What Ruben Östlund Taught Me About the Draft Process

Last month in our Cinema Master Class, we studied the complete feature filmography of Ruben Östlund, every fiction film, in order, and I cannot recommend this exercise enough for any serious writer.

One of the great gifts of watching a filmmaker's entire canon in a single month is that you get to witness how a storyteller actually grows. Not the myth of talent. The reality of craft, accumulated one film at a time.

Östlund's first feature, The Guitar Mongoloid, immediately signals what will become his signature: he does not rely on plot. Plot is the dominant craft tool of contemporary Western cinema, and Östlund essentially sets it aside. What he gives us instead is world and character.

The film moves as a series of vignettes, fragments of a social reality that felt largely invisible to mainstream cinema at the time. You can feel him working to make that world visible, to trust that observation alone can hold an audience. The connections between characters emerge, but quietly. He's not engineering them. He's discovering them.

With Involuntary, you can see his craft sharpen. He finds a governing idea that will anchor his work from this point forward: within each vignette, within each character's world, there is an involuntary event, something that happens to them, not chosen, and the drama lives entirely in how they respond.

The choices available to these characters are never clean or noble. They are the choices real people actually face: uncomfortable, face-saving, morally compromised. Plot is still not the engine here. Psychology is. He is learning to get inside the human animal in a way that traditional narrative structure doesn't always allow.

Play is where you start to see him reach for something new. For the first time in his work, there is a singular, driving plot, a genuine through-line. A secondary plot exists alongside it and the two converge by the end. It's not yet the mastery he'll later achieve, but that's precisely what makes it so instructive to watch. You can see him learning. You can see him layering in a skill he didn't yet have, and doing it carefully, without abandoning everything he'd already built.

By the time we reach Force Majeure, the film most audiences know, something has clicked. He has developed the ability to construct cause-and-effect sequencing, the engine of traditional narrative, without sacrificing any of his hard-won sense of world, character, psychology, or consequence. And here his thematic obsessions come fully into focus: social status, saving face, masculinity, the elaborate performances we give each other and ourselves.

The tension between those who serve and those who are served, which he will radicalize even further in The Square and Triangle of Sadness, and which I suspect will be central to his forthcoming The Entertainment System Is Down.

What This Means for Your Writing

Here is what I want every writer in our master class to hold onto: there is no education that could have gotten Östlund to Force Majeure without him first making The Guitar Mongoloid. There is no shortcut through the work. He couldn't write fiction at all in the beginning, so he made a documentary. Before the documentary, he filmed his friends skiing down mountains. That was where he started.

Please watch the early work of filmmakers you admire. Watch it without judgment. Watch it asking: where can I see them wrestling with the themes they would later master? How did they pursue those ideas before they had the resources, the collaborators, the budget?

And then apply that same grace to yourself.

As writers, we have an advantage: we don't need a million-dollar budget to begin. But your early drafts are meant to function exactly the way Östlund's early films did. They are explorations. Your first script, and your second, and your fifth, and your tenth, are not failures waiting to be corrected. They are the mountain slopes. They are the documentary. They are The Guitar Mongoloid.

I think of my own drafting process this way now. The first draft is filming friends down the mountain, just getting something moving. The second draft is the documentary, getting the world and characters onto the page, making them real and visible. The third draft is Involuntary territory, where do the events and consequences start to emerge? The fourth draft is where psychology deepens. The fifth is where I begin to shape structure and plot in earnest.

​You do not have to do all of these things simultaneously. Most writers can't. It is not only acceptable to layer them in, it is, I would argue, the most intelligent way to work.

This approach also gives me faster drafts, which matters to me. I am a sprinter, not a marathon runner. I give myself tight deadlines, not because speed is the goal, but because wandering in circles for years does not serve the work. Move through the draft. Get it done. Then get feedback quickly, before you have time to over-attach or over-ruminate. The revision always reveals more than the waiting.

Before The Entertainment System Is Down arrives, and I hope it is soon, I encourage you to start from the beginning. 

A note: Östlund likes to sit in a shot. He will not rush you. If you find yourself getting restless, I'd invite you to replace that judgment with curiosity. Ask yourself what that stillness is doing to you as an audience member, what it is activating, what it is making you feel. It is a genuinely meditative experience, and an excellent antidote to the fragmented pace of the rest of our screen lives.

If you'd like support with your own drafting process, learning how to move your creativity onto the page without self-judgment or critical interference, our Meditative Writing class is starting soon. For feedback on a script you're already working on, both our TV Screenplay Alchemy class and our year-long Masterclass offer structured guidance at every stage of the process.

The work teaches you. Trust the work.