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KO KO-DI KOKO-DA
Don’t Loop NowFANS OF GRIM BUT STRANGELY UPLIFTING
FILMS BUT WHO ALSO HAPPEN TO LOVE
GROUNDHOG DAY, WILL HAVE A NEW
HORROR FABLE TO PRIORITISE IN 2020
WITH KOKO -DI KOKO -DA.
This second feature from Swedish director
Johannes Nyholm really does do something
inventive – and frequently disturbing – with a
time loop storytelling device.
Koko-di Koko-da follows a grieving married
couple taking a holiday, stopping off in the
woods on the way to camp for the night, only
for their tent to come under siege from a group
of figures straight out of the circus of your
nightmares. We talk to Nyholm about his film.
HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR FILM?
It’s a drama about a relationship that is
breaking apart and it’s inspired by situations
like that, where you sometimes feel that the
whole world around you is falling apart. A
lot of the experiences in the film I actually
saw with my own eyes, through my own
relationships and others’, as well as in dreams.
The whole film has the structure of a dream.
Dreams, or nightmares at least, have this loop
structure with small differences where you
walk around in eternal loops trying to escape.
But the small differences between one loop
and another is something I wanted to convey
with the structure of the film. And it’s also an
interesting way to portray grief.
DO YOU HAVE ANY FAVOURITE FILMS
THAT ALSO EXPLORE GRIEF WITH A
HEIGHTENED ATMOSPHERE?
Don’t Look Now is fantastic and it also
has a very dream-like structure. I wasn’t
inspired so much by other films but more
by my own experiences.
YOU SHOT VERY EARLY IN THE MORNINGS
FOR MUCH OF THE PRODUCTION, WHICH
GIVES THE SECOND AND THIRD ACTS OF
THIS FILM THIS HAZY, DREAMY FEELING...
It’s supposed to be like a limbo state; a
transition between awake and asleep. There’s
no real contrast. Everything is kind of floating,
you don’t really know where you are. I wanted
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IAMSto achieve a timeless mood. A lot of the film
was shot really, really early in the morning.
The hour of the wolf, they call it sometimes.
That’s the time of the night when you dream
the most, have the most violent dreams. It
took a lot effort to pull off because you don’t
have so many hours to shoot, no more than
one usually, because if we stayed longer that
specific level of light would pass. I think we
were out in the woods for 20 days.WHERE DOES THE TITLE, KOKO -DI KOKO -
DA, COME FROM?
It comes from a children’s song that’s been
sung in many languages, originally a French
folk song called ‘Rooster’s Death’ or something
like that in English. In French, it’s ‘Le Coq
Est Mo r t ’. It’s a childish, naive song about adead rooster that can’t sing ‘koko-di koko-da’
anymore. You repeat that ‘koko-di koko-da
koko-di koko-da’ in the refrain. It’s a song with
a lot of morbid undertones. It came in early
when writing. I wanted the gentleman in the
white costume, who leads the group terrorising
the couple in the tent, to sing a song; to have
a melody surrounding him. And I thought of
that old children’s song, which has a weird
structure as well, which fits well with the film.
The song has this structure of a never-ending
loop that you’re trapped in and can’t escape.WHAT WAS BEHIND THE CONCEPT OF
THE THREE FIGURES THAT PLAGUE THE
PROTAGONISTS THROUGHOUT THE FILM?
In the discussions with me and the costume
designer, it was about making them looklike how they came across in my dream. If
you like, you can probably see a symbolic
meaning to each and every one of them.INTERSPERSED THROUGHOUT THE FILM
ARE A FEW DIFFERENT SEQUENCES OF
SHADOW PUPPETRY, DEPICTING FABLES...
They weren’t there from the beginning, but I
felt the film was too cruel without them. It’s a
violent and harsh film and I think it needed a
bit of comfort for the viewer; to show some
beaut y. That’s why I added it, to make people
be able to still sleep afterwards.WHAT KIND OF REACTIONS HAVE YOU
BEEN GETTING FROM AUDIENCES?
It’s been very mixed. For some people, it’s a
comedy and they laugh a lot at the violence.
Others love it and take it very personally.
Yet others are engrossed by it and find it
disturbing. It doesn’t really look like many
other films so that makes it hard to compare
it to other things. Some people are prepared
only for the usual sorts of entertainment, so for
them it can take a lot of effort.YOU DID A TOUR OF THE FILM ON A BUS IN
SWEDEN. WHAT WAS THAT LIKE?
One reason I did that is I wanted to have a
private dialogue with the audience, to talk
to them afterwards. We wanted to make
the framing of the film as personal as the
film itself, and wanted to take the film out to
people instead of forcing them into a cinema.
The bus we used for the tour had been used
for this mobile theatre a long time ago, so it
had a stage inside to seat 40 to 50 people.
And then we redid it into a cinema. It was
a really neat way to show the film and have
a super intense experience with everyone
crammed together in a really small space.
A bit claustrophobic and warm, but a very
friendly way to show the film and take care of
the audience. We talked a lot afterwards and
I tried to explain things in more detail than a
traditional Q&A.Koko-di Koko-da will be released in cinemas
on 27 March.