FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Music

A Blaze in the Icelandic Sky

'Metalhead' director Ragnar Bragason on burning churches and having sex to Megadeth.

In his latest film Metalhead, Icelandic director Ragnar Bragason tells the tale of a teenage girl who turns to heavy metal after her older brother—a devout headbanger—is killed in a horrific farming accident. Set in a rural Icelandic village, the film begins in 1983 and follows Hera, then age 11 or 12, and her parents until about 1992 or so. Breakout star Thorbjörg Helga Thorgilsdóttir learned to play guitar for her role as Hera, strapping on a Flying V to rock Diamond Head’s “Am I Evil?” while worshipping at the unholy altars of Slayer, Lizzy Borden, and Judas Priest—and generally pissing off her grieving parents. After learning about black metal from a TV news report on the church burnings that swept across Norway in the early ’90s, Hera slaps on the corpsepaint and takes her rebellion to a fiery new level. Intrigued, I decided to get Bragason on ye olde Internet phone to discuss the finer points of arson, female headbangers, and having sex to Megadeth.

Advertisement

[Editor's Note: St. Vitus will be holding an advance screening of Metalhead on November 25th. Buy tickets here. For the rest of you heathens, the film will be in American theaters and Video on Demand in early 2015.]

Noisey: What was the initial inspiration for Metalhead?
Ragnar Bragason: Where to start? I grew up listening to a lot of metal music when I was a kid, and I always had it in the back of my head to incorporate it into a film or TV project. But I never found the way or the story to do it. Metalhead is my fifth feature film, and I’ve done a lot of TV series, but I had in the back of my head this image of a girl with a guitar surrounded by cows. I don’t know where it came from, but there’s something about the contrast of the image—the flying V guitar and the leather surrounded by these mother-like creature that cows are. It’s something I’ve been carrying around for a few years.

How did it finally come together?
I was teaching a workshop at the [Iceland] Academy of the Arts in the acting department, and there was this girl there who was studying. We were working on improvisation, creating characters and scenes for the kids, and I just kind of matched that actress to the image in my head—like she could be that girl. So I asked her if she played guitar, but she didn’t. Then the story came to me bit by bit. I started asking myself questions like, “Why is this girl playing guitar surrounded by cows?” It’s probably a farm somewhere. And I remember when I was a kid there was a story on the news about this long-haired kid who got his hair stuck in the driveshaft of a tractor on a farm somewhere. I was like eight or nine when I heard that, and I grew up in a very rural community, so it was kind of close to me. Then I started thinking about how I grew up and what music meant to me and why I was listening to it and stuff like this. Little by little, all those pieces came together and I wrote the script. I called Thorbjörg, the actress, like a year and a half later. I basically told her she had 12 months to learn to play the guitar because I was going to make the film.

Advertisement

Did she take lessons?
Yeah, she found two teachers—one kind of classical, and one who was more metal. He was a guy I knew who was in metal bands when I was growing up. Then she found a female-fronted death metal band in Iceland, so she hung around their rehearsal room and got the moves down. [Laughs] She was very determined to learn how to play so it would be believable. It always freaks me out when I see a film and the actors are playing characters who are supposed to be able to do something like play instruments, and you can obviously tell that the person has never done it before. So it was really important to get that part right.

Did Thorbjörg listen to metal at all before you approached her?
No, not much. But the funny thing is that her older half-brother is a metalhead, so she could recall him locking himself in his room and listening to all the ’80s bands. But other than that it was a foreign thing. She had no knowledge of the bands or the music, so I made her a mix of one hundred songs and gave her some quick lessons in metal. I told her to watch some documentaries and read some books. So I’m pretty proud to say that I actually turned her into a metalhead. [Laughs]

Why was it important to you to have the main character be female?
Part of the power of the image was that it was a girl. Personally, I think seeing a girl with a guitar is the coolest thing. Maybe because it’s not typical—it’s not what you expected. Metal is a very male-dominated genre of music, so to contrast the harsher elements of the music with a female character was appealing. I wouldn’t say metal is sexist, but it does have this image as something that pimple-faced teenage boys start to play with. When I was growing up, it was always cool when I got albums of bands that had female singers. I really dug that—like Warlock, the German band.

Advertisement

The fact that Hera’s parents are churchgoers seems like an important aspect of her rebellion. Did you grow up in a religious household?
You know, Icelanders aren’t really religious. I grew up in a small village with only like 150 people way up north in Iceland in the most remote part of the country. Churches in Iceland, especially the rural churches, are more like community centers than a religious thing. It’s a place where people go to meet. My mother sang in the church choir, but almost one-third of the population here sing in choirs. So it’s more of a community thing than a religious thing. Iceland is not a religious place. People don’t go to church unless it’s to meet people and have a coffee and talk.

So when Hera burns down the church, it’s not an anti-religious act. It’s more about getting revenge on the community that she feels has ostracized her.
Yeah, I think so. But of course it has a religious element. At the beginning of the film, when her brother is being buried, she stares at the iconic symbol of the Christian religion, which is Jesus Christ on the cross. She stares that guy in the eye when she’s eleven or twelve. The church becomes a part of her anger because it doesn’t do anything to help her or her family. So in that way, the church and community go hand in hand. But in the end, the film is about forgiveness, which is one of the positive things you can take from religion.

Advertisement

Hera learns about black metal from a TV news report. Is that how you found out about it as a kid growing up in Iceland?
That scene is basically an exact copy of my life. [Laughs] I was sitting on the sofa, and I had this VHS tape that I’d use to record videos and things because it was really hard to get metal music in Iceland in the ’80s when I was growing up. I had to order most of my albums from London. But once a week there was this show screening music videos and you could expect maybe one metal or punk video, so I always had my tape ready. I had been using that tape for maybe four or five years. I was watching TV with my parents when the black metal report came on the news, and I couldn’t find my tape because my mother had misplaced it. But when I was doing research for the film, I went to the state broadcasters because they have copies of every news program, so I made a copy of it and made a replica for the film.

The soundtrack is obviously a big part of the movie. The sheep stampede set to Riot’s “Run For Your Life” is a particularly funny moment. Why did you choose that song?
I love that song, but it was actually my second choice for that scene. My first choice was “Run to the Hills” by Iron Maiden. We approached them to try and get the rights for the song, but they have this policy of saying no to every filmmaker who comes along, so you don’t hear Iron Maiden songs in films. But when I was writing the script, I wrote down every song I wanted to use. I made a first, second and third choice for each scene. Mostly I got the songs I wanted, but I didn’t get the Maiden song. I also used the song “Me Against the World” by Lizzy Borden, which was a second choice. I wanted to use WASP’s “I Wanna Be Somebody,” but [WASP frontman] Blackie Lawless refused on the grounds that the film was against his religious beliefs. He’s a born-again Christian, and he didn’t like the burning of the church. Which I thought was hilarious.

Speaking of hilarious, you also used Megadeth’s “Symphony of Destruction” for a sex scene—and then again in the film’s final scene.
The reason I chose that song was for the end scene, because there’s that cathartic moment with the family at the end, and the song has that kick-ass riff and beat to it. I think the feeling of the song kind of sums up the whole thing in a way. The reason I used it in the sex scene was because I wanted to establish the song in the film and introduce it to viewers who might not know it. That way they would kind of recognize it when it came up again at the end. And I think it’s hilarious to have a sex scene to Megadeth.

At one point, Hera plays Diamond Head’s “Am I Evil?” on her guitar. Just like the black metal VHS scene, that scene seems very real in that the opening riff of that song is not particularly difficult to play—it’s definitely a song that a metal fan just starting out on guitar could and would learn, especially given that it was made famous by Metallica.
It also has that doomy, evil feel to it. The title says it all. I think it’s one of my favorite riffs in all of metal history. I love Diamond Head, and because I couldn’t use Iron Maiden I really wanted to represent the New Wave of British Heavy Metal in the film in some way. But yeah, I love that riff.

A lot of teenagers who listen to metal might feel like outcasts, but not all of them lash out at their parents or other people around them. And only a miniscule fraction of them try to sabotage their parents’ businesses or burn down a church. But Hera does all of those things in the film. Are you at all worried about perpetuating the idea that metal fans are emotional basketcases?
No, I’m not. I’ve screened Metalhead at film festivals all over Europe and Asia, and I’ve had so many people coming up to me after the screenings or sending me emails saying they could relate to it. Of course it’s dramatic in the sense that she uses the music to deal with her life, her family, and the situation she’s in. That’s one of the things that intrigued me—you can use art and music to help you. If I analyze why I listened to metal music as a kid, it was that I felt the reality of it. It didn’t have the mushy elements of pop. It was real and it was dealing with more serious issues. I wouldn’t go as far as to say it’s thinking man’s music, but you can find metalheads who are university professors, you know? It can be intellectual music, but it’s also about release. I mean, I listen to Slayer when I want to relax. I think metal music got me through my teens. I would’ve have gone crazy without it. But going back to the alienation thing, people can read the film in various ways. I actually had a journalist from Finland who started to cry in the middle of his interview with me because he grew up listening to metal music and he lost his brother. He said everything Hera went through in the film was exactly like what he and his family went through—burying the emotions and not dealing with things. But he didn’t burn down any churches.

J. Bennett went to 12 years of Catholic school and (somehow) has yet to burn down a church.