Lukas Moodysson On Container

The Swedish director talks about garbage, tsunamis and his confounding new film

"Welcome inside the head of Lukas Moodysson!" In a dark room in London's Institute for the Contemporary Arts, the Swedish filmmaker is holding court in a room full of bric-a-brac, while clips from his latest film Container are projected onto the walls. It's a temporary art installation called 'Inside The Head of Lukas Moodysson' and it's populated by some of the signature items from the film: plastic dolls, religious icons, tattered magazines. It's like being surrounded by the detritus from a very weird jumble sale.

"I'm fascinated by ruins," explains the director. "I see this as a kind of archaeology, going through garbage and trying to find traces of human life. If I see a Coca Cola can on the street, I start thinking about who has been drinking it, where it was made and stuff like that. That obsession has kind of brought me to an end here with this film". Container is certainly a film about ruins and garbage. But it's also about Chernobyl, Paris Hilton and cross-dressing. In fact, it's so expansive and eclectic that it's very difficult to say what its subject is exactly.

"I started out wanting to make a film about tsunamis," says Moodysson, who claims to have begun filming in his bathtub using his children's plastic toys. "But when [the 2004 tsunami] happened it became too real. I couldn't make that film anymore." Instead he turned to Container. In its own strange way it's also something of a tsunami, assaulting the audience with words and images. "I saw this TV programme about a boy who was autistic," continues the filmmaker. "I'm interested in that kind of mind, where you take in everything but can't really decide what is important and what is not."

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