Playing With Fire: Ugla Hauksdóttir Premieres Explosive Disaster Drama “Eldarnir”

“Feature was always the big goal. For any filmmaker, making your first feature is always the top where you want to go,” says writer and director Ugla Hauksdóttir. Over the past decade, she has made a name for herself in the industry, working on short films, music videos, and, more recently, TV. We’re speaking the day after Ugla’s debut feature Eldarnir (The Fires in English), based on Sigríður Hagalín Björnsdóttir’s eponymous book, premiered in Reykjavík.

Jumping into the deep end

As we meet, Ugla has only one day in the city before travelling to shoot in Spain. She has worked around the world — from Canada to Thailand and South Africa — and lives up to her Instagram bio, which reads: Iceland — New York — London, places she calls home.

Even though her feature premiered on her original home turf, Ugla has been exposed to other cultures from an early age. She moved to New York at 15 for high school, followed by admission to the prestigious Cooper Union, where she studied fine arts with a focus on photography.

“What became quite evident in my photography work was that I was always working with time, so I was working with multiple exposures. It was almost like I was trying to tell stories within each frame,” she shares. “I think in some ways this was something inside of me saying you need to be moving towards a moving picture. Eventually, that’s what I did.”

“I had no idea what filmmaking was, or what directing really was, or what writing a script really meant, or how complex making a movie could be. But in some ways, I think it can be best not to know anything, because it means you’re not scared of it. So I jumped into the deep end of the pool, as we say. I think it’s only an Icelandic expression,” she smiles, recalling her first steps in film — a short film starring her mom, an actress and theatre director.

From there, Ugla went on to study screenwriting and directing in the MFA Film programme at Columbia University, soon winning the prestigious Directors Guild of America Student Film Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement for her short film How Far She Went. Around that time, she got noticed by the powerhouse director, Baltasar Kormákur, who invited her to direct two episodes of the acclaimed drama mystery series Trapped (Ófærð).

Photo by Art Bicnick

A dream, manifested

Since then, Ugla has built an impressive portfolio in television, directing episodes for Snowfall, Amazon Prime’s series The Power and Hanna. Coincidentally, Eldarnir isn’t Ugla’s only big release this summer. Just a few weeks prior, it was revealed she directed two episodes of Noah Hawley’s sci-fi horror series Alien: Earth.  “When I was in film school, I never imagined that I would be working in television,” she admits. “I didn’t watch a lot of television myself. I was mostly watching weird arthouse films.”

Then, as it happens, life interfered, and Ugla started working on TV sets first to get the experience, and, as she puts it, “I just kind of got addicted to the experience of that.” She says,

“You’re not making your own film, but you still get to be a really strong creative collaborator.”

“When I graduated from film school in 2016 and signed with my agency in Hollywood, they asked me, ‘if we were to try to pursue TV directing gigs for you abroad, who would you want to work with?’ Season one of Fargo, the TV show, had just come out in 2014 and it was my favourite TV show at the time. When my agents asked that question, I told them I wanted to work with Noah Hawley, the creator of Fargo. And of course, this is me, a young filmmaker, just speaking out my biggest dream and thinking that this would in no way ever become a reality. But my agents listened, and I got a phone call a year and a half ago, ‘Noah has seen your work, and he wants to meet with you,’ my agents told me,” shares Ugla.

“She’s married, she has a family, sort of a perfect life — and suddenly, when she falls in love and these volcanic eruptions happen.”

She was one of the three directors working on the series, the other two being Noah himself and his long-term collaborator Dana Gonzales. According to Ugla, the series pays tribute to the original Alien films, but “unlike all the Alien films that we have seen, suddenly there’s a spaceship that crashes on Earth, and what that means it’s not good news,” she says.

Ugla hadn’t worked in the horror/sci-fi genre before and admits it was a challenge. “It’s definitely a new way of thinking — you need to keep your audience on edge at all times. It’s not only about creating emotional performances with your actors and telling a good story. On top of that, you want to make sure that everyone is like leaning forward and holding their breath,” she explains, adding that together with Noah they spent a lot of time talking about how to craft fear and dread effectively.

“What I love about Noah’s work, and I guess this is sort of where I’m more in my comfort zone, is that he writes really good characters, and there’s a lot of depth. They’re all very three-dimensional. It doesn’t matter if they’re kind of good or bad, they’re always interesting and nuanced,” she says of the collaboration, adding that despite the show’s massive 800-person crew, working with Noah and the actors still felt intimate. Reviews of Alien: Earth have been positive, including a coveted four-star review from The Guardian, and a 95 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Adapting the story

Much like working in TV, or becoming a director in general, taking on her first feature as a book adaptation wasn’t something Ugla had planned. She admits she had developed a few of her own concepts, “but I don’t think that I had found it quite yet,” she says. So when producer Grímur Jónsson called to invite her to work on the adaptation of a novel, she was intrigued, yet surprised.

“It was a surprise that my first feature film would be an adaptation, but it’s also really interesting, because you’re sort of in a dialogue with another writer.” Or two — Ugla collaborated on the script with her long-term collaborator and life partner, Markus Englmair.

Both the book and the film follow volcanologist Anna Arnardóttir, whose work becomes the centre of attention as a series of volcanic eruptions begins on the Reykjanes Peninsula. The book itself drew plenty of attention in Iceland for its strangely prophetic timing — it was published in 2020, just months before the first eruption in 800 years occurred in Fagradalsfjall in March 2021.

Love eruption

In both the book’s original and its English version, translated by former Grapevine contributor Larissa Kyzer, the title reads Eldarnir: Ástin og aðrar hamfarir, or The Fires: Love & Other Disasters, which honestly hints at how the story will unfold.

“The volcanic eruptions become sort of this metaphor for what’s happening inside Anna,” says Ugla. “She’s married, she has a family, sort of a perfect life — and suddenly, when she falls in love and these volcanic eruptions happen, everything becomes uprooted, and there’s this almost explosive eruption that happens in her personal life.”

At first glance, the fact-oriented, stoic Anna, portrayed by Vigdís Hrefna Pálsdóttir, falls in love with Danish photographer Thomas Adler (played by Danish actor Pilou Asbæk) — who claims to be a Reuters photographer in town just to cover the eruption, though he seems more interested in shooting artsy film photos for his upcoming exhibition. “Thomas Adler, the love interest in the film, for me was always going to be a non-Icelandic actor, even though, in the book, he is Icelandic,” says Ugla.

“First of all, in the novel, he has a last name — Adler. While Icelandic people do have some family names, it’s not very common. So immediately, I saw it as an opportunity to get international talent, hoping that it would bring in a bigger audience for the film. But also I thought it would be exciting for Thomas as a photographer to come to Iceland and experience the country, the people, and these volcanic eruptions for the first time — and just have a different perspective as someone who’s not Icelandic,” she explains, adding that having Markus’s perspective as a non-Icelandic writer was equally important.

Compressing a 300-page book into 107 minutes isn’t an easy feat — especially when working on a disaster film with extensive VFX and a budget that can’t compare to Hollywood productions of this scale. Ugla and her team were resourceful, collaborating with an all-star crew, including composer Herdís Stefánsdóttir, and a Polish co-production partner. “I’m very proud that we managed to keep the full arc of the story. But of course, there is a price to pay when you have to cut things down — you have to kill a lot of your darlings.”

“Of course, we had these moments of thinking, should we try to write what’s happening in reality into the script.”

Since work on the script began in 2021, as Iceland has been ravaged by eruption after eruption, getting the science right was very important for Ugla. “We had an advisor, Kristín Jónsdóttir, one of our most respected volcanologists. She read the script and she was also an advisor on the book, so she gave us really valuable insights, and, sort of, her blessing,” Ugla shares. “It’s still a movie, and, of course, we simplify things and take creative liberties, but we talked to her, and we also asked Fannar Jónasson, the mayor of Grindavík, and Víðir Reynisson, who’s the head of Almannavarnir, to read the script. We found it really important to be involved and engaged with the people who actually live the reality of what this film is about.”

In terms of the volcanic events, the film stays true to the book. “But, of course, in reality, we’ve now had 12 eruptions. What started out as a very beautiful tourist eruption, then turned into a horrible disaster for the people of Grindavík, who had to be evacuated permanently, and many who have lost their homes and may not return. It was quite strange to experience that while we were basically writing the script. And, of course, we had these moments of thinking, should we try to write what’s happening in reality into the script?” says Ugla.

The final frame of Eldarnir pays tribute to the residents of Grindavík.

“It’s much harder to premiere something here at home in Iceland than out in the world on a TV show,” she adds. “The difference is that I’m also responsible for the script, so that’s a new feeling for me. I think when you are working on something for so long, you have a very complex relationship to what you create — especially in the post-production, when you’re watching the film basically every single day. Some days I loved it, some days I hated it, some days I just felt nothing, and then I loved it again, and then I didn’t like it at all again. But standing on stage yesterday, having shared the film with our first live audience, I felt very proud.”

Eldarnir premiered in Iceland on September 11 is screening at Smárabíó with English subtitles. Starting September 25, the film will also be showing at Bíó Paradís, also with English subtitles. Watch the trailer here.