Nói the Albino and Fúsi (Virgin Mountain) are among the films that have stayed with me even years after I first watched them. The reason is not only their stories, but also the compassion and simplicity in the way Dagur Kári looks at his characters. In his films, people often seem lonely, unsuccessful, or somehow left behind by life. Yet Kári sees humanity in them more than tragedy. That is why I wanted to ask him some questions I had been curious about for a long time. We talked about how his characters come to life, the power of silence, why Fúsi resonated with so many people, and the future of slow, personal storytelling in today’s world.
Your characters often feel like people who arrived too late to life, or who never fully managed to belong anywhere. Do you see this as a reflection of a modern crisis of masculinity, or does it come from a more personal place?
I don’t know where my characters come from, it’s a mystery to me. But I am definitely not consciously trying to address topics like “modern crisis of masculinity”. Making characters is more intuitive to me; I just try to create people that are interesting enough to hang out with for the duration of a movie.
Looking back today, what kind of connection do you see between Nói the Albino and Fúsi? Does one represent the desire to escape youth, while the other represents the emotional confinement of adulthood?
I think what both movies have in common is that they are coming-of-age films. Fúsi enters adulthood quite late in his life while Nói enters adulthood too early, in a way.
The men in your films are often fragile, quiet, and emotionally vulnerable. Is that a conscious choice? Do you see it as a reaction against the traditional image of the “strong male character” in contemporary cinema?
It is not conscious and I do not see it as a reaction to anything.
Why do you think Fúsi connected with so many people emotionally? Do you think audiences sympathized with him out of pity, or because they genuinely saw themselves in him?
Well, Fúsi is really good-hearted and innocent in a way. He has a big heart and a Zen-like wisdom. I hope that the audience does not connect to him out of pity. To me he has pureness and dignity.
Your films have a very unique emotional balance: they can feel deeply sad and very funny at the same time. Does that tone emerge naturally during the writing process, or is it something you consciously construct?
I have always been fascinated with the combination of humor and tragedy. That is my favorite cocktail. Pure comedies tend to be somewhat shallow or superficial and serious dramas tend to be too serious for my taste. So I try to position my tone somewhere in the middle.
Silence plays a very powerful role in your films. Is silence as important to you as dialogue?
My scripts are usually more dialogue-heavy in the manuscript and then when I get to shooting, I always try to erase dialogue as much as possible. If an emotion or feeling can be conveyed through a gesture, an action or an expression, it is almost always preferable to me.
After The Good Heart, you once said that you felt burned out and even lost the desire to make films for a while. What brought you back to cinema again, and how did that period shape the warmer and more hopeful tone of Fúsi?
That’s true. The Good Heart took many years to make and in the end it drained my energy. I went to school, briefly, to study music composition, but then the idea for Fúsi came very suddenly to me, while I was at the airport waiting for my flight. Usually it takes me 5–15 years to complete a script, but in this case the whole idea came to me in a flash and I wrote the script in just a few months.
When filmmakers move closer to Hollywood, larger expectations and more visible rules inevitably enter the process. Did that environment feel creatively liberating for you, or more restrictive?
I suppose you are referring to The Good Heart, which takes place in New York? Even though the film takes place in the USA, it was funded with European money and we shot most of it in a studio in Iceland. So I had full creative control and did not have to adhere to any kind of constrictions or pressure from money people. An incredibly lucky position to be in.
In an era dominated by algorithms and fast consumption, has it become harder to tell quiet, personal, emotionally fragile stories?
Telling the stories is not harder, but possibly it’s getting harder to find the audience. Sadly, cinema culture is in a decline; people prefer to watch films in the comfort of their homes. But I truly hope that cinemas will have a revival; that people start wanting to have a communal experience when they watch films.
Do you think modern audiences still have patience for slow, small-scale human stories?
I hope so!
