What was fascinating about it?
I started working on it [Godland] in 2014, so it’s a long process, and for me it’s always about the exploration of it and the discovery. I read a lot of travel books and I was interested in both people who came to Iceland and traveled around Iceland, and many of them were actually quite negative when they were talking about the Icelanders they met on their way, and also about how harsh it [the country] is. But I really tried as much as I could not to do too much finger-pointing. I was mostly playing with it – from both sides, so hopefully there’s no good guy or bad guy. It’s two-sided – everyone has a good side and a bad side.
How much research did you do on the missionaries going to Iceland from Denmark?
It [Godland] is definitely a fictional story. There are a lot of details that come from real events, but it’s fictional. I created Lucas as a Lutheran priest maybe because I was brought up a Lutheran. I’m not religious, but the Lutheran church was having a conflict with the Catholic church during that time, but a big part of Iceland was still heathen so they were trying to get them in the right church, so there is rich history within that. But it was usually Icelandic priests who were used for this. They studied in Denmark and went back to Iceland and worked for Denmark there. Then the Danish priests would come to Iceland and make sure everything was going well.
It’s beautifully shot but it’s almost like a love and hate letter to Iceland. What was it like exploring your country while shooting this film?
It’s good that you say love and hate, because the title of the film is Vanskabte Land in Danish, and in Icelandic it’s Volaða Land, and in English it’s Godland, so it’s three different meanings and three different names. It has been very difficult to find the exact words for it.
But it comes from a poem by [Icelander] Matthías Jochumsson, who studied in Denmark, moved back to Iceland up north and experienced a crazy cold winter there, where the whole fjord froze up and kept frozen until late summer, so it didn’t even have a chance to melt before the next winter. So he wrote this hate poem about Iceland, and the poem’s called Volaða Land, where he shit-talks Iceland for a long time and he basically says that it’s unlivable, it’s unforgiving and terrible. It’s a shitty land. And he didn’t want to publish it, so he sent it to a friend, and his friend loved it and put it out there.
The poet was canceled by the government and he had to write a love poem to Iceland. So it’s about both the beauty and the brutality of it, but it’s connected to both Iceland and Denmark, and if you really are passionate about something, you sometimes speak harshly about it. I’m not afraid of saying something about my own place – like shit-talking your own town or country. Being critical about it is very important. I try to be that with both Iceland and Denmark – not leaning on either of them but working with these opposites and being playful with it. [In the film] the girl is half-Danish, half-Icelandic. He talks Danish on Sundays, all of these [opposite] things.
