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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thanks for sharing part of your day with us. A couple of interesting programming notes for you. We are going to have an All Of It Watch Party. That's when we all get together, separately together, and watch a television show and then convene to talk about it with somebody, a creative from that show.

Here's the deal. It's the season finale of The Last of Us. This weekend, and on Monday, Merle Dandridge, who plays one of the resistance leaders, will join us, and she's agreed to take your calls. Let's say you're not into The Last of Us, you're into the Oscars. They're this Sunday, I'm going to be previewing the best picture nominees with weekend edition host Tiffany Hansen. That will be on WNYC, five o'clock this Sunday right before the Oscars.

One more interesting programming note, our public song project where we asked you to create art based on works in the public domain, one of those pieces will be played tomorrow night on WNYC's new standards. Here's a teaser. It was home-recorded with a rewired vintage radio from a Brooklyn Electronics boutique. That's a great tease. You can tune into WNYC tomorrow night in the 10:00 PM hour to listen to new standards. That's what's in your future but right now in the present, we're going to talk about Triangle of Sadness.

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We continue now with our week of pre-Oscars conversations with some of the standout nominees from this season. Today we'll hear about Triangle of Sadness which is up for best picture, best director, and best original screenplay. On one level, it's a cerebral and sly commentary about power, who has it, and why, as the story follows the uber-rich and uber-beautiful on a vacation aboard a 250 million luxury yacht where the word no is simply not in the crews' vocabulary and every whim is catered to.

On another level, the film is a visceral experience that devolves into a Lord of the Flies meets survivor hybrid. That happens after a much-written-about and lengthy barfing scene on the yacht that makes Regan in The Exorcist seem like she had a little tummy trouble. BBC writer Nicholas Barber described it as, "Perhaps the greatest vomiting scene ever seen on screen."

The film considers what can happen when those accustomed to holding all the cards, whether by their looks or by their wealth. In this story, a vapid Instagram influencer, a boisterous Russian oligarch, a gentile British arms manufacturer, and a timid tech titan have their power taken from them either by mother nature or by force. The film's title Triangle of Sadness is a term from the modeling world referring to a particularly expressive region on the forehead. I started by asking director Ruben Östlund when he first came across that term.

Ruben Östlund: Well, it was actually when I met my wife eight years ago. My wife is working as a fashion photographer and she has a friend that was dating someone working with beauty surgery and with Botox. When she was having this date, it was an intimate moment. There were sitting on different sides of the table staring in each other's eyes [chuckles] and all of a sudden this guy is saying, "Oh, I can see you have a deep triangle of sadness." He was pointing to this wrinkle in between your eyebrows. He said, "Oh, what kind of trouble have you been dealing with in your life? Don't worry. We can fix that with Botox in 50 minutes." It's basically a term that comes from Botox industry.

Alison Stewart: The way like crow's feet or laugh lines, that's the triangle of sadness. Why did that term stay with you and stay with you in a way that you would write a film script about the currency and the transactional nature of what you can do with your beauty?

Ruben Östlund: Well, I think that we live in a time when our appearance is maybe more important than ever. I got interested in a survey that was made with five graders in Sweden, five grade pupils. They were asked, "Do you want to be beautiful or do you want to be intelligent?" I think maybe 85% or something like that said, "We want to be beautiful rather than intelligent."

I think it said something about the currency of beauty in our time that had become a more and more important currency. A lot of the first part of Triangle of Sadness is about these models that have their currency in their beauty and have been able to climb and elevate in society from maybe being a car mechanic, or something like that, to be a well-paid model living a jet-set life only because of the currency in their beauty.

Alison Stewart: It's such an interesting idea because beauty, in many ways, can be a depreciating asset, It's not like it's-- [chuckles] Especially in our culture, a youth-driven culture. I kept thinking that during the film.

Ruben Östlund: If you look at, for example, to be a woman in our society where men many of the times have the resources and so on, beauty becomes a more important aspect and it becomes more important. The term trophy wife, maybe you heard about it, that you actually, with your beauty, become someone that you can buy and have next to you in order to, how do you say, portray the perfect lifestyle that you have in some ways. Yes, it's an interesting thing that is becoming more and more something that people actually are dealing with.

Alison Stewart: This film has three acts and so almost a little bit like telling a story, |nce upon a time, there were two beautiful models." That's our first act.

Ruben Östlund: Exactly.

Alison Stewart: How were you thinking about what each act would do and how it helped create the story arc for Triangle of Sadness?

Ruben Östlund: Well I wanted it to start in the fashion world and to start to look at the two main characters, Carl and Yaya, that is models and maybe it's coming from working class, but have been able to climb in close society because of their looks. Then I wanted to go to a luxury yacht where they have a free ticket to go because of their Instagram accounts. They basically wouldn't have money enough to buy the ticket to go on that yacht, but because of the beauty, they get a ticket basically.

On this yacht, they will meet the crème de la crème of our society. The thing is that the yacht goes under and they become shipwrecks on a deserted island. From these two very strong hierarchies that is in the yachting business and in the fashion world on the deserted island, they are taken away and now it's only about surviving. The old hierarchies are gone, basically.

Alison Stewart: These two characters of Yaya and Carl, their power is in their beauty. Do these two characters that you've written, Ruben, understand that, or are they unaware of their pretty privilege?

Ruben Östlund: No, I definitely think that they understand that. I think that Carl may be more, from a male perspective, he was like, "What about love and why does beauty have to be something that you're going to take advantage of and become a trophy wife?" That's the thing that he says to Yaya, the female character. The female character definitely are aware of this.

What I really loved about writing the script was that when they end up on the deserted island-- Now here comes some spoilers. A cleaning lady from the yacht is the only one that knows how to fish and to make fires so she ends up in the top of the hierarchy. All of the survivors, they are constantly hungry, hungry, hungry. I was interested in looking at what would the male model do with his currency in his looks. Would he maybe start to sleep with a cleaning lady in order to get more fish? It's basically looking at how the different setups and how the different power structures is going to bring out a different kind of behavior.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Writer, Director Ruben Östlund. We're talking about Triangle of Sadness. I want to play a clip from beginning of the film. Carl is at a modeling audition with a dozen other guys, all shirtless, super fit. Their faces are changing in just a moment, and you'll hear as they're being directed. Let's listen. This is from Triangle of Sadness.

Speaker 3: What was your name?

Carl: Carl.

Speaker 3: My best friend, Carl. How are you today, Carl?

Carl: Yes. Good. Good.

Speaker 3: Is this runway casting for a grumpy brand or a smiley brand?

Carl: I don't know, man. [chuckles] I don't know.

Speaker 3: Well, smiley brands are the cheap ones and the more expensive, the brand gets, you start to look down on your consumer. If you want to be a part of this fun one-man in crowded, you have to show us some serious cash.

Carl: It's a grumpy brand. Yes.

Speaker 3: Congratulations. I'm so happy for you. If you get the job, you will get to wear exclusive clothing and look down on your consumer.

[laughter]

Speaker 3: Okay, Carl, show us some of that grumpy look.

Carl: No, no.

Speaker 3: Yes, let's go.

Speaker 5: Come on, man. Come on.

Speaker 3: Come on, Carl. You can do it.

[background conversations]

Speaker 3: Yes. Don't you dare talk to me. I'm an Aryan Übermensch too obsessed with the image of myself to be involved with anyone or anything that doesn't fit my stylized image of the world. Wait. Suddenly I'm dressed in something way less expensive. It's H&M. Everybody come together. You can two be a part of this happy, smiling group of mixed skin colors for not that much money. #friendship, #everyone's equal. #happy life, #stop climate change.

Audience: [laughter]

Alison Stewart: [laughs] #hilarious. Ruben, there's a lot about marketing and consumerism and imagery in this. There's actually a Botox company that's promoting itself alongside the film. You reposted it on Instagram, so you're in on the joke of it. That you can get free Bach Botox with your Triangle of Sadness ticket stuff. What did you think when you heard about this?

Ruben Östlund: About the campaign-

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Ruben Östlund: -with Botox? No, I think it was fun. It was me and the distributor that came up with it. I was like, the satire that I'm working with and trying to make fun of everything and have a laugh about it, and maybe-- No, but not maybe, but actually to provoke some thoughts. That is the most important part of it, so I like that.

Alison Stewart: Act II of Triangle of Sadness takes part on this yacht. A lot of it is about the dynamic between these very, very wealthy guests and the cruise's staff. Then even a delineation within the staff, the mostly front-facing staff, mostly white front-facing staff. Mostly people of color in the back of house as cleaners and engineers. Each of these people on the ship makes their money in an interesting way. One of the ways we can't say on the live radio, by the way, the way he says it. How did you decide you were going to have an arms dealer sitting at the table with a manure manufacturer oligarch with-- I'm curious how you decided on the businesses these people would be in, and how they made their money.

Ruben Östlund: Actually, I did research and going on one of the crews on this luxury yachts. I was ending up next to someone that was dealing with gambling and betting, and they were so nice. The couple that I was dealing with these things, they were so sweet and so nice. I felt like this is actually a true description of people that are maybe dealing with questionable industries. I felt also, it would be very interesting to have someone that had been dealing with selling landmines and hang grenades and stuff like that, and make them very, very sympathetic.

I had an idea about like, you sit down and you have a dinner, and all of a sudden you ask this older British couple, "What do you do?" The answer you get is, "Well, our products have been involved in many conflicts for democracy all over the world." It's like, "What kind of a product is that like?" "Well, basically, our best-selling product is the hand grenade." It's interesting because you don't know 100%, how should you continue that dinner.

Should you question being an arms dealer or should you just accept that what they're doing is something that comes from, maybe they've inherited a company and so on? There's so many complex things when it comes to socializing, and all of a sudden you realize they're doing something that you don't 100% maybe support. I was interested in that.

Alison Stewart: To get a sense of the dynamic, I want to play another clip from Triangle of Sadness. The part where, "The customer is always right. The passenger is always right no matter what." There's an older woman on the ship who is obsessed with the cleanliness of the ship. A certain part of the ship she is so sure needs to be cleaned. Let's hear a scene. This is from the beginning of the Captain's dinner. The Captain is played by Woody Harrelson. Take a listen.

Woman 1: Yesterday I was up on deck, and it was so beautiful. Everything was fantastic, but then I saw the sails.

Woody Harrelson: The sails?

Woman 1: The sails, yes and they were dirt grey. Do you think it's possible to wash them?

Woody Harrelson: I don't think that's possible, ma'am, because this is a motorized vessel.

Woman 1: Yes.

Woody Harrelson: We don't have any sail. Maybe it was the sundeck roof?

Woman 1: Was it? Are you sure?

Woody Harrelson: I'm sure.

Woman 1: Magnus, [foreign language]. Yes. He says, yes. It was sails.

Woody Harrelson: Magnus says yes?

Woman 1: Yes.

Woody Harrelson: Jesus Christ. Then, in that case, we will clean the sails. Yes.

Woman 1: Of course. I'm sure we can find a solution for you [crosstalk]

Alison Stewart: There's another example, Ruben, When a passenger is commanding a young steward to have fun no matter what. Just mandatory fun. He forces her to go swimming, and it's awful. [laughs] At least in your script, what motivates these very wealthy people to flex their power in these very strange ways?

Ruben Östlund: I actually spend a long time to try to figure that out, because I always try to understand my characters and what they're doing. I guess you have to think of a person that probably is born with a certain standard in your life. You probably always have had a driver. You always have been taken care of in every single situation where you come to a new environment. All of that, when that's happening, you will get used to being treated in a certain way. This kind of, how to say, ignorance that comes from these characters comes from that they are not really aware of where they are in the position of a hierarchy. They don't understand how high up they are.

When I was looking into yachts, and I was doing research, the crew of the staff working with service, they quite often told me that they asked the crew to go for a swim. That was something that was common. It was one extreme example that I heard about. It was that one of the guests wanted to have a tiger on the yacht. They went to a harbor city that had a sue. They tried to convince the guy that was working with the tigers, "Okay, how much do you want to bring the tiger onto the yacht?"

Actually, it ended up that the tiger was brought to the yacht. It was there for a weekend. Then when they was transporting it back to the zoo, all the people in the crew was feeling like, "What is going on in this world?" It made them really, really depressed. It's an extreme place where you actually are not allowed to say no, and you try to fulfill the guests request, whatever. It doesn't matter what they ask for.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Writer, Director Ruben Östlund. The name of the film is Triangle of Sadness. We have Woody Harrelson in the role of the captain who is drunk for most of the movie. His drinking leads to a bad decision regarding weather, and this horrible storm whips up, and it's this dining scene. Everybody in New York City on the East coast, it's lunchtime. We're going to talk a little bit about this vomiting scene, just letting. Our West Coast listeners, you've had your breakfast already.

In this scene, I wanted to know what happens before everyone gets sick on this ship because I think it's really interesting. The food presentation. They're at this captain's dinner, and it's a multi-course meal. This fancy food is coming out, Ruben, and it's honestly, the fanciest of food, but it's also disgusting looking. It's all gelatinous and slimy and sea urchins with caviar and various creatures appendages and octopus tentacles. What went into the choice of what to put on the plates?

Ruben Östlund: I actually was inspired a little bit about three Star Michelin Guide restaurant in Denmark. I will not tell you the name of the restaurant because I don't want to be rude to the owners. They seem to be very nice guys, but they had a seafood menu. It was basically, they were eating jellyfish. They were eating sea star. They were eating sea cucumber, and stuff like that. I'm not a fan of fine dining. I guess that's the captain in the field. I'm not really a fan of fine dining, but I think I also was looking for certain dishes where if you were in a storm, if you were trying to eat a seven-meal course.

When the etiquette is very, very strong, it's very important that you take the right fork and the right knife and so on for every dish. I love when the social contract is broken. What do you do when you start to feel sick and the next dish is coming on the table, or when you hear someone vomiting in their other end of the room? Do you continue eating or do you go to your cabin? What do you do? I love the situation when social contracts are challenging us in how do we behave, how do we react?

Alison Stewart: You have put a screaming baby in the background just for added measure while this is all happening. [chuckles] As I said, a BBC writer described it as perhaps the greatest vomiting scene ever seen on screen. It goes on for a very long time. One, why did you want to push your audience, why did you want the audience to experience that for that length of time, and how did you decide how long? I'm imagining you had more footage. [chuckles]

Ruben Östlund: Yes. maybe we had a half an hour long vomiting scene from the beginning. Basically, I wanted the whole dynamics of the film to work. I had to cut it down a little bit. I had a plan and it was that Woody Harrelson would play a Marxist captain that gets very drunk together with the Russian oligarch and they start to play around with the microphone system.

I thought it would be so fun if this Marxist captain breeds from the communistic manifest to vomiting guests of a luxury yacht. It's just something in that image that I think is interesting. I knew that I wanted him to have the Captain's dinner on a day when the weather gets rough and it's heavy waves, strong wind, and big waves. Slowly, people would get more and more seasick.

I had a plan also to push it unto a point where the audience feels like, "Now we have had enough we don't want them to suffer anymore." Then I will go 10 steps further. [laughs] If you do something like this, you have to push further than the audience expects. Otherwise, nothing really interesting will happen.

Alison Stewart: You had to commit. I wonder also, and although I think these stories are really apocryphal made me think about all the stories, the vomitoriums that allegedly the Romans had, the rich people would eat and eat and eat and then they would regurgitate their food so they could eat, eat, eat more rich food. I don't believe those stories are actually true of what the vomitorium is, but I did think of that when I was watching this. Just the idea of consumption and then these people who consume so much and can commune so much just coming back on them.

Ruben Östlund: Of course, that is exactly what happens if you push this in far enough, you are starting to associate to other things that you heard about. In some ways, this European culture is very very extreme. The differences in equality and so on is extreme in our world. It was a part of the aim that I had. I wanted to push it so far that we start to associate and think about the world that we're living in.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Ruben Östlund, the name of the film is Triangle of Sadness. You gave up a little bit of spoilers at the top. I'll try to be vague about this. All of these people on the boat, and we see a small group of them end up in a situation where whatever their power is is no longer that useful. No amount of money is going to make food appear on a desert island. Your point is the woman who was cleaning the toilets as she's reminded, she was a toilet cleaner.

The best, one of the funniest lines she looks around because she can fish and she can cook and she knows how to survive. I am the captain now, as she says. It's just interesting that the other character on the boat wants to keep that hierarchical order is trying to make her still subservient to the oligarch, whereas what she has is powerful now. I was interested in that part of the film, that little part when they start to realize power is different in different situations.

Ruben Östlund: Yes, exactly. It's when she had been fishing and everybody's staring, everybody's so hungry and she's starting to cook the octopus around the campfire. When she is distributing the food, when she's handing out the food, she always goes like, "One for you, one for me, one for you, one for me, one for you, one for me." She gets six times as much as the other six, seven times more than the seven other members of that castaways.

Of course, she's immediately going to be questioned. In fact, "Why are you getting that much?" She says, "Well, I was fishing, I was cooking the food, I was making fire. What did you do?" I thought it was interesting. No, if you look at our world the one that is really producing are actually making less money than the people that are distributing resources. If you look at it from a little bit of a Marxist perspective and you talk about the one that is producing, the worker, then that should be the person that is getting at least a fair share of the profit. She is using a little bit of these theories when she's taking control of the island.

Alison Stewart: Before I let you go, I have to ask, this is your first English language film, correct?

Ruben Östlund: Yes, it is.

Alison Stewart: Why did this one have to be in English?

Ruben Östlund: Well, first of all, when I met my wife eight years ago, she's from Germany, we speak English to each other in our relationship. It became easy to me to speak English. Also in my previous film I worked with Dominic West and Elizabeth Moss and we had a couple of a few scenes in the square where that was in English. I felt like it's a good way maybe to reach out for a larger audience and to try to discuss the topic that is in the film with a larger audience.

Alison Stewart: That was my conversation with Ruben Östlund, the writer and director behind the best-picture-nominated film, Triangle of Sadness.

 

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