'Out Stealing Horses': How Stellan Skarsgard and Hans Petter Moland Adapted an Impossible Book
TheWrap Oscar magazine: “If you try to make a film out of a book and concentrate on what actually happens in the book, then you’re lost when it’s something as poetic as this,” Skarsgard says of the Norwegian Oscar entry
A version of this story about Hans Petter Moland, Stellan Skarsgård and “Out Stealing Horses” first appeared in the International Film issue of TheWrap’s Oscar magazine.
The fifth collaboration between director Hans Petter Moland and actor Stellan Skarsgård is an adaptation of the beloved Per Petterson novel about an aging man moving to a remote cabin and reminiscing about the pivotal summer of 1948.
The director and his star sat down to discuss Norway’s entry in the Oscars’ Best International Feature Film category.
Had you both been fans of the book?
HANS PETTER MOLAND Yes.
STELLAN SKARSGARD It’s a great book. And the film is very close to the book in tone, which I think is remarkable. I saw a couple of scripts before Hans Petter took it on, and they missed it totally. If you try to make a film out of a book and concentrate on what actually happens in the book, then you’re lost when it’s something as poetic as this. You have to have something that captures the atmosphere, the poetry, the nature, and Hans Petter’s script did that.
What was wrong with the previous scripts?
SKARSGARD They went for what happened. And they even made it linear. You can’t do that.
MOLAND Everybody said it’s an impossible novel to adapt. But when I saw “No Country for Old Men,” I hadn’t read the book, and afterwards I read the book and it was remarkable how close the film is to the book. And I thought about that. What is it that makes a film interesting? You start with the origin: What is it that fascinated me about the book? Well, it’s an effortless wandering inside the head of a man from 1948 to 1990. So I made some ground rules from this. OK, I’m going to keep the structure. I remember the first time I read it, it was the universe, the spirit that you just wanted to be around, the characters that you like to be intimate with. Those are good guiding lights for how to approach it.
SKARSGARD I’d been waiting for him to do a project like this. The four films we’ve done before have been totally different from this one, and from each other, but none have had the possibility for this much poetry. Hans Petter looks tough, he looks like Clint Eastwood, but he’s a real softie. He’s a poet inside. And when he sent me the script and I read it, I thought, “Yeah, he’s going there.” Also, he grew up in those forests, working. He knows how it smells and how it feels.
MOLAND That’s one of the things that made me think I would be able to be true to the material. I really felt like I know the territory. And when we were filming the summer scenes, I realized I was the only one on the set old enough to remember those old skills. I was the anthropological tour guide showing the prop guys how to put up wires for logging, telling the art department what kind of grass cutter the horses should drag behind them…
SKARSGARD It’s not a film that should be made by a city boy.
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