Spanning several decades and set in Iceland, London, and Japan, 'Touch' is about an Icelandic man’s quest to find his first love, a Japanese girl who suddenly disappeared from his life half a century ago
LOS ANGELES, USA – Baltasar Kormakur makes a radical shift from loud action movies like Mark Wahlberg’s 2 Guns and Contraband to an East-West love story, Touch. The result is a quietly compelling, tender drama-romance.
Baltasar, whom Variety reported in 2013 was going to direct Universal Pictures’ Hollywood remake of Erik Matti’s On the Job (whatever happened to that project?), proves surprisingly adept in working in a different vein.
Spanning several decades and set in Iceland, London, and Japan, Touch is absorbing and compellingly peaceful (quite a pivot from Baltasar’s frenetic action thrillers) about an Icelandic man’s quest to find his first love, a Japanese girl who suddenly disappeared from his life half a century ago.
This low-key, small gem is one of the best films in this year that’s already more than halfway over.
One of Iceland’s best-known talents in film, Baltasar counts among his credits The Deep, his country’s entry to the 85th Academy Awards’ best international feature; Beast (Idris Elba); Everest (Jake Gyllenhaal); and the aforementioned Contraband and 2 Guns (which also starred Denzel Washington).
The filmmaker, whose father is Spanish and mother is Icelandic, recently spoke to us via Zoom (his comments were edited for brevity and clarity). He stressed that he had done more varied fare before and he was not confined to the movies in his earlier work.
The 58-year-old, who is also an actor, said, “I want to point out that, earlier in my career, before I was introduced to Hollywood — and I’m very grateful for that, because it has opened a lot of opportunities for me — I had done theater: Shakespeare, Chekhov, and others as an actor.”
“I did Hamlet twice on the national stage in Iceland as a director and also in Denmark. In some of my earlier films, I did family dramas.
“So I’ve done more range of work than for the American audience. Of course, I’m not doing like a political satire in America — better people are suited for that than me. But when it comes to nature, man against nature, that’s pretty much my upbringing: walking to school in a blizzard or riding my horses through the highlands.
“I chose the projects where I feel I have something to add and not being kind of culturally lost, doing like an American comedy or something. Those choices have been made both by what I have been offered and also by where I think I have strengths.
“But I do love, most of all, to tell stories about people. I’m really interested in people.
“And, of course, when you’ve gone through life, through difficult times and some good times as well, a lot of them, there’s so much in you that you want to project into your characters. And Touch is an opportunity that I couldn’t resist.”
Based on the 2022 novel of the same name by Olaf Olafsson, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Baltasar, Touch stars Egill Olafsson as Kristofer, a widower who, upon being diagnosed with early onset of Alzheimer’s disease, decides to find out what happened to his one and true love, Miko. Koki and Palmi Kormakur play the young Miko and Kristofer, respectively.
Kristofer and Miko meet in 1969 London. He’s a radical student who impulsively quits his conservative economics school and decides to apply as a waiter at a Japanese restaurant. He immediately falls for Miko, the daughter of the restaurant owner and chef (Masahiro Motoki, who starred in Yojiro Takita’s Departures).
Also in the fine cast are Meg Kubota (Hitomi), Charles Nishikawa (Goto-san), and Ruth Sheen (Mrs. Ellis).
“It came to me in the most beautiful way because my daughter gave the book to me for Christmas,” recalled Baltasar. “I started reading it and I couldn’t put it down.”
“There was something about this quiet story on this guy from somewhere on the seaside in Iceland and, slowly but surely, it just started gripping me more and more. And then it took me to places I didn’t expect.
“I had been wanting to make a film where I could express, in some way, my relationship with love. For me, this story had it all and both the intensity of falling in love when you’re young and then dealing with the consequences of having lost somebody that you haven’t had a closure with.
“And then I just liked the obstacle very much. It’s very hard to find a real obstacle. We know the obstacle in Romeo and Juliet, which is the families, but often I feel that the obstacles become a bit rom-com-y. I liked how unexpected it is and the gravity of the obstacle in that love life.”
Baltasar immediately bought the film rights to Olaf’s novel. He further explains why the story about a man who makes a bold step before dementia takes over appealed to him: “Something I loved about it is, it’s a movie where he’s searching for his lost love, but he’s not trying to get her back. He just wants answers, a closure.
“It’s not about like a little crazy old man who is looking for a love that he lost 50 years ago. It is about a man who is looking for closure and he knows there’s something out there that he needs to know before it’s too late.
“And that’s one of the things that drew me to the story. Because the older you get, the more you have this need for closure, either with things you have done wrong to people or things that you haven’t really had after the final act.
“Also what I liked about the book is the mystery that, at least, in my opinion, allows for the time you need with these young people, to see them fall in love because I didn’t want to do that in a contrived way. Needed to have the time.
“And it is all in the little eyeblinks and the little touches but the mystery holds the audience stronger to the to the story. It gives you time. You know that you can allow time for the love to develop.”
Adding poignancy to the bittersweet love story is that Egill, revered as an actor and singer in Iceland, has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s Plus in real life.
“Olafsson has been a legend in Iceland since I was a kid,” Baltasar said about Egill, subtle and moving as the older Kristofer. “He’s like the most famous singer we ever had. And he is also a movie star — singer first, then he became a movie star.
“He has been like a showman, like a big showman, a sex symbol, for a very long time. He wouldn’t be my original idea about how I saw Kristofer because, to me, Kristofer is a very humble guy who steps very softly on the ground. He doesn’t take a lot of space.
“That doesn’t mean he doesn’t have his opinions. He often goes against the grain but he does it all in this kind of soft manner.
“We have not worked together through the years but I worked on a TV series called Trapped. He came in to play a guru.”
But meeting Egill, 71, again for the role convinced Baltasar the actor was now right for the widower role. “I just saw that his energy had changed a lot. He was very different. I didn’t know then that he had actually been dealing with Parkinson’s Plus, but I did find out later.
“For me, it was like, I didn’t want to put him aside because of that suddenly. He was actually perfect for the role. It was like, okay, maybe this will actually add another layer [to the character].
“Like his voice is really rusty because he’s losing his voice. But, just before I cast him, he announced that he wouldn’t be singing on stage ever again. So, when I brought him this project, he was like, yeah, this will be my swan song.
“I thought, if you’re ready for it, I will do whatever to get you through this. In this situation, it was all right to get tired and actually, it’s good for him to do work.
“But in the Japan part of the movie, he’s in almost every shot of the movie. So we had to add another extra week and shoot only for eight hours a day because what happens to people in this situation is that they just shut down. They just can’t stand up anymore. Just don’t have the energy.
“But I’m so happy that I got the chance to do this with him because I think he’s wonderful in the part. I think in some ways, his struggle does give another layer to the film, which I really appreciate. Because it feels a matter-of-life-and-death journey for Kristofer. It is really his last effort.”
For Baltasar, the story exploring memory, time, and lost love also resonated with him personally.
“There’s something about time which is really beautiful but painful, which I feel when I look at pictures of my sons and daughters in Christmas pictures,” said Baltasar, who was once declared by Variety as one of the “10 Directors to Watch” along with Christopher Nolan, Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu, and Lukas Moodysson.
“That’s what drew me to this project. I wanted to show the relationship with time, which is really sad but melancholic in a way.
“I do think it’s a weird feeling, when somebody, especially someone you love, starts to operate from your memory, in the way that you can put his face up again, he might pop up in your dreams, because somewhere back down we have like a hard drive.
“But it gets harder sometimes to pull it out of your hard drive, if you understand what I mean. So, I think all of that, and knowing that he’s heading into the fog, as we call it, Alzheimer’s.
“Then the urge is stronger. But there’s also another part, which I want to emphasize – Kristofer, when he’s young, he goes his own ways, he has his political battles with his friends. He’s in a different place.
“He decides to take a job in a Japanese restaurant and stops going to school. He’s kind of a free spirit; he just goes his own way.
“But something happens when he’s traumatized and when he loses Miko. He locks in, goes back to Iceland, where he came from. He doesn’t make his choices anymore. He marries a woman that obviously he is not that in love with.
“He wants to love this woman but it just isn’t there. He’s not allowing his real character to come across. When he makes the decision to go and see her (Miko), it starts coming back to him.
“So when he’s going against the grain while the world is shutting down (because of the pandemic), he’s going the other direction. It’s very close to me because my mother told me that I used to wear winter clothes in the summer and no clothes in the winter.
“So I also have a tendency to go against the grain. That’s something I like about Kristofer. His old self starts to come back to him and he starts to make decisions that come from the heart, from his intuition.”
On how he kept the film’s tone sweet and hopeful, the director explained: “My life is full of emotions and hope. I really wanted to keep that and I didn’t want people to feel sorry about Kristofer. I wanted them to enjoy. I’m a big fan of Jacques Tati, the French comedian in Trafic and those movies.
“That’s one of the reasons I chose a man who is really romantic. He’s beautiful. Rather than somebody you feel sorry about, you enjoy his journey with him. So it was very important to inject humor into it and a lot of that is a conscious decision because it wasn’t as much in the book.
A surprise element — and a wonderful one — is that Palmi is Baltasar’s son. Sporting long hair evocative of the late ’60s, Palmi is perfect for the young Kristofer role, capturing what one critic wrote, the “John Lennon gentleness.”
“Actually, there’s a bit of misunderstanding,” Baltasar clarified when asked how Palmi has evolved as an actor since he has been directing him since he was a child. It turns out it was not Palmi but his brothers who are into acting.
Baltasar said, “I have three sons: two of them, one is a trained actor and my youngest son is now in the drama school; I’ve never directed Palmi before.
“Actually, I was under the impression that he didn’t want to act at all. He was in a very small scene in The Deep. He just opened the door and that’s about it.
“He was also in a film where I acted in which I didn’t direct. It was called Reykjavik-Rotterdam, which was the original Contraband. He played my son there.
“And, after that, it never came up that he wanted to act or was interested in it, at least, to my understanding.”
Until the Touch project came along. “We had exhausted all possibilities, looking for the right guy,” Baltasar recounted the search for the actor to play the young Kristofer.
“You know how it sounds when you cast your own children in a film. I had two casting directors, one in Japan and one in Iceland, who suggested: What about your sons? And she was referring to two of my youngest sons, obviously because of the age of the character.”
“And I thought she was talking about Stormur. I said, ‘Stormur is my youngest. He’s a great actor but he’s not right for this character at all.’ And then she said, what about Palmi?
“Little did I know. Palmi showed up a few weeks later in my office and I thought we had scheduled getting a lunch or something. He said, ‘I’m coming for your audition. Didn’t you want that?’
“I was absolutely surprised. He was 22 at the time. He wanted to say ‘No’ less. He was shying away from things and saying no. But he wasn’t going for the role. He just wanted to get over the un-comfortability of having to do an audition.
“But he totally blew everyone away in the audition. I sent the tapes to Focus and my co-producer, Mike Goodrich, and even to the author (Olaf Olafsson). Am I blinded as a father, am I right?
“And none of them knew he was my son. Everyone came to the same conclusion. And so, there was no way out of it.”
“In all honesty, of course, you don’t want to cast the wrong person on a film, but, more so, I don’t want to put my children in the position of being in something where they are miscast and it can affect their life. So it was even more important to me that I wasn’t doing him any harm.”
But Palmi brings just the right touch to the young Kristofer part. Asked if Palmi will keep acting, Baltasar answered, “He’s in a fine arts school in the Netherlands, but I think he’s open to exploring that (acting). So I hope he does.”
As for Koki, who is also persuasive as a Japan-born young woman growing up in swinging ’60s London, Baltasar said he was not aware that she is the daughter of two celebrities. The model and songwriter is the offspring of actors Takuya Kimura and Shizuka Kudo.
“I had no idea about that,” Baltasar said. “I went through with Yoko, the Japanese casting director, a lot of Japanese girls but there’s a limited number. Because I didn’t want them to be like Japanese girls who have been totally brought up abroad, like America or England.
“I wanted them to have both cultures in some way in them because she only lived for a few years in London and the rest of her life, she lived in Japan. So we’re looking for somebody who’s authentically Japanese, also by upbringing.
“And it’s not easy to find girls who are good enough in English, who come from that background, that you believe have lived in England. So you put yourself in kind of a very difficult position.
“There was a lot of interesting choices. When I exhausted the options, I went back to look at my email. I found this email that Koki sent to me. I asked her to read for the role and there was no turning back after that.
“Koki’s mother had been to Iceland and I didn’t know she was a huge celebrity. I realized it when the Japanese extras started talking about both of them.
“Then when we came to Japan to shoot, I realized what I got myself into. But Koki was chosen for her own talent and her incredibly striking looks.”
The filmmaker, who graduated from Iceland’s National Academy of Fine Arts and went to work first as an actor in theater, had another interesting casting story in the search for the actress to play the older Miko.
“There’s a lot of fun casting choices for me,” the Reykjavik native began with a smile. “I was looking for an older Miko and she needed to speak English well because she lived in England.
“We were struggling with that again – finding an older Japanese woman who has a believable English accent. There were some choices but Yoko was also reading with people who were auditioning.
“Like she was reading the part of Kristofer [with auditioners]. Yoko was reading really well. She has a really good sense for dialogue. So I said to Yoko, would you mind reading for me for the part [of Miko]?
“And she got very shy because it was an awkward situation. Because we’ve been testing other women and now she’s going to read for the part. She was shy about that but I said, it’s my decision, please do it for me.
“And she did and she brought us to tears. She was heartbreaking. So there was, again, no turning back. I tend to cast with my heart, my instinct. It’s not about who people are or where they come from.
“I try to be as honest, to try to find the character because so many of the decisions made about the character are in the casting. I don’t like people to go far away from themselves.
“Like my son (Palmi) really sits close to himself and that allows for the little nuances because you don’t have to be pushing people to play a character as much as just being themselves.”
He added about Yoko: “Actually, Yoko had done some things. Many casting directors are actually actors first. She’s a big casting director in Japan. She also does all these big Hollywood films. She lives in LA.”
Baltasar shared another casting secret, which he asked not to be revealed so as not to spoil a story element for the filmgoers.
For a film that seamlessly jumps back and forth between decades, cinematographer Bergsteinn Bjorgulfsson adds to Touch’s visual beauty as his camera shifts in tone and hue.
“We’ve done quite a lot of films,” Baltasar said about his DP. “A lot of my Icelandic films, like Jar City, White Night Wedding, and he did The Deep as well. He comes from documentaries. He has been kind of the most celebrated DP in Iceland for quite a while.
“The 1970s time is a memory. We wanted to give it a little bit of a kind of a pleasant feeling as you bring out the best in memories.
“I looked at a lot of films from the ’70s. I wanted a brown feeling. And then I didn’t want to, and this is often done, I didn’t want to make the present times like cold.
“I just wanted to find a different palette and more realistic, maybe in some way. (Ingmar) Bergman developed beautiful lenses that are very rare and hard to get so everything in the past is shot with those lenses. They give a little bit of a flare and light and give you more of the ’70s feel. So it was a rare find.”
The specter of war, including the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, has a significant part in the film’s story, especially with the character of Miko’s father.
“I lived through the Cold War, so I knew a lot — not everything, but I knew a lot,” Baltasar replied about handling the topic of war in the movie. “And I did go to Hiroshima, to the memorials and the museum.
“I kind of educated myself as much as I could. But what I liked about and what drew me again to the project is that rather than engage in the blame game and the shouting match about who did what.
“But I like the idea of taking the audience by the hand and leading them through these tragic events, horrible events, from a singular view of one person, a victim that had nothing to do with it. I wasn’t even born when it happened.
“I love that sometimes when you talk to people in a soft and respectful manner, and you show them something, it affects them more than when you shout at them and blame them.
“Hopefully, also seeing where history is taking us, now that people are threatening to use this awful weapon again, I wanted to remind people of the consequences, not only the immediate consequence but the consequences for generations that these decisions have.
“It’s easy to get into misery porn, as they say, but it’s not necessarily more effective. There’s quite a lot of survival drawings that you can find on the internet, which is more harrowing to see people expressing, rather than just the horrible images.
“We worked with a Hiroshima institution that holds the memories and they gave us footage and pictures that we could use.
On the John Lennon-Yoko Ono reference in the film, Baltasar remarked, “That came from the book.”
“There were more racial issues then towards the Japanese people. When the Japanese were starting to immigrate to London at the time, they were dealing with all kinds of racial slurs so I think for Miko, who was there, and is living there, as a young woman seeing Yoko and Lennon dating, that opens an idea.”
Asked about the memorable highlights of filming Touch, the son of a well-known painter (Baltasar Samper) and an actress (Kristjana Samper) shared: “There were so many pleasant memories I remember. I remember directing Japanese actors in London.
“I was like, what am I doing here? I never thought my career would bring me to direct Japanese people fighting in a London apartment.
“That’s great about filmmaking. Then to be in Japan. It was absolutely wonderful and working with Japanese people was something that I was really excited about.
“And creating the (Japanese) restaurant (in London). That was exciting to me, too. Where do you get the references for a Japanese restaurant in London set in 1969?
“There were two or three of them at the most but we did find an old Japanese couple who immigrated to London and opened a Japanese restaurant. They gave us a lot of information and insight.
“I didn’t look forward to directing my son in his scenes. So I had to find a way to do that with a coach. I didn’t want him (Palmi) to feel awkward about it. It all went well.”
On the particular challenges of shooting in Japan, Baltasar pointed out: “Tokyo is a really difficult city to shoot in. You can hardly put down a tripod. And getting permissions is really difficult. You’re dealing sometimes with the Mafia (Yakuza) and all kinds of things.”
“But when we went to Hiroshima, there was nothing but love and help. Of course, there is a language barrier. Not everyone in Japan speaks English. So, there’s a bit of that.
“And there was a bit of a challenge because they tended to give us only traditional Japanese food. And [that was a challenge] to the digestive system of a lot of my Icelandic crew.
“But I’m so lucky and appreciative of the fact that I get to travel in my work. I’ve been to Fiji, Japan, South Africa, and the Everest.
“I realize how lucky I am and sometimes I have to pinch myself about being able to go to these places. It’s different when you go to places and work with people.”
As for shuttling between Iceland and Hollywood in his career, the action maestro cited: “I’ve always kept Iceland close and I’ve always made films there. It’s very hard to finance movies in Iceland. It’s a very small market and therefore, you don’t get to make so many of them.
“And being able to work constantly, I do believe it has given me more understanding of the medium and a closer relationship with the cinema. So I learned a lot.
“And also, of course, you work with a lot of quality people and you can find so many of them at home. But you can bring them to another level in the technical aspects.
Looking ahead, Baltasar talked about other film genres that he would like to tackle. “I’ve done musicals in theater. I rewrote Hair and put it on the stage in Iceland. It was an absolute breakthrough. I would love to make a lot of musicals because I love musicals.
“I would love to do a western, like where the Native Americans are portrayed in a much more truthful way.”
In the meantime, Baltasar is in post-production on the BBC and CBS’ medieval drama series, King and Conqueror, with a cast that includes Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (as William the Conqueror), Harold Godwinson, Eddie Marsan, and Jason Forbes.
He will direct Charlize Theron in Apex, which brings him back to a genre he is also noted for: survival thriller. He is also slated to helm the Icelandic-Spanish drama, Whalemen – At the Ends of Earth, based on real events about a whaling ship in the 17th century.
This early, there’s buzz that Touch will be Iceland’s entry in the next Oscars. That would be an apt fate to the wistful cross-cultural love story. – Rappler.com
