The Bad Apples filmmaker discusses pressure, authority, and working with Saoirse Ronan.
Bad Apples begins with the premise of the novel, yet director Jonatan Etzler treats that premise as a point of departure rather than a blueprint, choosing to reshape the narrative so that it reflects the pressures and contradictions he wanted to examine.
A teacher removes a student from her classroom, and from that moment, the situation develops according to the logic of the environment around them, where resources are limited and expectations are constant. The film observes the relationships inside a school without idealising them, and shows how easily authority can shift when the structures meant to support it are already strained. This interview explores how Etzler approached adaptation, why he altered the original narrative of the novel, and how his understanding of both Swedish and British educational cultures influenced the tone and rhythm of the classroom scenes. It also touches on performance, collaboration, and the long history of films that treat the school as a contained social world.
The novel gives you a built-in plot, but your film feels leaner and more psychological. What parts of the book did you strip away first to make it work on screen?
I stripped away a lot. The film only keeps the setup from the novel – the teacher who kidnaps a disruptive child in her class. After that, almost everything is changed. The original novel follows another teacher trying to find out what happened to the boy. But I wanted to use the premise as a starting point for my own story, and I got the author’s blessing to do so. What fascinated me was the dilemma at the core of the story – how do you actually deal with people who simply can’t fit into society? We’ve built a society that isn’t made for everyone.
In the novel, the balance of control shifts quietly inside the teacher’s mind. In your film, that reversal feels physical, in the framing, the tempo, even the students’ body language. How did you decide where that power switch should actually happen on screen?
The original novel was never published in English, so I knew most of the audience – and even readers of the script – would experience the story for the first time through the film. That gave me freedom to reinterpret it quite radically.
You capture how adults panic when they lose control. Were you thinking of the school as a stand-in for society, people trying to look in charge when they really aren’t?
Yes, I’ve often thought of a classroom as a kind of microcosm of society, or even like a kind of social experiment. It’s almost like that Reality TV show Survivor: you drop a bunch of young people on a deserted island, or lock them in a classroom for three years. Often, they come from completely different backgrounds, so there’s a lot of potential for dramatic and interesting situations.
This was your first film in English. What surprised you most about working inside a British school culture compared with Sweden?
There are many similarities, especially how underfunding affects children with special needs. But in the UK, it’s perhaps even more visible – the way teachers are left to handle impossible situations with too little support. What surprised me most was how much pressure there is from inspections and testing. The ”Ofsted” school inspections are really what everything hangs upon for a UK school. When the inspectors are on their way, panic spreads through the entire teaching staff – the school is deep-cleaned, beautiful paintings are hung on the walls, and the troublesome students are suddenly sent off on an unmotivated field trip.
The classroom scenes feel tense even when nothing’s happening. How did you use the camera to make the audience feel that quiet pressure between teacher, and students?
Nea Asphäll, the cinematographer, and I have a long great collaboration. What I loved about her shooting the classroom scenes, was how she could ”paint” with the camera lens. The children could feel free to improvise while she picked up different details everywhere in the room. We used long lenses to make the room feel smaller and more confined, to heighten the sense of pressure. Andreas Franck’s sound design also does a lot to enhance the tension in those scenes.
A lot of great films about school, from If… to The Class, show how fragile authority really is. Did you see Bad Apples as part of that tradition?
I love If…! That was definitely an inspiration. Also, the documentary High School by Frederick Wiseman has a scene where a teacher plays her favorite song for the class, and she has a moment of vulnerability. That inspired the first classroom scene where Saoirse plays ”On Saturday Afternoons in 1963”. I played the scene for Saoirse as a reference for her character, and she came up with the idea of having a similar scene in Bad Apples. Another film that inspired me was Jan Troell’s Who Saw Him Die. It captures, with great sensitivity, the psychological toll a teacher can be under.
Saoirse Ronan’s character keeps slipping between warmth and frustration. What did you ask of her to keep both alive at once?
It was such a joy to work with Saoirse. She’s brilliant in everything she does, and she has a great comedic talent. I really wanted the audience to feel for the main character, no matter how horrible things she did. It’s certainly always a balance in finding the right temperature, but Saoirse handled it brilliantly.
After spending months inside this story, how do you see education now? As a way to shape people or a way to control them?
The education system tries to press every individual into square molds, which becomes difficult if you happen to be another shape – a circle, or something else entirely. But I think the seams between the molds are starting to crack.
What emerges is that Bad Apples is not driven by the question of who is correct, but by the recognition that institutions often ask individuals to absorb pressures they were never equipped to handle. Etzler chooses not to resolve those tensions within the story, and instead allows the situation to unfold in a way that feels close to ordinary life, where motives are mixed and outcomes are rarely clean. The classroom serves as a clear setting for this, since it is a place where personal behaviour, collective rules, and institutional limits meet every day. By focusing on process rather than message, the film leaves room for the viewer to consider what is familiar in these interactions, whether they recognise the teacher, the student, or the system itself. It is a film that observes, like a school inspection, rather than concludes, and that is precisely where its strength lies.
Bad Apples premiered at TIFF 50 and was reviewed below.
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