Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier’s latest film, premiered at Cannes earlier this year to rapturous reviews and the Grand Prix, making its New York Film Festival premiere this week one of our most anticipated. The film is Trier’s sixth feature, co-written with Eskil Vogt like the previous five and similarly interested in the intricate nuances of human relationships. It’s also his best yet, a quietly devastating and often funny look at a pair of sisters and their absentee father. Nora (Renate Reinsve, a frequent Trier collaborator) and Agnes Borg (incredible newcomer Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) are mourning the recent death of their mother when Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård) reenters their lives unannounced. A revered director who abandoned them post-divorce, Gustav is as charming as he is emotionally illiterate; in an early scene, he tells Nora, an actor, that he’s written a script for her and wants her to star in it, despite having no real paternal relationship with her. She’s visibly insulted, feels used, and turns him down. Gustav then serendipitously meets a famous Hollywood actress, Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), who’s a fan and thrilled to take Nora’s role, not quite aware of the baggage attached to it.
Trier paints a vivid, tender portrait of a fractured family through time, examining its tangled roots via a beautiful family home passed down through generations, where a matriarch once hung herself and where, in the present day, Gustav wants to shoot his new film. It’s a personal film for Trier, who wrote it shortly after he became a father and, as he admits in our conversation, wanted to exorcise some of his fears about his own potential failures. I caught up with him just before Sentimental Value’s NYFF premiere to talk about whether one can, as Gustav puts it, “write Ulysses while driving to soccer practice.”
Did you start writing this after you’d already become a father?
Yes. I had one child, a daughter. I’d decided with Eskil to write about two grown-up women, sisters, who are very different from each other, and how they’re grappling with trying to make a coherent narrative: Who are we? Now that their mother’s passed away and their father is back. As I finished the script, me and my wife realized we were having another child and that our daughters would have the same age gap as the women in the film. I was like, Wow, okay, now I have to make sure I tell a truthful tale of this father character. When we started out writing, I kind of didn’t like him, so we needed to give him some humanity. And that’s around the time I reached out to Stellan Skarsgård.
What did you say when you met him?
I said, “Hey, man, I need to make a three-dimensional character that has some humanity.” And he’s a really warm person in real life. He’s not like Gustav Borg. I flew out to Sweden and he took me to lunch; he knows all the cool places to eat. I’d been to a birthday party for a Norwegian director many years before and Stellan was there and I didn’t dare say hello. I was so starstruck. So at lunch, I started talking about the script and it’s a long, complicated pitch with themes and characters. And he started asking the smartest questions. I was like, I can’t do this without him. So by the end I was begging. I used the American term: “Man, if you don’t do this, I’m up shit creek!” He was laughing like, “What are you talking about? Anyway, I’ll do it.”
What was he asking you?
He didn’t want it to be a generational cliché. Not just the stern father, not just an asshole. He said, “What are his reasons?” Which is absolutely the right question to ask. Inside this complicated man with his arrogance and self-centeredness, there is also a wounded person. Somebody who is being hindered for some reason from having the emotional language that his daughters are longing for.
How much was writing this film an exorcism of your own fears about fatherhood?
I do think that was a part of it. Exorcising fears but making them into stories. There’s no clear function in creating stories or art or movies. But it turns out that they come from somewhere. A lot of people have asked about biographical aspects of this film, and to be quite frank, there’s a beautiful freedom in having enough distance from it so you don’t feel like you’re throwing anyone in your family under the bus, and you can be cruel or tender to your characters depending on the scene and the dramaturgy rather than feeling you have an obligation to say something specific. But you’re right. I am exorcising something.
Renate Reinsve in Sentimental Value.
Photo: Mubi
Do you feel now that it’s been exorcised? Will it make you a better father?
Well, I didn’t start writing it thinking I’d be like Gustav because I’m of a different generation and I’m more emotionally available. That’s something I care about and I grew up raised like that as well. I come from a family with a lot of emotional communicative skills. I’m sitting here in New York and I’m away from my kids, but I’m trying to make it so it doesn’t happen too frequently. That’s why I’m doing 50,000 things in one day and trying to get home quick. (Laughs.) It’s also important that this isn’t only for movie people. It’s for everyone who has passion in their life, or who does something with passion. That can be a place of growth and value, and it can also be an avoiding mechanism. A place to hide yourself.
There’s a line where Gustav says to his daughters, “You’re not going to write Ulysses while driving to soccer practice.” Is he right?
I don’t want to conclude! I think he’s got a point. Like, that’s the challenge. But also there are myths about artists we need to be cautious of. To create free art, you need some sense of removedness from certain codes of behavior. I think it’s valuable to feel that you can speak your mind about difficult areas of human behavior, to not idealize people. On the other hand, I get encouraged to make movies from being in life and not removing myself from it. So a part of me thinks if you’re getting interrupted by the fragmentation of your day to day life, maybe you’re not having the time and space to go deep enough into your art. On the other hand, maybe there’s an interesting story to be told about soccer practice. So I’m ambivalent. I don’t think it’s either or.
As I was rewatching the film and thinking about these themes, it struck me that usually these types of questions about parenting and work are posed to women artists. It’s rare that a male director talks about balancing his life in that way.
I’m glad you bring that up. It’s a delicate matter because I want to give respect to the specific experience of being a woman and having a child; I now know how much that demands from women, especially the first year. It’s very demanding on their bodies. Having said that, though, my mother was a film director for a while and became a journalist because it was so tricky. We’re not there yet, but we’re working our way towards a place where we can be human beings and film directors. And us men are grateful for that progress, too.
I’ve explored, since Reprise, vulnerable male experiences. I think something is happening in society where we’re paying attention to that. At the same time, there’s a countermovement of a lot of macho bullshit. So it’s even more important to talk about this and to be close to our children. And to engage in being emotionally available. There’s an interesting book I read about psychological research done in the ’80s and ’90s, and they made a distinction between “empathy” and “action empathy.” Boys tended to be raised to, rather than accept emotion, to act to solve a problem. A character talks about this in The Worst Person in the World: “I talk about emotions and you give me words. I don’t want you to solve my problem.” I think Sentimental Value talks about this in a parent-child context — Gustav sits at a party and give advice in a deeply disrespectful way, hurting Nora deeply, and it’s an example of that. He is not present outside of work — as a director he can be emotionally available to his actors, but then he goes away.
There’s a monologue in the film, written by Gustav in his script, that Renate and Elle both read aloud at separate times. After reading it, one of the sisters says to the other, “How does he know?” Meaning, how did Gustav write something that felt so personal to Nora? It made me think of you writing women. Not to be too essentialist, but your first three films are centered on young men, and then you switch halfway through at Thelma to women. Do you prefer writing women?
I think Thelma changed me because I was trying to break out of a mold. I was trying a genre movie. It still became a drama, which I’m happy about. And I was trying to work on a character who was different. Gender was certainly one aspect. But also she comes from the coast and from a really religious family, and I’m from an atheist family from the city. I think it’s about the actors as well. Renate changed something in the way I tell stories. Maybe I was more comfortable with the open emotionality of those characters. It’s funny, because Renate came in for a casting session for Thelma, to play her girlfriend. She didn’t get the part because there wasn’t that chemistry and she was a little bit older than the woman playing Thelma. That part went to Kaya Wilkins, who was amazing. But I realized then also how good she was. And that was part of the motivation for writing The Worst Person in the World.
So maybe it’s random, maybe it’s not. Maybe you can tell me your perspective. (Laughs.) I’m kind of lost! Something has happened. You’re right! I’m aware of it but not in a conscious way: “Now it’s time to do the women.” You don’t always control things. That’s the irony. I’m sitting here with you trying to create a secondary story of intention, but it doesn’t always feel like that when I do stuff. I try to encourage that when shooting, too. I want something to occur with the actors that feels like life, not just what we planned.
That’s more interesting. And Renate led you here in a way again.
Yes, Renate was a big piece of this one to cling onto, a collaboration I really value. Very specifically, I saw the character of Nora first. I saw a way of talking about an aspect of Renate without it being her biographical story at all. As an example, she doesn’t have stage fright. She’s brave. But we could both feel that stage fright is at the center of the creative process in terms of the anxiety of creation.
You have a tendency to refer back to suicide as a theme. It’s in nearly every one of your films, and looms large here, too. What draws you to that?
It’s a mixture of many things. Some experiences, some notions of the existential question of the meaning of it all. Not that I feel like that myself. I am embracing life a lot. It’s very short! But choosing to end things that way mystifies and terrifies me. It can also be a rational or logical conclusion. I don’t go into all the private stuff but I have had that around me. I know what that is. We took a break from it after Louder Than Bombs; it’s not in Worst Person in the World or Thelma. So this was a return to that theme, among other references to the earlier films.
I did notice in this film that behind Gustav’s head in a restaurant booth, there’s a dedication to Sten Egil Dahl, who’s a fictional character in Reprise. I like the self-referentiality.
Yeah! And it has a oner at the end of the film inside the film that’s quite reminiscent of Oslo, August 31st. There are some allusions in here to our past movies, without that making complete logical sense.
Talk to me about writing Elle Fanning’s character. You avoid a lot of easy jokes or caricatures about actresses.
Elle’s character is the catalyst of the whole thing. It’s sort of a mini-Vertigo story. Feeling like you’re slowly being commodified, objectified, used for a purpose beyond what you see. Elle is actually doing something very complicated. The scene where she’s acting crying, versus crying later with Gustav — don’t you see the distinction in her performance?
Absolutely. I wanted to ask whether we’re supposed to think she’s good, or if we’re meant to feel the way he’s feeling about her performance — that it’s maybe a little off?
I can’t say! People ask me: “That’s a really good performance, but he thinks there’s something off? Or is he moved by it? Or is he realizing he made a mistake because even though she’s doing something interesting, it’s not the film he’s making?” I want it to work in all those ways. I don’t want it to be simple.
Gustav gets Netflix backing and more financing for his film when he hires an American star, but has to make creative sacrifices, like not hiring his preferred collaborators. You’ve spoken a bit recently about resisting working in Hollywood, and insisting on working within the European system, where you have final cut and more artistic freedom.
I want to clarify, I don’t want to be snobbish about it. I say the same thing about working in 35-mm. — I work hard and make sacrifices to do that. But there are young people making wonderful, beautiful digital images. And they should make their movies! And I feel the same thing about working in Hollywood — I know there are great films being made in Hollywood. But many of them are also made by auteurs who have achieved at a level where they’re respected and allowed to do what they want. One example is Paul Thomas Anderson, who’s a friend and I adore his new film. It’s a strong, beautiful piece of cinema that is not conventional at all.
Having said that, for me to always have final cut is part of European tradition. It’s like a music band. The more we can work on the film as a band, the better it works in the market. That’s what I am trying to achieve. A middle ground where it isn’t an obscure film that won’t be seen but also doesn’t rely solely on star quality. The final cut conversation is nuanced: It often becomes about power. But to me, it’s about having the actors’ trust, and their sacrifice. I have a responsibility to do what we agreed to do. They’re bringing a lot of personal baggage on set. They spend time away from family and friends. They’re going into heavy stuff for this film. Renate and I both felt very emotional on the last day on set. We were applauding her, and I said, “Thank you for being Nora. I know it’s very hard.” It’s a tough place to be for months. She wept and said, “I’m very grateful for the role, but I’m also very glad it’s done.” And she trusts me to handle that material. So for me, it’s a creative discussion.
Have you been lured into Hollywood at any point?
I have collaborated with some good people. Like, look at Neon. They’ve been great. But I have to do it with Eskil’s and my writing. That’s what I learned after Reprise. I had an agent. I went around. I met a lot of smart people. Scripts were sent to me and I felt like, “Oh, I’m not connected to this.” I learned I had to write my own movies. I’m very happy about the process because I love writing. Sitting in the room with Eskil and coming up with stuff — “We’re going to have this shot out of a window on a train and it’s a oner and a child is running towards us” — and we write it, and it gets financed, and it become a problem I have to solve. “Oh shit, I have to figure out how to shoot this.” It’s what I love. Why would I illustrate someone else’s idea when I can wake up in the middle of the night sweating, thinking, Yes, like this!
Are there alternate-universe versions of your career? Have you turned a lot down?
There have been moments when people have offered me generous big projects and great actors, which has been very tempting. But maybe I’m old-fashioned. I have never taken money to develop something I didn’t believe I would do. I’m a little bit superstitious. (Knocks on the chair.) Eskil and I have written six scripts together. And I’ve directed six scripts. I don’t have anything in my drawer that I didn’t make. Even though sometimes it’s taken years. I believe in that development process and putting all of my energy into that one film, at one time. I don’t have a system where I’m being strategic. I’m sure in an alternate universe I’m richer. (Laughs.) But for now I’m pleased.
You haven’t ever had trouble getting financing within the European system?
The European system encourages what is fancily called auteur cinema. But there have been moments. Louder Than Bombs took years. It was really complicated getting it together. But you build a base with an audience, also like a band. People show up in the theater and the money people get their money back and we get to do another one. As long as that works, I’m happy. And that’s how America is at its best as well. Sean Baker, Paul Thomas Anderson, Mike Mills. And in the ’70s, this was the American standard. What people looked to America for. Maybe studios just need to restructure how they look at filmmakers. What Paul is doing with Warner Bros. is the way forward.
The Worst Person in the World was your most internationally successful film. Did you feel more or a different sort of pressure making this next one?
Yeah. I always feel terribly pressured when I make a new film. Eskil and I spin ourselves into a state of anxiety when we start over again. “We’re idiots. We have nothing. Everyone liked the last one. They’re going to compare and not like this one.” But then we come to a hardcore place where we’re like, “We gotta make it for ourselves.” Sentimental Value was not made to supply comfort to anyone other than, we wanted to talk about this and hope it makes sense. To have intimate conversations through movies. That’s my goal. People talk about their families with me. That idea of a closer human story in movies, there seems to be a hunger for that. The world feels cynical and technocratic right now. So at least for me, I’m longing for connection. And reconciliation, but not in a fake way.
It reminds me of when, at Cannes, you said, “Tenderness is the new punk.” Can you talk about making this movie in a more straightforward, less ironic key than your past work?
That’s how I felt bravest this time. Instead of going electric, I went acoustic. I want to explain that statement from Cannes a bit more. I used to skate and it was illegal. I felt grownups were idiots; I didn’t believe in the structure, it didn’t work. I still have some of that. I grew up in hardcore and punk scenes and the countercultural position was to be mad, to stand up for something and yell back. But I also lived through the ’90s and all of the irony. “Yeah, language doesn’t work, so let’s make a joke of everything.” And that has its moment, but right now, I feel the most brave position is, “I don’t know everything. I’m really confused and I want to understand the other. I’m yearning to connect.”
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