Sitting down with a director for the first time is one of my favorite things. It’s a get-to-know-you session, even if it’s just a half hour in the lobby of New York’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel. I’m meeting Norway’s Joachim Trier, the fast-talking Cannes Grand Prix winner of “Sentimental Value” (Neon, November 7), who co-wrote his sixth feature with his long-time collaborator Eskil Vogt, his fellow “Worst Person in the World” Best Original Screenplay Oscar nominee. The Academy also nominated that film for Best International Feature Film. And given its warm reception so far from critics and audiences, Norwegian Oscar entry “Sentimental Value” is likely to nab even more nominations this Oscar season.
Trier took me on a wild ride through his film family and filmmaking philosophy and process, which includes “jazz takes.” (More on that later.) With “Sentimental Value,” two decades of digging into the human and artistic psyche has yielded his most universal film, which tracks generational trauma within a show business family. After winning the Grand Prix at Cannes and turning away eager passholders in Telluride, “Sentimental Value” has gone on to wow theater audiences in France and Norway, and this week, the New York Film Festival.
That’s partly because Trier successfully wooed Norway’s Renate Reinsve to return to his ensemble to play Nora Borg, a revered stage actress, as well as Swedish star Stellan Skarsgård, who plays her father, Gustav, a once-successful auteur now in decline who tries to persuade his daughter to make a movie with him. He desperately wants to mend broken bridges, but she isn’t having it, and he moves on to an American star (Elle Fanning), even though she’s a bad fit for the role.
Both Reinsve and Skarsgård give towering performances that will not be denied at Oscar time (for Best Actress and Supporting Actor, respectively), given that Neon, which bought the film at Cannes 2024 before production, is adept at playing the awards game.
The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Anne Thompson: Your film is hitting universal chords. How many of us have been traumatized by our parents?
Joachim Trier: It’s the nature of human beings almost.
This film is informed by your own culturally rich background.
I come from a film family. My grandfather, Erik Løchen, a film director, was in Cannes in 1960. And he created art. I knew him as a child. He passed away when I was nine. He was in the resistance during the Second World War and was captured and spent time in a work camp and barely survived. He was affected by it his whole life, but started playing jazz and making movies. “The Hunt,” his first film, he called the “jazz movie.” And the French called it “Nouvelle Vague.” I believe that art can have a saving power. It’s not something done just for purpose. It’s something you do because you don’t know how not to. I see it in my children as well. They dance and sing, and they’re very small: “So this is what humans do, okay?”
But also humans become obsessed and chase achievement and ignore children.
I have two daughters, one and a half and four and a half years old. I had children late. I’ve pondered upon how obsessed I am by making movies, and would I be able to create a home? I was ready, in a way, and I’m making a film about that as well. I believe in that balance and possibility. That came out of that climate of being in middle age, still having parents, having small children. You have a feeling that things move fast, and maybe not wanting to be Stellan’s character, who is complicated and egocentric.
When he pitches Nora to star in his movie, it doesn’t land well.
It’s his only way of trying to connect. If you look at it from her point of view, she’s grieving her mother, and she needs a father, and he’s offering her a job. But if you look closely, it’s a clumsy man without a language and emotionality that’s trying desperately to connect with the daughter that he loves. So that’s the sadness of it. I’m trying to straddle or balance these two energies of different perspectives.
Throughout the film, Skarsgård is operating on many levels, saying one thing while his face says something else.
I wrote this film for two actors. It’s Renate Reinsve and Skarsgard. I never worked with him before. I didn’t even know him. I contacted him during the writing process and flew to Sweden. And I’ve never begged an actor before, but the more I hung out with him, the more I realized I couldn’t do without him. He’s one of the really, really great, great actors of the Scandinavian countries and the world, to be honest. I’m super proud that he’s accepted. He’s tender and sweet, but he also knows how to not idealize characters. He can be a real asshole on screen, and he can play a narcissist. He knows who that is. He understands people in an intimate, intricate way, psychologically. He’s sophisticated like that. I call him Mr. Cinema because he’s worked with everyone internationally.
Everyone, every kind of film, big or small, every visual medium, from Lars von Trier to “Andor” and “Dune.”
And he loves movies like me. He watches movies. He eats movies for breakfast. He comes on set more than any other actor I’ve worked with. He doesn’t want to be away in his trailer in the morning. I have my whole method of talking to the team, prepping them emotionally for what we’re going through, how they can help me, help the actors, they’re co-directors. I say, “we’re changing wheels on the Formula One car.” When the actors are out, we’re moving fast. And Stellan comes and he sits next to me: “Yeah, what do you want to do?” He will understand movements. “Okay, so I should get up a little later than this.” “Great idea. Yeah, please. That’s smart Stellan. Mr. Cinema.” He has all that craft. But in this one, he wanted to go out on a limb, and he wanted to lose control, which is the kind of movie I do. I try to create an unhinged chaotic state just in the moment of shooting. We plan a lot. We have rehearsals. We trust each other, but to give them a risk, a chance for something special. And he wanted that.
What did you see that Renate could do here, that you hadn’t let her do before?
She is an actor that brings unexpectedness, mystery and hard, precise work. So that combo is exciting. After “The Worst Person,” I felt we had known each other, but the way she opened up in that role, I saw potential. She was quite naive in playing a young character in “The Worst Person,” whereas Nora carries a burden of a trajectory that’s fixed. She’s as ambitious as Nora, she’s quite opposite of Julie in the previous film. I saw that aspect of Renate. I knew she would understand. And we share that. We’ve both been that person, in a way, in a different version in our lives, but someone who’s so driven and it gives you a sense of life and connectedness, and it also could be a coping mechanism of avoidance as well as communication in itself. It’s both.
One dramatic and comedic set piece is at the beginning, when Nora freaks out with intense stage fright before opening night of August Strindberg’s play “Miss Julie,” in which she is the lead. She’s busting out of her corset, unable to breathe. Where did that come from?
I know two actors in Norway, great stage actors, who have stage fright like crazy. One of them, it becomes more physical, and he vomits a lot during the whole stage performance of “Hamlet.” We all have our performance anxieties, right? That’s a part of creating. And then I know a woman who kept trying to run away. And I wanted to have levity as well, not to be too self-serious about the artists. But it’s a human thing that we have approach and avoidance at the same time with things that we care for that we’re also scared of, because they dominate us. Renate does not suffer from stage fright. She’s actually bold and gutsy, but she knows that there’s a perversion going on stage in an almost evolutionary, animalistic way. To be in front of everyone’s gaze is the most dangerous place for any being in the animal kingdom. You’re extremely vulnerable, and you’re in a masochistic sense exposing yourself.
I have deep respect and love for actors on the film set. They keep their heart open and their emotions open for 8-10, hours, emotions that the rest of us would put away after 10 minutes. We would finish crying and say, “Ah, I don’t want to feel that anymore.” They keep it open. So I thought, behind all the beauty or facade of a success, there’s also that vulnerability of the gaffer tape dress that is broken and it’s all just made up by a great bunch of people. It’s my love letter to the gang that makes something. It’s messy and beautiful at its best, and we’re all just trying to talk about something because we don’t know how not to, but also to try to generously share it with people, not to say, “Oh, you have to be an artist, understand my movie.” Rather the opposite, saying, “Hey, these are messy people and in the story, I’m trying to create the idea that the communication of art is a key to open a family story to a deeper level.” That’s what I’m trying.
Finally, that does happen. It’s reconciliation?
It works, right? Reconciliation. That’s the word, and not the cheap kind where you say, “Well, you’ll have that dialogue, and they will share their feelings, and everything is okay.” I don’t believe that’s life. I believe that maybe there is a distance. Reconciliation isn’t that we have to agree or have to get acceptance for everything, but that we will negotiate enough our differences that we can listen to the other and say, “We might not ever agree, but I can find peace with you.” And that’s what I’m longing for, on many levels.
So you’ve experienced psychotherapy?
I’ve had that experience. Yes, I’ve been fortunate enough to to learn that there are certain things maybe that you have to also deal with, yourself, to accept that not all relationships can be resolved objectively.
Do you believe that if you don’t learn the language of psychotherapy you will never understand yourself?
The aim of certain psychodynamic therapy is to go beyond the language, to reach an emotional presence in yourself. There is some aspect of human life which is language without words. I believe that in trauma and woundedness, there is unspokenness we transfer to our children, tons of things without language that we don’t control. This is how humans grow and develop and connect or disconnect. We know this to be true in our emotional experience, all of us. And isn’t that non-spoken space connected to the possibility of art, the possibility of how music moves us, or how we mirror ourselves in a movie, and all our friends don’t like it, but we feel deeply moved, and we don’t know how to defend it, but we know it’s true to us? Yes, that space exists in art.
What are “jazz takes”?
Anders Danielsen Lie, my dear collaborator, he’s a musician as well. He said, “what you’re asking for towards the end of doing a scene, let’s call it a ‘jazz take.’” It’s perfect, because you know the structure, you know the tune. But let’s phrase it differently. Let’s play it your way, different. The loose take encourages the actors to continually search and fall on their ass. It’s the “hang loose” concept. Let’s see where it goes. They know that I’m next to the camera, and they want to do something unexpected. They find it. And I sit there and I cry and I laugh and I love them. That’s my job, to encourage the risk of making it look stupid, but then at the end it comes back.
One of the film’s great set pieces is a moving breakthrough between the two sisters, played by Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas. It was not scripted?
It happens in the moment completely. It’s written in one way, and everyone was in love with the written version. But on the day, we try to create an event, something that we didn’t quite plan. Inga, the young sister, she didn’t share with me her trajectory. It turned out that the film for her was about love and the power of it. She shows the way that she wants to get close to her depressed sister. And it was more moving in the story. It was like she was in control, and she opened up the sister’s emotional register. She’s actually bringing her own grief, this connectedness into the scene.
Is Eskil Vogt on set?
No. Never. During filming we don’t talk so much. We do our talking before; we write together every day, and then he writes out the script. He’s a better writer than me, so out of the year, maybe six weeks is spent apart at the end, when he writes and I edit and we meet and he writes again, and we do the actual writing. But we planned everything, we talked everything, we acted everything, and then I do rehearsals. So rehearsals is just about trying the elasticity with the actors. He’s not there, and I show him the tapes. So he has that remote position. And then we rewrite. Then I go on set, and he leaves me alone until the second half of the edit, when I have something I want to show.
Does he come into the editing room?
I do screenings with him and others and discuss. An important person I’ve worked with since day one is Olivier Bugge Coutté, the editor. Editors don’t get enough respect. It’s this triangle before and after. It’s Eskil and Olivier and me. Eskil comes in and reminds us of things, and sees things, and that’s important. But Olivier runs the room. He sees what we have. There’s a dialectic between these two very smart collaborators. And then in the middle, we have beautiful Kasper Tuxen, the cinematographer, and the actors, who bring their own things. It’s a complete collaboration.
It seems that this movie is reaching people, they’re understanding what you’re talking about. They get it.
I’m happy we’re doing great box office in France and Norway now, the two countries that have opened are tremendous. In France, after three weeks, we sold over 400,000 tickets and it’s still going. And in Norway, the same thing, we’re doubling the numbers from the previous one at least, if not more. So how the hell did that happen when cinematic box office is diminished generally?
Who did you use for the narration?
That is Benter Børsum, who’s now 93 years old, and who played the lead in my grandfather’s film “The Hunt” that was in Cannes in 1960. “Do you want to come and do a voiceover so that I link this experience of this film I’ve worked on with someone that my grandfather also worked with?” And she said, “Of course, I’d love to.”
Neon will open “Sentimental Value” in theaters on Friday, November 7.