Director Joachim Trier isn’t worried about the state of movies these days.
“If we can get (viewers) for a couple of hours in a dark room with no cellphones and they can really feel images in a much deeper sense, we’re lucky,” he says. “Cinema is at a very exciting place to take that responsibility.”
In Trier’s latest, “Sentimental Value,” he peels back the curtain on filmmaking and shows how a director (played by Stellan Skarsgård) tries to get back into the lives of his estranged daughters. The film he wants to make taps into their family life and touches on those moments that may have divided them.
Stellan Skarsgard, left, and Renate Reinsve star in “Sentimental Value.”
The director, Trier cautions, isn’t a veiled version of himself.
“He’s quite different,” Trier says. “I actually started writing him from the perspective of the daughters and then he was a kind of antagonist. Slowly, through understanding that I wanted Stellan to do it, I wanted to create some emotional and character depth. (Skarsgård’s character) actually wants to make good movies and that I could kind of cling on to. Isn’t it interesting with people who are clumsy in their social life but still make great art? I find that kind of a saving grace.”
Because he employs many of the same people from earlier films, Trier has a shorthand that works.
Star Renate Reinsve, who plays one of the daughters, won the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress for “The Worst Person in the World,” a 2021 film she made with Trier. She also starred in his “Oslo, 31 August.”
What the two have in common is trust, the Norwegian director says. “I know how to help her be her best … and she is incredible. I’m lucky to work with her. We (Trier and his longtime writing partner Eskil Vogt) wrote this for her. She was one of the motivations for doing the story.”
Reinsve doesn’t ask for changes once the cameras start rolling because she knows the story before the film even begins.
Renate Reinsve, left, and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas star in "Sentimental Value."
“She kind of embraces it," Trier says. "I write what I know she could do well …and she finds that fun.”
When filming begins, Trier is close to the camera. “I’m with the actress and the director of photography.”
That helps the film’s intimacy and captures what it is the writers want it to convey.
Trier and Vogt have worked together on six films that he has directed. The process is always the same: “We start from scratch.”
In their writing room is a bookshelf filled with volumes about cinema.
“Between lying on the couch and thinking about life and that kind of shelf of film history and what we admire, we find something that we want to talk about,” he says.
When an idea gets too close to his own reality, Trier often veers.
“We create enough distance to the characters so that I don’t feel I’m throwing someone — a family member — under the bus," he says. "It’s very personal, but I create a form that’s far enough removed that I feel I can really treat the character both with love and ruthlessness.”
In “Sentimental Value,” which received eight Golden Globe nominations Dec. 8, Trier isn’t afraid to throw curves.
“I have great respect for the audience’s capacity to interpret and empathize and fill in the voids,” he says. “I really try to say enough, but not too much. Emotions need to be earned and audiences need to connect in their own way. If they don’t, that’s OK, but at least I have given them an opportunity to put the pieces together a bit themselves.”
