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“It’s Not Enough to Only Have Narrative”: Hlynur Pálmason on Cannes 2025 Premiere The Love That Remains
Saga Garðarsdóttir in The Love That Remains Icelandic filmmaker Hlynur Pálmason’s epic 2022 film Godland mapped the crisis of faith experienced by a 19th-century Danish priest on a mission to Iceland. A majestic tapestried shot of a horse skeleton lifts viewers from the difficult physical and emotional terrain of the film’s narrative world into a realm that is more formal, ethereal, and symbolic. Similarly, Pálmason’s fourth feature, The Love That Remains, which premiered at Cannes last weekend, is only in some layers a dark comedy about the varied pains experienced by a rural Icelandic family undergoing a separation of parents Anna (Saga Garðarsdóttir) and Magnús (Sverrir Guðnason). Horses are made memorable here too, in a magnificent extreme wide shot, as they trample a statue of a knight regularly pierced with arrows fired by the children (played by Pálmason’s own kids). This brief equine moment holds its own alongside a fascinating series of seemingly scattered imagery of artistic and industrial process mappings, which in turn fits in distinctive fashion within the film’s dramatic currents, making for a hybridity that’s equally challenging to categorize or forget.
Explicating his approach to filmmaking as a cinematic playground that he visits for several years at a time, never knowing for sure what the output will be, Pálmason eschews a traditional script development process and shoots time-lapse footage prior to principal photography using leftover film stock that he keeps handy in his car. I sat with Pálmason at the Palais des Festivals at Cannes a couple of days after the film screened at the Premieres section of the 2025 edition.
Filmmaker: There is a shot towards the end of the film, the last of a series of shots of the statue of the knight which the kids have been playing with and shooting arrows at. To my eyes, it evokes a fallen soldier, and with the light and ice draping it, it almost feels like there is a quality of faith and prayer in that shot. At that moment in the film, I thought to myself—because The Love That Remains is so different from Godland—that if it was one shot from this film that I could see in Godland, it would probably be that one. That is my long way of asking: where do you see—or do you see?—the line where Godland ends and The Love That Remains begins?
Pálmason: My process is very peculiar in that, actually, The Love That Remains was being made parallel with Godland. This one started in 2017. The first image I filmed—of the roof getting pulled, which is the opening of the film—was actually shot in 2017 before Godland. So, there’s a strange dialogue between the films, but they have very different temperaments. When I’m working and collecting ideas and scenes, I often try to have the projects be very different in temperament, so that I’m not repeating myself or exploring the same things each project. When I made The Love That Remains, it felt strangely familiar. I do feel like it’s a step forward, but it’s a natural step from Godland, in a way. But I never think, “OK, now I’m going to do something completely different and forget everything I know,” or do it differently for the sake of being different. I just want to work with a different energy, a different temperament, and have fun.
Filmmaker: I have a background in development in Los Angeles, and I’m curious about the development process in Northern Europe. In LA, development executives distinguish between story and story world. I feel like with this film though, if you were to think about it just in terms of plot, plot would be less than half the film. It’s not a traditional drama. There’s so much imagery! I was struck by the imagery of the industrial process, with Magnús’s character and also Anna’s art process. The imagery is not B-roll, it’s an intrinsic part of the film. Would you call that part the story or the story world?
Pálmason: For me, it’s not enough to only have narrative—it’s very important that you also have a form. I have a lot of narratives that I’m interested in, a lot of stories, a lot of characters, but then I also have a lot of forms and concepts that I’m interested in. When I can feel that it’s more than just a narrative, or more that just the form, I begin working on a film. I’m trying to fit these two things together. I have to work a long time on the project, and that’s why I developed it for so long, because for me, it’s very mysterious. I don’t know what this is, I just know the things that I’m passionate about. I know that if I explore them, I will probably come to a place where I know more about it. But I never feel like I get to an end. I have maybe a couple of years to explore, and I give my whole heart, body and soul to it, but then I’m drained when the film is done. I can’t really finish the film, because the film goes on. If you would send me a really good script, I wouldn’t want to do it. I think someone else should do it. The process and the exploration is the whole thing for me.
Filmmaker: Regarding the unexpectedly hilarious scene where the gallerist visits Anna to look at her art, how would you describe the story versus the form in that scene, or the story versus the story world?
Pálmason: When I started writing the story of the gallerist, when he suddenly entered, I had this feeling that I already knew this gallerist because I think I probably met three, four people like that. I’m not saying that they’re bad people, I just think they have this very funny side to them that I really enjoyed exposing and playing with. I’m really trying to be playful. I’m not trying to be overly cynical. Hopefully people can have a laugh. We do have a person, Anna, that takes her work very seriously, and she’s trying to make a name for herself or to survive. So, this is serious.
When this scene entered the script, I really felt surprised. I was like, “Oh! He’s here. Let’s see what happens.” I have no idea what’s going to happen, so I just write and see what happens. When the plane crashes, it was very much a surprise for me and I just decided to just keep it, so it’s also a surprise for the audience. I don’t know what is the narrative and what is the form. But I think the narrative would be this gallerist coming; the form would be this branch that grows to the side of a tree, if the film is a tree. Sometimes it goes straight up, like in a narrative thread, but sometimes it takes these right and left [turns]. As a filmmaker, the question is always, do we follow the branches or just keep it linear? I feel like this film in particular really wanted to go sideways.
Filmmaker: That gallerist scene also produces one of the film’s most hilarious shots. It’s the last shot, a medium closeup, when the gallerist is about to depart. He turns around and looks at the camera, with the helicopter right behind him. He’s holding an egg and gives this devilishly comical smile. Was that part scripted, or did you work with the actor to land it?
Pálmason: No, it was scripted. In the script, it said that he reveals a stolen goose egg with the propeller really close to his back and his hair flying in the air. That was in the script. Most of the things with the main characters, or the characters that were cast for the film, are mostly written, and it’s actually shot very much like it is in the script. Some people think that the script is fractured or scattered, but it’s really not. Before we go into principal photography, the script is very fully formed. It’s only these moments of clouds or fish that are shot over a long time span, and also the story of the kids creating the statue of the knight, which was shot over a two-year period, but the script itself is almost exactly like the final edit.
Filmmaker: Before you start principal photography, do you do an inventory of all the images you have shot in the years leading up to it, select them and decide which to put into the script? I found myself paying attention to these plethora of scattered images, like a shot up a skirt or of the sky through an oval shape. Do you sit down and ask, “Do I include this, exclude that”?
Pálmason: I do, in a way. What happened was that my producers and I decided that we need to buy a camera if we’re going to do the projects that we’re going to do, because we’re shooting almost every week. But sometimes, I’m just shooting a cloud or a small scene with the kids We can’t be renting equipment the whole time and having it where I live. I live quite far away from Reykjavik. So, we bought an old film camera, then I started just having the camera always in the car. When I’m going through my daily routines, I go and film. If I see something that interests me, I film it. And I don’t know if it’s always material for this project or the other one, if it’s for Godland or if it’s for The Love That Remains, or for my next ones, On Land and Sea or Joan of Arc. Sometimes I don’t know; sometimes it’s very clear. When I look at the footage after it’s been developed, I react to it, and start putting it into an editing process where I can, for example, put the opening scene of the roof in the beginning. Then I write, “We see our main character, Anna. She is in the car.” I have a couple of images throughout the film that are key images for me that I work around. So, this is sort of early in the process of developing. A lot of the shots are over a long timeframe.
Filmmaker: Is everything shot on film during this long timeframe, and isn’t that expensive?
Pálmason: Yes, everything is on film. After each movie, we have a lot of short ends. So, maybe we have a small magazine that is 120 meters, and we have like 70 meters left. I start always by using them. I have all of that in the car, then I keep the rolls until we have some development money, or find money ourselves, and send them to be developed and scanned. So, for a long time, I just have footage without sound.
For me, my daily routines calm me down. Because I have different projects going on, I’m visiting the same places again and again, it really connects me to my roots. It’s also about spending as much time as possible with your project. [Nowadays] we’re supposed to go through a project very fast. That’s the standard. I think that’s really hard. I try to stretch that time. So, instead of having one month, I have many years of figuring out what the hell this is, because I really do enjoy having time with everything. I feel like then things emerge very naturally. I’m not forcing anything. It’s like when the knight woke up, went to Magnús’s house and they kiss; this is something that I had no idea would happen but it [became] a key thing for me. That only came because I allowed it to take time to emerge on its own.
Filmmaker: The extreme wide shot of the horses, as they trample the statue of the knight, is such a handsome shot. Was that difficult to execute and how did you execute it? Did you use an animal wrangler?
Pálmason: This is a very homemade film, so we don’t have an animal wrangler. But if we have horse scenes, we have either my daughter, because she’s trained with horses, or we have our niece, who is a horse person, so she comes with her horses and helps us out. If we have scenes with the dog, it’s our dog. If it’s chickens, it’s our chickens; we don’t need anyone else. It’s very often just us and the crew that help us out. Everything in this film is written because it’s there. I use what I have, then you stitch them together. You make it work.
Filmmaker: How did you get the horses to stay in the frame when shooting the scene?
Pálmason: If you live with these animals, you know them and how to handle them. Or maybe you put an invisible line, which you can take out in VFX, if you don’t want the horses to turn too early, or turn a little later. Maybe you have your AD offscreen, so the horses don’t go another way—very small, basic, practical things.
Filmmaker: There is a lot of underlying pain that the characters are experiencing, but I feel with the character of Magnús, you’re showing his pain externalized more than the other characters’. I’m thinking of the dream scene with giant rooster, or the scene where he kisses the knight, or the last scene in the ocean. How did you conceptualize Magnús and his pain, compared to the other characters?
Pálmason: I had a feeling that that maybe Magnús didn’t realize what he had. Often that’s the case in life. You have something, then you lose it and find out what you had because it’s not there anymore. That was one of the core feelings [with which] I wanted to color Magnús and his journey, because often when you’re making a film, there are a lot of things you know you don’t want the film to be, but you maybe don’t know exactly what you want the film to be. That’s the process. I had this core [idea] throughout the journey of the film with Magnús, which is to see the beauty around you. There is a lot of beauty around you. You don’t have to travel. If you just pay attention and really nurture your garden, beautiful things happen.
Filmmaker: I didn’t realize until I read the press notes that the kid actors in the film are your children. I was struck by the performance of one of your twin sons in the unforgettable and darkly funny yet literally painful scene when he goes to the hospital with an arrow in his chest. Watching in the theater yesterday, when he screams at the end, the sound really pierces. I found myself a bit shook. The sound level is a strong artistic choice. Can you talk about it? Was it in the script or something you changed in the post-production process?
Pálmason: I actually wrote it for Þorgils because I have heard him. He sometimes jokes with me and makes this high-pitched scream just to irritate me. When the sound comes to my ear, you can hear it going all the way in, almost like it’s piercing your brain. It’s this very strange journey through the air. I was like, “I want to use that.” So, I wrote this scene for him and said, “You have to scream like you do for me, and it has to be really loud.” We recorded and filmed it, but we also tested it a lot in the cinema when we were mixing it. There I said, “No, we have to put [the volume] a little bit down.” It’s just noise, it doesn’t evolve, so we really tried to have it at the right place. But, of course, it’s a little bit different every time you show it, because cinemas are different, and also cinemas are not always full, so it echoes a different way. We really used a lot of energy to try to have it at the right volume, but also the right quality of sound. For us, it was of course supposed to be funny, but also a little bit scary and aggressive or dangerous.
