Director Hlynur Pálmason on battling the elements for Godland: ‘Making a film threatens you’

Hlynur Pálmason has been held up. The writer and director recently booked a screening tour of his native Iceland for his head-spinning new film Godland. He was keen to present the movie himself, despite Icelandic cinemas having no tradition of in-person Q&As. A clue as to why became apparent in Seyðisfjörður, a town of 676 people in the east of the country with a single big screen, at the deepest point of a fjord amid mountains and puffin colonies.

After the Q&A (“a lot of fun”), Pálmason and his two lead actors promptly found themselves in a violent snowstorm. They remained marooned until the following night. This interview was delayed as a result.

Pálmason shows me the whiteout scene on his phone. “It was pretty crazy, even for Iceland,” he says. The blizzard would make it on to Icelandic TV — no small feat in a country where snow is not generally a news story.

The episode is not without irony. Godland is the story of a 19th-century Danish priest sent to colonial Iceland to build a church. Neither weather nor landscape offers a friendly welcome. Loaded with extraordinary images, the film has drawn larger audiences than might be expected for a stark, strange art house odyssey. In France, 113,000 tickets have been sold, cementing the status of Pálmason, 38, as a new star of European cinema, his visually stunning films made with a subtle twist of deadpan comedy. (He is, he says happily, a huge fan of Buster Keaton.)

As well as speaking after Seyðisfjörður, we meet in the London office of Godland’s UK distributor. Here, Pálmason says he plans to visit Infinity Mirror Rooms, an exhibition by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, at Tate Modern. “I live on the south-east coast of Iceland, so I’m a long way from museums and paintings.”

Mostly, Pálmason makes his own art instead. Godland is his third film. He lives and works just outside Höfn, a fishing settlement of 2,000 people. Across the country in Reykjavik, the Icelandic movie industry has a hub fit for the age of modern, multi-platform entertainment: sleek production complex RVK Studios, a regular host to Hollywood projects that was founded by high-profile film-maker Baltasar Kormákur. But for Pálmason, a blueprint comes instead with another Nordic name from cinema history, Swedish master Ingmar Bergman.

“I like what Bergman did on Fårö [the Baltic Sea island that was his home and filming location]. In the winter, you write. In summer, you shoot. And you work with actors who are like family.” 

I wanted ‘Godland’ to show a country can be lovely and impossible

The cast of Godland is led by Elliott Crosset Hove as callow young priest Lucas; Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson plays his gnarled local guide. Both are good friends of Pálmason. (Lucky, given that they also ended up stranded in Seyðisfjörður.) And the untamed rivers, volcanoes, waterfalls and tundra that co-star were no more than a short drive from Höfn.

“Godland basically happens in my back garden,” Pálmason explains. (Indeed, his own chickens briefly feature.) “This is really a homemade movie.”

A home movie too. Pálmason’s references to family are made literal by the casting of his daughter, Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir, who also starred in his second film, the mesmeric 2019 thriller-of-sorts A White, White Day. If most parents find it bittersweet simply seeing snapshots of their children getting older, Pálmason expands the effect on to a cinema screen. “Your children’s childhoods go by so fast. But I like the thought my grandchildren will one day see their parents as children in my films.”

The passing of time is a theme for Pálmason. In Godland one bravura sequence of time-lapse photography, shot over two years, sees the body of a dead horse rot down to the bones. Finally, the meadow hollow in which it lies becomes a vivid bed of flowers. This being a Pálmason film, the horse — which died of natural causes — belonged to his father. “When I told him the idea, he said: ‘Hlynur, that sounds a bit strange.’ But it shows something important about Iceland and life — that brutality and beauty are entwined.”

That goes for the whole film. Though fictional, Godland took a pinch of inspiration from Matthías Jochumsson, a 19th-century clergyman who left Iceland to study theology in Denmark, then returned to find the place even more gruelling than he remembered. In response, he wrote the poem “Volaða Land”, roughly translated as “wretched land”.

“It was a hate poem. He was saying, ‘Why did I ever move back to this terrible, unlivable country?’” A public backlash — “he was cancelled!” — then forced him to write a second poem, praising Iceland’s wondrous spectacle instead. “So I wanted Godland to reflect both. To show a country can be lovely and impossible.” (Jochumsson, by the way, later wrote the Icelandic national anthem.)

Growing up in Höfn, Pálmason spent his childhood among farmers and fishermen. An interest in cinema took hold in his teens. His education continued in Denmark. Graduating from the Danish National Film School in Copenhagen, he stayed for a decade, returning to Iceland before making A White, White Day.

In adulthood, he has rooted himself in a sense of filmmaking as practical art, rather than a career. “I can’t imagine being a hired gun for a studio.” Increasingly as rare, he also sees it as a deeply hands-on activity. “Most movies now are essentially unreal. If you want a volcano in your film, you simply use VFX to create a volcano. Or you can do what we did, and shoot an actual volcano from a metre away. It isn’t for me to say if one is better than the other, but the experience for the audience is different.”

Pálmason now keeps a 35mm camera in his car, used as a visual notebook. While Godland’s anti-hero priest Lucas is prim and pompous, and Pálmason is anything but, that suggests a common ground. After all, Lucas too travels around Iceland with a camera: suffering the weather not just for Christ, but to take pioneering photographs of the country and its people.

The director is fonder of both than of his often appalled protagonist. But cultural identity still intrigues Pálmason. “Historically, some Danes felt Icelanders to be a rough, ugly people, who maybe smelled bad. Lucas definitely arrives believing that. It’s part of why audiences can find him irritating. But I also have a split in myself now, because I lived in Denmark so long. And I can be irritating too.” 

And as Lucas hauls his camera across Volaða Land, is he also a proxy for every director, trying to make their movie in a hostile wilderness? Pálmason smiles. “I think so, yes. Because making a film controls you. And it threatens you. Financially. Emotionally. But if it actually works, the satisfaction is like a drug. You think ‘Ah, the world has meaning after all.”

‘Godland’ is in UK cinemas from April 7

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