You might be surprised to hear that one of this year’s awards season contenders is a Norwegian film. But this is not the first time. In 2022, Joachim Trier’s sly, POV-shifting relationship drama the worst person in the world It swept the Academy Awards with nominations for Best International Film and Best Original Screenplay. Follow-up supported by his family, sentimental valueHas been pegged as an Oscar hopeful since its big Grand Prix win at Cannes, along with several other European accolades.
Trier’s latest film is steeped in parental issues. Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) plays a neglectful father and a filmmaker himself who has returned with his magnum opus: a script he wrote about his own mother, who died by suicide. He wrote the lead role for his daughter, Nora (Renate Reinsway, a frequent Trier collaborator). But she is unable to forgive her father’s absence and eventually leaves the role.
As much as Trier’s film operates as a pair of dynamic character portraits, he believes the use of location and space is just as important. The house in which most of the film takes place is treated as a character. “It’s like you can smell it, you can feel it. And that’s cinema to me,” he tells me. (Longtime Trier fans may also recognize the house from a key scene Oslo, August 31The second of three films in his Oslo Trilogy.)
spoke to the director The Verge About how he used what he calls “polyphonic structure” to move sentimental valueNarrative through his protagonist’s pain, the key to recognizing a good actor in just two minutes, and how the process brings together this awards season contender.
Robin Kanner
I heard that you and [cowriter] Eskil Vogt watches a lot of movies while writing. What were you looking at when you were writing? sentimental value,
Joachim Trier: Not as specific references, but I think we like films with a human story. It’s just this inspiration for something to be human and entertaining and intimate. I showed the team opening night By [John] Cassavetes. It’s a great performance piece, and it’s also about someone struggling with a crisis in creativity and personal life.
Is that how you like to set the tone?
Yeah, I’m trying not to imitate other movies. We do our own work, but I want to remind the guys on the team – all of them, my great colleagues, all their assistants and everybody – that we’re shooting on film, 35mm. And there’s a beauty in that and seeing it on the big screen. So we’ve got a copy of the 35mm and the atmosphere of that film was really beautiful.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but was that the same house Oslo, August 31 That you shot?
Ah, you are very observant.
I haven’t told anyone, but, you can guess. Let’s put it this way.
It feels like you have such a tender relationship with that place, and I’m wondering what it is about that specific house that you love.
This is very strange. It’s like another human being. You just like someone. You think there’s something in it. I don’t know what, and the house is very close to where I live. I know the people who live in that house and we looked at a hundred houses before we came back and looked at that house. And I went in and, in 30 seconds, I said, “We’re doing it.”
How does architecture play a role in how you’re composing shots? What I love about this movie is that your outside is nice, but your inside is kind of romantic. How do you create that shot list?
It’s the most spontaneous thing we do, me and the team and the cinematographer, Caspar Tucson. But I think without getting too academic, I know for a fact that in visuals, like in film the structure of images, the way we structure repetition, the way we look at locations and all those things – it matters a lot. When talking about it, it sounds extremely intellectual, but when actually experiencing movies, the most exciting thing about them is the mood and the people and the light that comes into a room in a particular way that reminds us of something.
It makes a lot of sense for the specifics of the tactile nature of the place to be triggered. It’s like you can smell it, you can feel it. And for me this is cinema. And the problem is I hate talking about it because people think, “What are they talking about?” Close your eyes and see. Think about a David Lynch film. This is the most mood-saturated cinema you can get. And then people suddenly say, “Oh, wow.” But this is an aspect of old movies, regardless of intention.
And sometimes I’ve seen old Norwegian movies from Oslo, like this stupid gangster comedy series that everyone watched, super mainstream, no critical approval. But I love them because they showed the summers of Oslo in the 80s during my childhood. And I just look at the background and I feel something deep in those movies, even if the story isn’t extremely interesting. So when we make films and tell the story of a place, a specific house, we play with that aspect. You try to capture this specific house for all the childhood home ideas that people can bring.
In the film, Gustav Borg says that he recognizes a good actor in about two minutes. Is it the same for you? What makes a good actor for you?
It could be many different things, but sometimes Renate Reinsway came to the casting for Oslo, August 31, And I watched the tape and I was like, “Wow, great energy. Like, who is that?”
It’s an energy, but it’s also, for example, looking at someone and being curious about their thinking. That’s probably number one: a good listener and thinker. You look at them and say, “What’s going on in that person’s mind?” Because it attracts the audience to the interpretation.
Acting, as in all filmmaking, is both shown and not shown. And good actors will draw you into their inner circle, into a mystery that you want to go into.
Courtesy of Neon
You move the story forward with periodic fades to black. It’s a fun move and it also feels a little slimy worst person Where you are explaining entire chapters.
Truth.
Why did you want to progress the story this way?
The story starts off with pretty much what we expect to be entertaining snippets of various lives in a family, and then it turns into a tale of togetherness and kind of togetherness of two sisters and a father. It gets into a sense of flow towards the end, but we’re also doing it to leave room for interpretation and what I call a “polyphonic structure”, where our dramaturgy is not about pushing the plot forward all the time, but about trying to create enough entertaining songs in the album so that you listen to the next one and have it as a driving force in the first half. So emphasizing those ellipses as well, there’s an absence and then you come back and you have to re-orient yourself. I think it creates an interesting energy in storytelling.
How do you find the right time to introduce those breaks? They occur at the end of moments but are also spread out during editing.
No, it’s in the script and then you reinterpret the structure during editing and find it there. This is its art. This is music. It is difficult to explain. This is an emotional thing.
Do you hold the script very tightly during shooting, or loosely—
We loosen it up. First we do a few rehearsals and rewrite the script so that the actors can learn the dialogue and come up with their stories. In this case, for example, when I cast the younger sister Inga I thought – I think she’s remarkably good, and I hadn’t worked with her before. She is not very famous, but she was also different from the written character. So we had to adjust. Agnes’ character was written more cheerful and wholesome, but she was a little more grounded, deeper and quieter, and I thought, “Oh, this is more interesting.”
That was a surprise. I would like that. Receiving a gift rather than any kind of disrespect regarding your vision. I’m all about the process.
Because you’re shooting on 35mm, which costs more than digital, do you ever worry about it coming loose? Or do you just give yourself that space?
Sometimes if we have nine-minute long rolls and four-and-a-half minute short rolls, if I have a shorter roll, I can get the roll out if I just do the loop scene. But it is in my conscience. Most of my films except one – like five out of six films were shot at 35 and the short films were shot at 16 – so I structure it that way.
sentimental value It’s such a stable film. For all its tension, there are no crazy explosions. Can you talk about striking that balance?
It’s true, and it’s built up to more chaos in the beginning when they’re nervous and all that, but it goes into almost silence. This deep intimacy that I long for with sisters and all that… I think the greatest drama of life sometimes happens in those silences. Yes, we can scream and shout, but when it comes to any aggressive level, we close ourselves down.
So I’m interested in cinema’s ability to try to reach those intimate places between people. And we’re also allowed to look at each other differently in the movie theater. So close-up, for example – [Trier leans in] – Like in real life, if you sit like that and stare at someone, it’s almost like either you’re mentally ill or you’re deeply in love or something. But in films, we are allowed to really see someone, their behavior, their pain, their happiness and everything in a very intimate way.
sentimental value In theaters now.
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