HEN I WAS PLAYING drums
in the Swedish black metal
band Bathory in the early
1980s, it took me a little while
to realize that I was a better
editor than I was ever going to be a drummer.
Playing music was always a struggle, but fig-
uring out our band’s logo and image, coming
up with cool names for ourselves, and having
a visual take on the band was easy. A lot of
my friends from that time continue making
music, and I probably could’ve been that guy,
struggling with my drums to this day—and
that might’ve been a cool life, too. But for me,
moviemaking took over.
TELLING TALES OUT OF SCHOOL
When I first started out as a moviemaker,
music videos didn’t exist. Growing up in Swe-
den, we didn’t have commercial television,
and Swedish moviemaking was very much
under government control. Ingmar Bergman
was at the top, and he often influenced think-
ing about who should get the prestigious,
state-sanctioned film education. But there
were no schools teaching how to pull off the
strong sound effects, super-wide shots, and ef-
fective editing schemes that today’s audiences
are much more used to seeing.
I was lucky enough to be part of a group
that was a little ahead of its time, so we
didn’t really care about all that. In music
videos, we saw a way that stories could be
told in a short span of time. Oliver Stone had
touched on it to some degree by that point,
as his films mixed formats and went in and
out of black-and-white and color. We would
watch his films closely, along with the films
of other directors we looked up to, to figure
out their techniques. Still, you couldn’t really
read or learn about such things in any formal
manner, so we bought Super 8 cameras and
started doing it ourselves. TOP LEFT: COURTESY OF JONAS ÅKERLUND / TOP RIGHT: PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER BESTE
40 WINTER 2019 MOVIEMAKER.COM
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DIRECT FROM
COMING TO AMERICA
One of the first films I made, a short called
“The Hidden,” played some festivals and
somehow ended up in Los Angeles, where it
started to make an impression on people in
the film industry. The film didn’t have any
dialogue, and was more of an art project, but
the way our crew shot, edited, and sound-
mixed it had people saying, “OK, that’s a dif-
ferent way to make films.” A couple of years
later, I was hired to make a video for British
electronic group The Prodigy’s song
“Smack My Bitch Up,” and when it was re-
leased in 1997, our approach was still received
as kind of taboo. Today, there’s dialogue in
music videos and you can do whatever with
the medium, but back then it was unheard
of to re-edit music and add sound effects—to
basically fuck up a song in order to make a
good, four-minute little film out of it.
From that point on, in the late ’90s, I began
working in America, and all of us making
music videos at that time were encouraging
one another to experiment with unexpected,
obscene, and shocking ideas. The results
ranged from my 14-minute music video for
Metallica’s “Turn the Page,” which included
dialogue and actors, to intense, two-minute
performance pieces. When I made my debut
feature Spun in 2002, I called upon the edit-
ing techniques I had developed as a music
video director: Spun’s pace and presentation
needed to be as close to the brain of a meth-amphetamine junkie as possible, so natu-
rally, kinetic cuts and jolting sound effects
strengthened the story.BEING YOUR OWN CLIENT
It would seem that making a feature
demands a bigger time commitment and
a different approach to screenwriting and
directing actors than making a music video.
And yet, I’ve come to realize that working
in both mediums requires the same level of
commitment. The real difference between
music video and feature moviemaking is
this: With music videos, the people who hire
you to make them are your clients, but with
features, you’re your own client. Of course, no
matter what project you undertake, chances
are, you’re going to have somebody else who
pays you, so there will always be that some-
body to report back to. The fact remains: Your
job when making a music video is to fulfill
somebody else’s dream, but your job when
making a feature is to fulfill your dream.WHEN NEW BECOMES NORMAL
To make my new film Lords of Chaos—a
horror-inflected thriller based on the true
story of crimes committed by the members of
the Norwegian black metal bands Mayhem
and Burzum—fulfilling my dream didn’t
require the kind of music video effects I used
in Spun. An exception to this rule, however,
is when the film goes into our main character> BURNING DESIRE: DIRECTOR JONAS ÅKERLUND
STANDS IN FRONT OF A BURNING CHURCH ON THE
SET OF LORDS OF CHAOS, HIS PASSION PROJECT
THAT TOOK 10 YEARS TO DEVELOPÅKERLUND HELMS THE ACCLAIMED
MUSIC VIDEO FOR LADY GAGA AND
BEYONCÉ’S “TELEPHONE” IN JULY 2017VIDEO