: Yes. You couldn't shoot it like Jurassic Park or Transformers. Because you're forced to shoot everything from one perspective, which means you don't have different angles, which can be very costly. We could use so many production days shooting a scene over and over again. So we could shoot 3 or 8 or 10 takes and then move on.
JMA: Were those fairy tales a normal part of growing up in Norway?
AO: I think all children, as far as I know, are read the fairy tales. My grandparents and parents read them to me when I was a kid. I grew up in the woods, so walking through the woods by myself at night, the stories came up in my head.
JMA: They would actually prevent you from walking in the woods at night.
AO: That's what they're meant to do. But when you're an adult you don't see them anymore, and they become tourist stuff, little dolls in a toy shop. The trolls are depicted as cozy, sweet creatures. So I wanted to go back to the original depiction. I got like five Facebook messages from kids, and they love the film, about ten and up. I have had so much contact with kids who have seen the film five, or ten times. It's not scarier than Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings. We've become almost too protective. It's good to be scared, a little bit.
April 25, 2011
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