{"id":2178893,"date":"2025-11-27T14:05:17","date_gmt":"2025-11-27T14:05:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2178893"},"modified":"2025-11-27T14:05:17","modified_gmt":"2025-11-27T14:05:17","slug":"talking-to-joachim-trier-about-sentimental-value","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/talking-to-joachim-trier-about-sentimental-value\/","title":{"rendered":"Talking to Joachim Trier about Sentimental Value"},"content":{"rendered":"

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It might surprise you to hear that one of this year\u2019s awards season contenders is a Norwegian film. But it\u2019s not the first time. In 2022, Joachim Trier\u2019s sly, POV-shifting relationship drama The Worst Person in the World<\/em> snuck into the Academy Awards with nods for Best International Film and Best Original Screenplay. His family-anchored follow up, Sentimental Value<\/em>, has been pegged as an Oscar hopeful since its big Grand Prix win at Cannes, alongside a number of other European accolades.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Trier\u2019s newest film is tied up in the mess of parental issues. Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsg\u00e5rd) plays a negligent father and a filmmaker himself who has returned with his magnum opus: a script written about his own mother who died by suicide. He\u2019s written the lead role for his daughter, Nora (Renate Reinsve, a frequent Trier collaborator). But she\u2019s less than forgiving of her father\u2019s absence and ultimately passes on the part.
As much as Trier\u2019s film operates as a pair of moving character portraits, he believes his use of space and location are just as important. The house where much of the movie takes place is treated as much as a character itself. \u201cIt\u2019s like you can smell it, you feel it. And that is cinema to me,\u201d he tells me. (Longtime Trier fans might even recognize the house from a critical scene in Oslo, August 31st<\/em>, the second of three films in his Oslo trilogy.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The director talked with The Verge<\/em> about how he used what he calls a \u201cpolyphonic structure\u201d to move Sentimental Value<\/em>\u2019s narrative through his protagonist\u2019s pain, the key to spotting a good actor in just two minutes, and how process brought together this awards season contender.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Robyn Kanner<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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I heard that you and [cowriter] Eskil Vogt watch a lot of films while you\u2019re writing. What were you watching while you were writing <\/strong>Sentimental Value<\/em><\/strong>?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Joachim Trier: Not as specific references, but I think we love kind of human story films. It\u2019s just inspiration of something being human and entertaining and intimate. I showed the team Opening Night<\/em> by [John] Cassavetes. This is a great performance piece, and it\u2019s also about someone who is grappling with creativity and the crisis in personal life.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Is that how you like to set the tone?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Yeah, I\u2019m trying not to emulate other films. We do our own thing, but I want to remind people on the team \u2014 all of them, my great collaborators, all their assistants and everyone \u2014 that we\u2019re shooting on film, 35mm. And there\u2019s a beauty to that and watching on a big screen. So we\u2019ve got a 35mm copy and just the vibe of that film was really beautiful.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Correct me if I\u2019m wrong, but was that the same house from <\/strong>Oslo, August 31st<\/em><\/strong> that you shot in?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Ah, you\u2019re very attentive.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I haven\u2019t told anyone, but, well, you can speculate. Let\u2019s put it like that.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It feels like you have such a tender relationship with that place, and I\u2019m wondering what it is about that specific house that you love.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It\u2019s so weird. It\u2019s like another human being. You just like someone. You think it\u2019s got something. I don\u2019t know what, and that house is very close to where I live. I know the people that live in the house and we looked at a hundred houses to return to that one and look at it. And I walked in and, in 30 seconds, I said, \u201cWe\u2019re doing this.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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How does architecture play into how you\u2019re composing shots? What I love about this film is that your exteriors are nice, but your interiors have sort of a romance to them. How do you compose that shot list?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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That\u2019s the most intuitive thing that we do, me and the team and the cinematographer, Kasper Tuxen. But I think without sounding too academic, I know for a fact that mise en sc\u00e8ne, like the composition of images in the film, the way we structure repetitions, of the way we look at spaces and all that stuff \u2014 it matters tremendously. When talking about it, it sounds terribly intellectual, but actually experiencing films, the most exciting thing about them are the moods and the people and the light that hits a special way in a room that reminds us of something.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The triggering of specifics of the tactile nature of the place matters tremendously. It\u2019s like you can smell it, you feel it. And that is cinema to me. And the problem, I just hate talking about it because people think, \u201cWhat are they talking about?\u201d Close your eyes and look. Think of a David Lynch film. It\u2019s the most mood-saturated cinema you can get. And then people suddenly say, \u201cOh, wow.\u201d But that\u2019s an aspect in old films regardless of intention.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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And sometimes I\u2019ve watched old Norwegian films from Oslo, like stupid gangster comedy series that everyone watched, super mainstream, no critical acceptance. But I love them because they showed Oslo summers in the \u201980s during my childhood. And I just look at the backgrounds and I feel something deep in those films even without the narrative being terribly interesting. So that aspect we play with when we make movies and telling a story of a place, of a specific house. You try to capture this specific house for all ideas of a childhood home that people could bring.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In the film, Gustav Borg says he knows a good actor in about two minutes. Is it the same for you? What makes a good actor for you?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It could be so many different things, but sometimes Renate Reinsve came into a casting for Oslo, August 31st,<\/em> and I saw the tape and I was like, \u201cWow, cool energy. Like, who is she?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It\u2019s an energy, but it\u2019s also, for example, looking at someone and being curious about their thinking. That\u2019s maybe number one: a good listener and thinker. You look at them and you\u2019re like, \u201cWhat\u2019s going on in that person\u2019s mind?\u201d Because that draws the audience into interpretation.
Acting, as is all filmmaking, is the shown and the unshown. And good actors will draw you into a space of their interior being a mystery you want to get into.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Courtesy of Neon<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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You move the story along through periodically fading to black. It\u2019s a fun move and it also feels a little slimmed down from <\/strong>Worst Person<\/em><\/strong> where you\u2019re explaining the chapters throughout.<\/strong>
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<\/strong>True.
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<\/strong>Why did you want to move the story through that way?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The story almost starts from what we hope are entertaining fragments of different lives in a family, and then it moves into cohesion and kind of one story of the two sisters and the father. It gets into a sense of flow toward the end, but we\u2019re doing it also to leave space for interpretation and what I call a \u201cpolyphonic structure,\u201d where our dramatic is not about pushing the plot all the time but to try to make entertaining enough songs on the album so you listen to the next one and have that as a driving force in the first half. So also emphasizing those ellipses, there\u2019s an absence and then you\u2019re back in and you have to reorient yourself. It creates kind of an interesting energy, I think, in storytelling.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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How do you find the right time to introduce those pauses? They happen at the end of moments but are spread throughout the edit too.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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No, it\u2019s in the script and then you reinterpret the structuring throughout the edit and find it there. That\u2019s the art of it. That\u2019s the music. It\u2019s hard to explain. It\u2019s an emotional thing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Do you keep pretty tight to the script while you\u2019re shooting, or you loosen\u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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We loosen it up. First we rewrite the script while doing some rehearsals just to get the actors to wear the dialogue, bring their own stories. In this case, I felt, for example, that Inga, the younger sister, when I cast her \u2014 I think she\u2019s remarkably good, and I hadn\u2019t worked with her before. She\u2019s not very famous, but she was also different than the written character. So we had to adjust. The character of Agnes was written more jovial and wholesome, but she was a little bit more grounded and deep and silent, and I thought, \u201cOh, that\u2019s more interesting.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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That was a surprise. I\u2019d rather have that. Taking the gifts rather than being sort of anal about your vision. I am all about process.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Because you\u2019re shooting on 35mm, which costs more than digital, do you ever have anxiety about being loose around that? Or do you just kind of let yourself have that space?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Sometimes if we have long rolls of nine minutes and short rolls of four and a half, so if I have a short roll, I can get a roll out if I just loop scenes. But I have in my instincts. Most of my films except for one \u2014 like five out of six were shot on 35 and short films on 16 \u2014 so that\u2019s how I structure it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Sentimental Value<\/em><\/strong> is such a steady film. With all of its tension, there are no crazy outbursts. Can you talk about striking that balance?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It\u2019s true, and it\u2019s built from more chaos in the beginning when they\u2019re panicked and all that, but it goes into silence almost. This deep intimacy that I\u2019m trying to yearn for with the sisters and all that… I think life\u2019s biggest dramas happens in those silences sometimes. Yes, we can scream and shout, but we turn ourselves off when it\u2019s that level of something aggressive.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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So I\u2019m interested in cinema\u2019s capability of trying to reach into those intimate spaces between people. And also we\u2019re allowed to look at each other differently in a movie theater. So the close-up, for example \u2014 [Trier leans in]<\/em> \u2014 like in real life, if you sit and stare at someone like that, it\u2019s almost either you\u2019re psychotic or you\u2019re deeply in love or something. But in movies, we\u2019re allowed to look at someone, really their behavior and their pain and their joy and everything in a very intimate space.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Sentimental Value is in theaters now.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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