Fridtjof Ryder is a British writer and filmmaker. In 2019, he directed the short film Flicker and Go Out. Three years later, he directed his debut feature Inland , a horror folk about a young man released from a psychiatric institution, deftly blending hyperrealism with surreal symbolism. The film premiered in the BFI London Film Festival.

This interview was conducted in December 2024 as part of ArteKino 2024. Inland is available to watch online for free during the entire month – just click here for more information.

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Paul Risker – Given that you started out wanting to be a novelist, what motivated your pivot to filmmaking, and how would you describe your relationship to cinema?

Fridtjof Ryder – Damn, hard start… The pivot was as simple as sensing what film encompassed, and happened, by the way, at the ripe old age of 15, so it’s not like I was busy on my Gravity’s Rainbow or anything. But directing a film ranges from engaging with subjective sound to hanging out with actors. Its raw material is so beautiful, its processes so weird… Also, writing is included in that process for me. I get my time alone and then I get the madness and the accident. Also when I was young films were restricted in a way that made them fascinating, for which I eternally thank my parents. We watched all together and it was like a religious event. They were really moving quicksilver on the wall, an alchemy. That makes you want to engage, to be a part.

I also think they are not mutually exclusive at all, and beyond this, the more I read these days the more I feel the need to try and engage the same freedom of expression in cinema. Cinema, at the sort of corporate-quality-is-an-Oscar-nominee-level, can feel formulaic as hell and when you’re reading a wild novel that can fly 1,000 miles and 1,000 degrees of latitude of thought in a line you wonder how how how? And then you watch a Tarkovsky film and your heart calms a little, you watch something as concentratedly beautiful as Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day [2001], as violently full of feeling as Larissa Shepitko’s The Ascent [1977] and little by little you can feel a knitting between yourself and cinema. Cinema as a form of the possible, not as a moral lesson or popularity contest.

PR – A first feature has a special aura, and having experienced the whole journey from conception to distribution, how would you sum up the experience? Is there any advice you’d give to aspiring first time filmmakers?

FR – Jesus, the advice thing is always interesting. I was just interviewing Brady Corbet [of this year’s The Brutalist], a director who I admire immensely, as a filmmaker, but now also as a friend. He was saying essentially – nothing is as expensive as you think it is, and then running through specific examples from having a technocrane onset to having a grip so you can be shooting with a dolly for a day or two etc… all the way down to tiny budgets. I feel that’s about right, just fighting always in the reality of how to get something made. Look at films you like, so many films I admire are made for well under a million, and I’m struggling now with thinking in those terms as I go into new (slightly) more expensive projects, but part of me is like, just do that, just find something that works, that fits, that can fight against the constraints you have but can also go hand in hand with them. It’s a fun way to work, backwards like that, and it kind of describes the whole independent cinema experience these days.

Also not being so scared maybe; fear can make for formulaic work. I was burned a bit by how all over the place the critical reception to Inland was, but then is it ever going to be any other way when you make something like that at that age? Mark Kermode telling you that what you made there in Gloucester in 2020 at age 20 is valuable and you and your collaborators must keep making films – if that isn’t enough of a push, what is? We have this formula of chances now that is in place – short film into first feature, first feature into slightly more commercial second feature etc… What a painful relationship to have as a creative to the work, how risk averse it makes you. What about Bergman with his fifty movies and twenty plays a year, etc…?

I don’t know, I think basically the answer is bloody-mindedness & hope & a little grace.

PR – Looking back on Inland, what was the genesis of the idea and what compelled you to believe in this film and decide to tell this story?

FR – It was having a mass of notes on your phone and you hear a snatch of something someone says. You go for a walk in a forest and you get something from that – there’s an image or a feeling. With x number of notes on your phone, at a certain point you can feel it crying out, wanting to be a part of something. With this film there were lots of drafts. Originally I came at it more through the characters – the scenes between the father figure and the son, and built that into a narrative. Then reading a lot of new ecology stuff and feeling my way into that. I always liked playing in the forest [when I was young]. I always felt something in that [experience] – how do I translate that image wise? Is there a story in that beyond stringing feelings and fractured pieces together?

But in terms of being compelled I think the centre was that drama – between the father figure and the son, everything that encompassed; their push and pull, their pulse together made me feel like there was a heart there.

PR – The default position when talking about influences is to look at films and directors. While Inland appears to possess a Lynchian spirit, are its influences from the broader school of the literary, cinematic, musical, as well as folklore and dreams? Could you give examples of specific influences and how they present in the film?

FR – Yeh, tons. The process of influence moves from single images, shots or remnants you have running around in your head to ideas of narrative. On this film, we were growing up as filmmakers and cinephiles simultaneously, the references changed accordingly I feel, growing with us. Funnily enough, Lynch was never in the equation very much but he must have been doing laps in the back of my head somewhere to make the film I did. There were Glazer films for sure, the way Under The Skin [2013] deals with location and place, there were the words and love of the rural English language in the plays of Jez Butterworth obviously, from Jerusalem to The Winterling etc, the way language is played with, the way his words owe some kind of debt to his mentor Harold Pinter I always found fascinating. Then of course there was a bunch of folklore related stuff, but that mainly coming from the writing of the likes of the Dark Mountain Project and a bunch of other ecology stuff – the idea of needing a new language for engaging with nature, how mythology/rural mythologies are maybe a part of that. Rural England can feel weird, you know, if you are out there on a walk somewhere alone.

PR – Inland is a puzzle-box that moves between reality and a dreamlike space and mimics the different layers of consciousness. It enters into direct conversation with the idea that cinema is built on a dream logic. Do you see this film and more broadly the cinematic form as being influenced by dreams and psychological ideas?

FR – Oh, god…

Let me put it like this – there are films you watch, funnily enough Eyes Wide Shut [Stanley Kubrick, 1997] immediately springs to mind or Sergei Parajanov’s Shadows of our Forgotten Ancestors [1965], where the experience of watching creates some kind of vibration, some kind of song in you. The weightlessness of that, the kind of density of symbolic-becoming-objective truth in those moments creates this total weightlessness, this complete submission, with others, in the dark. There is something so sexy and so complete and so terrifying in those experiences that the answer must be yes – this is cinema’s role. Also in a Situationist-Debord kind of way the game must be reclaiming some images if we can, and we must, from the machinery of commodity image-making… trying to make films with images that are true dreams.

PR – Inland is a visual film that relies on the framing and composition, as well as colour scheme to communicate its ideas. Can you discuss the thought process behind how you used the camera and the different colours and tones in the film?

FR – The camera was a mixture of what we could do with the time and money, coupled with our ethos for the film. It’s basically either extremely close (faces as landscapes etc) or extremely wide. This has a kind of full-stop effect, in which the jumping out is always freighted with something, a kind of rhythm, punctuation. Also the closeness I found very moving with those actors, you can look at Rory Alexander and Mark Rylance’s faces all day (or I can, and did). Besides this I love to free the actors, to build around how they move, to let them run a space & then react to it – I really think actors can frame incredibly well, incredibly instinctively. That can be interesting.

PR – Do you think that Inland has a British/English sensibility? How would you describe that?

FR – Genuinely don’t know how to answer that, aha, not even meaning to be glib! It’s so ineffable. I would like it to; I hope it has. I would like us to broaden cinematic definitions of Britishness internationally – Britishness to be the Brother’s Quay and Lynne Ramsay as much as it is Leigh and Loach. I remember looking, not even reading properly, at Simon Schama talking about how forest’s mean completely different things for German & English people. For the English it’s more romantic, for the Germans much more terrifying, untamed psyche etc. Being German and English I was like, what do my forests look like/mean? That space is kind of fun.

PR – Your debut feature appears to avoid categorisation. It’s a mix of straight drama and psycho-drama, with surrealism and horror. It occurs to me that you’re keen to experiment with narrative and film form, even at the expense of alienating some of your audience. Would you agree, and can a film only be considered art if it takes risks and isn’t afraid of the response?

FR – Yes, absolutely to the first part. I think playing in the language of different genres but not delivering, or delivering (to put it badly) weirdly. That seems to me the remit of dreams as well, of ruffling and playing with our forms and stories. That is of most interest to me. In terms of something being considered art I have no idea, no real way of defining outside, maybe, of something being interesting.

PR – Isabelle Huppert, while head juror at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, has expressed concerns about the future of cinema, owing to its current “very weak” condition. In the past year, there have been discussions about how cinema is no longer the dominant art form. Do you share Huppert’s concerns, and what are your thoughts about the crisis of cinema’s diminishing dominance?

FR – I don’t know whether I can speak to something as eloquently as the most eloquent of them all. Isabelle Hupert really does know though; she is at the absolute vanguard of fighting for true cinema with true filmmakers – thinking cinema, feeling cinema. In terms of its declining state, I think image-making itself means something completely different now than it did, the terms themselves are slipping as our reality does. But I think if there is one thing about the kind of postmodernism that we are dealing with now in our world in floods is that, alongside paranoia, it can foster crazy degrees of apathy and good cinema fosters the opposite.

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Fridtjof Ryder is pictured at the top of this article. The other image is a still from Inland.