Raised by a single mother who still proudly calls herself a Communist, Östlund grew up on a non-deserted island in the southern Göteburg Archipelago of Sweden, surrounded by “a lot of loud political discussions”. In sharp contrast to their mother, Östlund’s older brother is a “Right-wing liberal”, which has made for lively family dinners. As a child, Östlund would hide the spines of his mother’s Marxist books when friends came over. “Being brought up during the Eighties, Sweden was in the middle, between the two superpowers, the Western World and the Eastern bloc,” said Östlund. “To be a Swede, you were navigating yourself between these two ideologies that were bashing their heads against each other.” He emerged into adulthood and a new century with a belief system that gives the most importance to equality and sees merit in conflicting ideologies. “To me, the biggest threat to equality is individualism. The opposite of socialism is not capitalism. The opposite of socialism is individualism,” he said. “I believe that the struggle for equality is an ongoing struggle and it always has to be there for us to try to create an equal society. As soon as you stop fighting for equality, inequality will happen.”
The worlds that Östlund creates in his films are riddled with different kinds of imbalances and anxieties. For instance, one of the sharpest scenes in The Triangle of Sadness is one in which a young couple, both of them models, argue about who will pay the bill at a fancy restaurant. At the start of the scene, Östlund includes a brief moment when you can see a small fire in the blurry background, foreshadowing the flare-up that’s going to happen when Carl reminds Yaya, his girlfriend, that she’d promised to pay this bill. (By the end of their conversation, he’s literally got his back to the wall.) The scene is actually taken from real life. “It was something that happened when I met my wife (fashion photographer Sina Görcz),” said Östlund. The two were at Cannes Film Festival — “I wanted to impress her,” he remembered with a smile — and at one point, it struck him that he was going to have to point out that he wasn’t interested in playing the role of a traditional, masculine provider and protector. “I knew immediately that I like this woman a lot and I really, really want to spend my time with her. But I also felt that she had a very old-fashioned and stereotypical idea of men and women,” Östlund said, laughing. “And I felt like ‘Ok, it’s not going to be possible for me to play this role of being this man who is paying for the bill every time we’re going to the restaurant’ because I’m brought up by this mother who has been telling me, ‘You have to be equal. Otherwise you’re not going to be happy’.”