‘O’Horten’ filmmaker takes a leap

It may have been two years since he completed his endearingly whimsical tale, “O’Horten,” which opens today, but Norwegian filmmaker Bent Hamer is still very much “traveling” with the movie’s lead character, an elderly train engineer who retires after 40 years riding the rails.

“The whole writing process for me was very different,” Hamer said during a recent visit to Los Angeles.

Hamer has written and directed five feature films, including the acclaimed 2003 “Kitchen Stories” and 2005’s “Factotum,” his first English-language project, which starred Matt Dillon as writer Charles Bukowski.

“Usually, I have focused on an idea and I start from the inside and I work my way out. Sometimes it’s just a situation. This time I pieced it together.”

Baard Owe stars as Odd Horten, the 67-year-old engineer whose life slowly begins to change after he retires. He decides to try his luck at ski jumping. He even goes on a nighttime drive with an elderly eccentric who steers the car while blindfolded.

The lanky 73-year-old Owe is one of those actors who can say much with just the slightest change in his facial expression. Hamer wasn’t familiar with the Norwegian-born actor until he saw him in Lars von Trier’s Danish medical series “The Kingdom.”

“I needed a face and body of an old actor you could stay with for the whole film. He doesn’t say a lot, and that was really the challenge -- to find someone who is exciting to watch.”

And who still has quite the trim body. “He’s so young you won’t believe,” said Hamer, laughing. But the veteran actor was a bit unnerved about doing a nude swimming scene. “He was so cute,” recalled Hamer. “He called his wife -- she’s an actress -- and said, ‘They want me to swim naked.’ ”

After a pause, Owe told Hamer, “She said it was OK.”

“O’Horten” is dedicated to the memory “of my mother and all other female ski jumpers,” Hamer said.

“She was a little tomboy,” he explained. “She was involved in many kinds of sport. When I was a kid -- not everybody, but a lot of us -- we played soccer in the summertime, and we did ski jumping in the wintertime. I was also competing. There were ski jumps all over my city. That is what we did after school and even until it was dark.”

Hamer, born in Sandefjord, Norway, south of Oslo, originally went to law school, but his heart wasn’t in it. He got the entertainment itch when, two years out of high school, he was asked to write and direct a big cabaret event at his alma mater. Later he did a cabaret show at his law school on the 75th anniversary of the university.

“I was more into that than studies,” he said. “I then started to study culture at the college and [discovered] I wanted to study film. But there was no film studies in Norway, so I had to go to Sweden.”

The first Norwegian film school didn’t open until 12 years ago. “Now, we have a very healthy 25 films [produced] a year in Norway and we just have 5 million people.”

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susan.king@latimes.com