The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. You’re listening to Episode 724 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, how do you best introduce your characters and their world to the audience? We’ll discuss with an expert on the topic. Joachim Trier is a writer and director whose credits include Louder Than Bombs, Worst Person in the World, and this year’s Sentimental Value, which is now nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay for him and his co-writer, Eskil Vogt. Welcome, Joachim.
Joachim Trier: Thank you. Hi. Good to see you.
John: It’s great to have you here. I loved your movie. I’m so happy it got this amazing reception. It is just a terrific film. I want to talk about how it came to be, but I specifically want to focus on how you introduce the audience to both the world and to the characters. I thought that was when I knew I was in really good hands. The opening sequence is brilliant. How you meet Nora is so, so good. When you’ve stuck your claws into us that well, we are going to follow you on your story, and it’s just masterfully done.
Joachim: Thank you so much. That’s a big compliment coming from you. Thank you. I’d love to talk screenwriting. I’ve collaborated for all the six feature films and the short films before that with Eskil Vogt as a co-writer. I find that we are drawn to, on one hand, of course, wanting to do movies in a tradition of clarity of storytelling and all that, but more than anything, we are interested in the ambiguity of character. We are interested in building stuff around the psychological mechanisms and the yearnings of people. That’s where the energy comes from when we start writing a lot.
John: I definitely want to focus in on that initial part of the process. We’ll also answer some listener questions that were relevant to your film. In our bonus segment from premium members, I want to talk about screenplays on screen because we have a screenwriter in this movie. Stellan Skarsgård plays a writer. The printed scripts we see in the movie are different than what I expect.
I want to talk about how we depict screenplays and screenwriting in movies because it’s a thing that actually weirdly comes up a lot in movies because writers are often writing about writing. I want to talk about the choices you made and maybe some things that I’m expecting as an American screenwriter that are different than what you’re expecting as a European screenwriter.
Joachim: Let’s get into it.
John: Let’s start with the start of this movie. Let’s start with where this movie comes from because you’re saying this is the sixth collaboration with Eskil?
Joachim: Yes. On feature film [crosstalk]
John: On a feature film. Talk to us about where an idea comes from. What is the discussion before there’s any words put on paper? What was the impetus behind Sentimental Value?
Joachim: It started with wanting to talk about siblings, two sisters, two adults who are negotiating how come they feel so different about who they are as a family and why are their experiences so individually different from each other. That was some early stuff, the mystery of how we become who we become in a family. We thought that idea of mirroring between sisters was interesting.
The way we work, just to tell you a little bit about that, is that we sit for about a year in a room together, Eskil and I. We meet every morning and we work from 9:00 until 4:00 or 5:00 in the afternoon, every day on the weekdays. Some days we feel terrible. We don’t feel we’re doing much and other days everything happens in two days. It just rushes in of ideas and structure.
After we have structured everything and come up with what we want to do, there’s a part of two or three months at the end where Eskil actually writes it out. Then I go out of the room and I edit, I look at it, I come back into the room sometimes. Then finally we have a reading phase where we do sittings. We turn off the cell phone, we read it through to get a cinematic experience of reading it through in real time. Then we restructure a lot together.
Those two weeks are the most productive almost because then suddenly you have to rewrite something quickly, you have to come up with new ideas, you have to change the structure. Then we go into the world and pretend it’s our first draft. That’s the process.
John: It’s a much longer process than I would have guessed to get into that first draft. Talk to us about what you’re doing. You’re saying 9:00 to 4:00 every weekday. What are you actually doing? Is it all conversations? Are you mapping stuff out on a board? How do you know that you’re making any progress? What is the work in that daily session?
Joachim: I think what we’re aiming for is to find our own connection to the material. I have not developed one screenplay or written a screenplay that I haven’t filmed as a director. When we do a film, this is what we do for a few years. A bit more like someone who worked with a novel perhaps. We let a lot of stuff come up. Very often we start out with three, four different directions we want to explore.
Then something eventually after a couple of months, we see we have much more material or more yearning to tell something rather than something else. As an example in this one, we were struggling to try to find something interesting. We didn’t want to make just a domestic sitting around table, talking kind of movie that isn’t interesting. It’s like the chamber drama.
We want it to be cinematic. We want to have conceptual, formal scenes that we play around with, almost like set pieces. What we do is we gather material, a lot of material, almost like actors exploring the life of characters and then just playing those few scenes. When we then finally found out there was also the father’s point of view and the daughter’s, and more of a polyphonic, multi-voice, multi-character story, and it had that kind of novelistic feeling is what we were after.
Not that we wanted to feel like a book. We very much wanted to be cinematic, but what we’re yearning for is the slight of hand that you get when you read a book and you don’t quite know how you thematically get involved in what you’re getting involved in terms of thinking. That’s the kind of thing we’re trying every time, is that through character, you get involved in a space in the movie where there’s space for some thinking and philosophy around life and existence and how little time we have and why is it so difficult to be in a family and all that stuff. We don’t want it to be on the nose.
When we have all that material, we start structuring it after a few months. Then we get a timeline and we write a step-out line. Sometimes there are pieces or there’s ambitions of pushing material together. It’s not like a story arch just yet. It’s more like we know we want a montage that’s like an essay about a house told from one of the characters. We know that we want a panic scene when she has stage fright, but we also know what the ending is. How do we get there?
Then there’s this, how do we get into a situation where the other sister could go to the National Archive because that’s an interesting building and that’s a cinematic thing. All of these things come together. Eskil often says when he’s asked, use the word storytelling, we’re slightly ambivalent because the storytelling, the structuring is something we almost want to hang our material and our characters on. It’s not like one of these wonderful– I know there are wonderful screenwriters who are like, “I got the story, now I illustrate it.” We work the other way around. We want the material and the characters to come first.
John: For listeners who haven’t seen the finished movie yet, its story follows a Norwegian family, the two grown daughters and their father, who is a famous film director trying to make an autobiographical film at their longtime family house. How many of those things I just described in this logline existed in early stages of these discussions?
You said it was about siblings, so you knew that. At what point did you know there was going to be two sisters? At what point did you decide that their father was a character, you said polyphonic, that was able to switch to his point of view? When did you start to have those realizations?
Joachim: I think three to four months in, it all clicked. We suddenly saw what it was going to be. Then we went another round exploring character scenes and getting material, and a lot of stuff ends up on the floor. It gives us a deep sense of who they are. I would say that just for the listeners who aren’t that familiar with what we do, that we are in between two traditions a bit.
On one level, I feel I grew up with a lot of American great character films. I remember Kramer vs. Kramer undergraduates when I was a teenager being amazing films and ordinary people. Films like Hannah and Her Sisters or Annie Hall or Amazing or The Breakfast Club, which was a gateway drug to Ingmar Bergman because it was actually deep character studies done within a genre that seemed like it had levity.
On one hand, we love American character-driven storytelling. On the other hand, we’re also film geeks that love Fellini and Alain-René and Godard, and how do you do that modernistic, break the form, make some hard edits, not make it all fluid, make the audience have to fill in the blanks a bit. We’re going between these traditions when we’re writing these ideals.
When we gather material, we want, for example, when we do character scenes, how can we avoid it just being done through dialogue? How can we make a formal scene? I don’t know if this is the moment where I can use an example like the opening of the film, for example.
John: Absolutely. I want to segue right into that because you’re establishing in this opening sequence this narration about the house and what this is. I’m wondering, could we actually have you read a bit from the English version of the screenplay because I thought the narration voiceover here is so important in terms of setting things up, and it’s so unusual and so unique. Can I just share my screen and have you [crosstalk]
Joachim: Yes, please do. I’ll read off the screen. That’s great.
John: The film opens with this house. I love how you describe the house. This is a venerable old house in Oslo, sorely in need of a coat of paint. Other houses in the neighborhood may be more modern and in better condition, but there’s something soulful about this one missing from the others. Then we’re going to see this house in different times, different periods, inside and outside. This narrator starts talking to us. Joachim, could you read his narration?
Joachim: Yes, I’ll read the narrator. “When she received the essay assignment to write a story as if one were an object, she immediately knew that she would choose to be their house. She described how the house’s belly shook as she and her sister ran down the stairs and out the back door, the house’s butt, taking the shortcut to school through a hole in the fence and a neighbor’s lawn before they turned into the road and the house could no longer see them.
Her mother pointed out that it was a bit inconsistent that the house could also see behind its back as if a house couldn’t have eyes in the back. She remembered wondering if the house preferred to be light and empty or full and heavy, if it liked being trampled on, or that people crashed into its walls, the eager dog claw scratched the floorboards. She thought, yes, it liked being full and that the marks were just scrapes like you get playing tag or soccer.
Her father said that the crookedness was an old flaw discovered right after the house was built 100 years ago. She wrote that it was as if the house was still sinking, collapsing, just in very slow motion, and that the entire time her family had lived there was just a split second in midair. Before them, a number of people, pets, insects also had their brief flash in the house’s time.
Four people had even died within the walls of the house. Nora’s great grandfather, Edward Ergens, died in the bedroom on the second floor from the Spanish flu, in the same room where his granddaughter, Edith, was born just seven years later, which was now her parents’ bedroom.” I have to add, the pictures are then telling a complete story of parents arguing here, of people coming and going.
We are illustrating it with lenses and celluloids from different cameras through the 20th century and all of that stuff. This is a good example of how we are dealing with a cinematic language countered by a literary voice so that the voice only tells a part of it where the pictures reveal more. I’ll jump back into the narration’s voice.
“Her teacher gave her an A and her father had loved it. She dug out the essay when she was looking for a monologue for her auditions at the theater academy but was disappointed because it seemed so unemotional. She therefore chose Nina’s monologue from The Seagull instead.” Then we do a hard cut in the film, and we’re at the National Theater. Nora is now a grown woman, an actor, very accomplished, about to go on stage and the lead of a theater play and she’s panicking.
John: This is about six pages of script. It’s an unusual choice to spend the first six minutes of your film establishing a place rather than the individual characters you’re going to be following. What you’re doing so masterfully is saying, this place is going to be important and most crucially, the people who live in this house and their relationship with each other and with this physical space is going to be so important. This is a movie that’s going to involve death. It’s going to involve noise and fighting, but also this idealized version of what a house and a home should be and how everyone’s perception of it is going to be different.
Joachim: Absolutely. I’m going to be very straight now, and so listeners should turn off because I’m going to really explain stuff which an artist or a creative person should always be careful about. I think I love the craft. When I’m doing talks about screenplays, particularly directing, I always imagine talking to a younger version of myself and I always love when people were speaking straight about what they did.
Here’s the thing. This sequence sets up themes, as you were just pointing out, and character, which are the two things that we care the most about. Themes, in my opinion, or motifs are, “This is the area that I want you to think about when we go through the story.” What we’re learning is Nora as a 12-year-old, being the older sister, we learned that, parents quite dysfunctional, arguing a lot, she is avoiding describing that even though the film shows it to us by being creative, by telling a story, by being the daughter, by being someone who, in a psychodynamic term, sublimate her pain, I’m being very literal now, into something creative already as a child, as we all do.
Children do this. All people, whether they choose to be artists later in life, dance and sing to make their parents happy. We tell stories to try to understand who we are. All of this stuff is inherently human, in my opinion. We set that theme up, that in this creative family, that’s her choice, and she’s longing to become an actress. We later learn that’s also an avoiding mechanism. Yet, paradoxically, it also gets her closer to herself.
It’s a double bind of the creative role in life, that we both avoid ourselves and get closer to ourselves in strange ways that, to me, Joachim Trier, the filmmaker, is still mysterious. I’m exploring something. We also learn that the house has had a perspective on time. People come and go. They’re born, they’re die. Time is short. This story’s about reconciliation.
It’s about grown people realizing they don’t have those difficult parents around forever. Within that limited space and time that we have together, how are we going to deal with that? Maybe we’re never going to get what we quite want for our parents. Is there baby steps to reconciliation, we ask? All of that is placed in the background, hopefully not too explicitly, in that first part.
John: You’ve primed the audience for what they’re supposed to be looking for. I came out of this sequence going like, “Oh no, the house is going to burn down.” It sounded like this house is crucial to the film and something terrible is going to happen. Spoiler, it doesn’t burn down, but–
Joachim: Something worse happens. It gets renovated.
John: [inaudible 00:16:29] I don’t want to spoil it for people. I didn’t see it in audience, but I’m sure there’s an audible gasp when people see what happens to the house.
Joachim: I’ve experienced that and that’s funny. It’s turned very slick at the end, isn’t it?
John: I wrote Big Fish and Big Fish has a similar set where we go through many, many years to establish what is the underlying dynamic here and prime the viewer for this is what to watch out for. These are the things you’re going to keep seeing again and again over the course of the movie. How early did you and Eskil find that this was going to be the way into the film? It’s not an obvious choice and yet once you’ve realized that you want to make a novelistic film, it’s a very novelistic device. What you just read could have been the first few paragraphs of a book.
Joachim: I think there are many reasons to choose this opening. We love opening movies and we have several openings often and several endings. The freshness of an audience meeting a film is just a remarkable moment and one needs to be smart about it. It’s a luxury in a way. They’ve hopefully bought a ticket and go to the theater and they sit down. You got them, but you owe them something.
First of all, we want to establish a sense of narrative authority. I don’t know if that’s the right English word. The authority sounds a bit strict, but a sense of guidance that we really care and we’re going to have fun here. We’re going to try to make a movie that takes you several places. I often say to Eskil, as a joke, that why I loved James Bond movies as a kid was you know you were going to go to an island with the palm trees and a beach. You’re going to go into the mountains. You’re going to go to a cool city.
I’m going to take you several places. You bought a ticket to see a family movie, but we’re not going to get stuck by the kitchen table. That’s a promise. That’s one thing that we know very early. We want to show a formal playfulness because that’s what we do. In Oslo, August 31st, the film we did several years ago, we start with a documentary montage or in The Worst Person in the World, we start with a narrative playful story of how the lead character can’t figure out what to do with their life in a humoristic way.
There’s that establishing of sense of humor and levity to it, but also the theme. We knew that. Then also, we cut contrast out straight to a very subjective, intimate, real-time feeling of being behind backstage, going onstage as an actor and having stage fright and panicking completely, which is the opposite. It’s a formal opposition. It’s not about montage and moving in time and space freely. It’s sticking in that anxious space of going onstage.
To have that contrast in dramaturgical terms, that’s what Eskil and I talk about a lot. How can we make contrast? We have one posted note that’s been hanging there for several films. We’ve ripped them down every time and started all over with a new script. The one that keeps sticking on the board is, remember contrast. That’s the holy thing.
Contrast of scenes, contrast of characters, the formal devices, the character explorations, the unexpectedness. Remember that the dynamic of contrast is at the key of making interesting material. It sounds childish, maybe, and obvious, but it’s really good to bear in mind. We start with a very clear dramaturgical contrast between the opening scene and the next one.
John: Your opening sequence goes through over a century, and it’s jumping forward versus a real-time panic moment with Nora. Let’s talk about Nora because a choice you’re always making as a writer, is you’re introducing a character on a normal day or on an extreme day. You made the choice, like, this is Nora at a very big extreme. We’re seeing her. She’s supposed to be going on stage in this play, and she’s having a panic attack. She is both clearly a protagonist, but also the problem.
I love how you, as an audience, are not even panicked on her behalf. You’re panicked on behalf of the stage manager and everyone who’s acting normally, just trying to get her to effing go on stage. It’s a really funny sequence, and it’s harrowing. It’s just a great way into it. This sequence is seven pages long. We’ve got a six-page opening, and then it’s this seven-page sequence.
Some simple things you notice on the page, you never name characters who are unimportant. The stage manager, great role, really great performance, but their stage manager throughout, we don’t give them a name, because that way as a reader, we know this is not a person who’s going to be coming back. Same with the director.
Joachim, the actor, gets a name because he’s going to be coming back. There’s small things, but they just help the read because ultimately, Joachim, you’re going to be directing this, and we’re going to get a sense of people’s relative importance, but our first experience with them is on the page. Just making those choices help us know what to focus on, how to be thinking about this sequence that we’re seeing.
Joachim: The right things, yes. We knew one challenge with the screenplay was we’re going to throw a lot of characters on everyone. With the casting department, we worked for one and a half years getting this cast together. We’re super proud of it. Also, people have to look like themselves at various younger stages, and the previous family of the 20th century going 100 years back also needs to have similarities. It could be one family and all that.
A lot of work, and then we’re jumping straight into a theater world with tons of the side characters. We grew up adoring, really loving Martin Scorsese. Obviously, we all love good fellas, but also The Age of Innocence, like, this incredible variety of characters, and then the task is how are they important in different ways? There’s a hierarchy of who you’re going to invest in emotionally. That’s my job as well as the director.
Eskil always manages to do a good reading script. Credit to him, because I think he’s a much, much better writer than me. I think he’s very smart about conveying what the film will feel like. We know that we will do more shooting-like scripts later on, and that I will go with the actors, all of them. I even rehearse or meet smaller parts. Sometimes I cast amateurs.
I want them to get to know me so they feel safe on set, and so they don’t come and feel like, as a day player, they’re not up for the task. Then you give them names and background, and you discuss with them who is this character and all that. As you’re absolutely pointing out correctly, at this stage, we’re throwing a lot of less central roles into the play.
John: We’re meeting Nora here. We’re panicking with her and around her and about her. Ultimately, she does succeed and triumph there. In the sequences on the page versus what’s in the film, some things have changed. Let’s talk about some of the discoveries you make along the way. Like, she kisses him backstage, which is not scripted.
There’s the sense of geography and space is going to be dictated by the actual place you end up picking, and how it’s all going to work. How do you find, as the director who also helped write this film, that balance? When are you taking off your writer hat and putting on your director hat?
Joachim: I feel that I’m developing the same thing all along, and that the writing is such a central aspect of setting up the possibility of directing. Then I go to the National Theatre, which is very hard to get into. It’s where Henry Gibson did his plays. We were so lucky to be allowed to film there. It’s almost 200-year-old building. I get those late Sunday nights after a play to go there and research with my team, my AD team, my production designer, the cinematographer. Then I see a lot of possibilities.
I note it down. We do floor plans. We shoot on video. We do this stuff. I often bring it back to Eskil and explain it to him so we can do a quick redraft so that the team that comes in later will feel that it becomes an organic process of reaching that space. Writing is spatial. Writing for space. Eskil and I talk about it. The banal example, as all writers feel, is that if a character is in a kitchen and it’s important that they are looking into the fridge as someone saying, “I’m going to leave you,” and then they turn around and go home to the table, how far is that walk is going to be tremendously important to the dramaturgical weight of that scene? From the smallest to the biggest thing. I go back and forth.
Then ultimately, Eskil is not precious. He trusts me as a director. I go and do my thing with my team. It’s important, for example, this scene, in the editing of the film is when we shot a lot more for everything. That’s what we do. We invest a lot to go on screen, which is the magic of having less resources go above the line in Norway and more below the line because I shoot for 60 days. We get to try a lot of stuff.
For an ambitious film like this, in terms of all the spaces, remember there are several montages where we actually have to go through the century again a bit later in the film. For the National Theater, for example, I had a lot of material. In terms of character, what we realized was the buildup of panic is what we dropped. We got straight into the middle of it.
John: Exactly. People will put a link in the show notes to the English translation of the script. There is a lot more lead up to it. You were able to just come right to her at that moment. It seems an obvious choice in retrospect because you’ve just established this narration about who she was. To see her as the adult figure in this moment of panic makes sense. Yet, you don’t know that as the writer. Do you think you need more runway for the plane to take off and you didn’t?
Joachim: Yes, that’s exactly it. I find that during the editing of the film with Olivier Bugge Coutté, the editor who’s done all the same features that Eskil and I have written together, we have a very close collaboration. His job is to be dialectically opposite to all the establishing. He’s saying, “Do we need this establishing?” People are smart. The actors are great. He’s coming in at the other end. It’s a wonderful dialectic always. Eskil always says when we talk that, ultimately, Olivier makes us shine as screenwriters.
I must say, going back to the script, for example, I’m very proud about the script as a structure. It doesn’t mean that it didn’t work. It just means that we can be more effective and be more respectful to the audience. There are certain things you think you need to establish. Like the runway was a wonderful way of putting it that you just said. I like that metaphor. You think you really need to involve people at every step of that staircase. Actually, it’s quite exciting to jump into the middle of it and discover it a bit backwards. That goes for a few other points in the film as well.
John: Let’s talk about the introduction of Gustav. Gustav appears. Here’s the description from the script. The car stops in front of a house and a figure dressed in black steps out. This is Gustav Borg, 71. Gustav is a well-known film director with his heyday behind him. On a good day, he still has the energy and charm that once made him a force of nature, but today is not a good day. He is tired and his suit is creased.
At this moment, we are introducing another crucial player in the film. We don’t realize yet that he’s going to have storytelling power. The film is not quite a two-hander because the other sister also can drive scenes by herself, yet we greatly change the dynamic here. What you were saying about the audience doesn’t need to know, we often talk on the podcast about the difference between mystery and confusion.
We’re not confused when this guy comes on, we’re just curious. His arrival without any real explanation gets us curious about what’s going to happen next. What does it mean that he’s entering into this house during this post-funeral meal? What’s going to happen? We’re leading in because we’re curious because we weren’t told and that’s the power of holding stuff back.
Joachim: That’s very interesting. We often use the same dichotomy and we talk about ambivalence or uncertainty, or mystery as a positive, but vagueness is what you want to avoid. It’s how can we be specific yet not give all the answers? The reason we write it, just to comment on– I love that we’re having conversations also about the actual creation of the process of creating something that will read and hopefully be made into a movie.
We cheat only in cases like this, where describing all this stuff as a director, I won’t show all that. It’s give a context to the following scenes of him so that Stellan Skarsgard brilliantly will help us illustrate and we can even get rid of more of the exposition than we thought because he’s a great actor. There’s a moment in Notorious when Cary Grant gets introduced later and you have a lot of examples of films, and the way they do it, because Ingrid Bergman has established as the lead and then you’re doing a colleague, is there’s a long track in on the back of the set at the party where he’s smoking.
Just the film language tells you, this is important. It’s not just one of the guests at this party, this is a guy we’re going to follow and of course it’s Cary Grant. We have the luxury of having Stellan Skarsgard step out of a black car, which arrival we proceed and we use time. It is that and we follow him in and he looks around and he’s not doing anything for a moment.
Here comes a big difference between the screenplay and the finished film. As he enters the house in the screenplay, he goes in and sits by himself for a moment, and we get a huge second montage early on with the remaining story of the house and the death of his mother and all this stuff. In the film, again, let’s sustain the mystery. Let’s do that. Then we use that montage much later and it became much more interesting when the audience wanted to know all of that. At this point in the film that’s finished, we just want to be there with them. We want to observe, want to feel, want to be in the spaces. We’d just been on a montage not so long ago, and we want to be present. We want to explore the wonderful actress doing the character work.
John: Often in screenwriting, we talk about how you want to end a scene with enough forward momentum. They lean at the end so that you have some momentum going into the next scene, and your film does that all the time. Your film also makes a lot of use of blackouts. We fade to black, and then we come back up. Basically, it’s the curtain comes down, the curtain comes back up.
It gives you the power of a new scene. It gives you the power of starting a whole new idea, which is so useful. When did you know you were going to do that? How many of the ones you had planned ended up making it all the way through editorial versus disappearing in the edit? What was the discovery process there?
Joachim: I would say that those blackouts, they’re also noted in the film. They are important because they are a formal device that does a couple of different things. First of all, it gives that fresh, “Hey, here we go with something new.” It gives a freshness, and sometimes it’s fun again to use the energy of an opening. It also tells the audience, which is almost more important, that, “Hey, this film consists of pieces that have an autonomy in the sense that they might be little chapters that have an entertaining quality on their own, and you’ll follow a little story, and you’ll have to help us piece it together.”
It’s an invitation for interpretation space. Sometimes we jump time. “Oh, wow, something has happened.” It gives this urgency and energy jolt into the film, and it keeps us guessing, but it also gives us a possibility of shifting point of view, which is the difficulty of this story, is that we suddenly need to establish that the other sister is also really important, but it’s a slow process of her building from being an observer to being a subject. Through these kind of chapters, we have an allowance to jump somewhere else.
John: We had Eva Victor on the show recently. We were talking about their film Sorry, Baby, which has more formal chapters. The chapters are important for us understanding, like, oh, this is not told chronologically. It’s crucial for this. In the case of Sentimental Value, we are sometimes shifting between who is really driving the sequence of the films. It’s important for us to understand that we’ve moved not just in time, but also point of view. You are covering also many seasons here, so we’re going to see this house and these people in different seasons as well.
Joachim: That’s very important. Again, it’s a subject of time and memory, this feeling that it’s almost like a family album where we can jump between very intimate moments and more essayistic observations of how time passes in a family, that we have that dynamic at play in the narrative structure of the actual film, which I think opens up different thinking, hopefully.
John: We have a couple of listener questions here. Let’s start with Jeremy in Montreal.
Drew Marquardt: “On Scriptnotes, you often talk about outlining your script and knowing your ending before you begin writing. This makes a lot of sense, as knowing where you’re going feels like the best plan to actually getting somewhere. My question is, how often do you find that your ending has changed by the time you’ve gotten there?”
John: Now knowing your process and how much work you were doing before Eskil went off to do a very first draft, I would guess endings didn’t change a lot. Tell us, in this movie and the other movies, what’s been your process and how much of your ending shifted based on how the script turned out or how the film turned out?
Joachim: That’s a great question and a very important one. In our case, I would say that almost all the endings of the six films we’ve done, and particularly this last one, the ending, have been tremendously important to understand and believe we had a film. It’s not to put too much weight on conclusion as tying things up neatly, but it’s rather trying, like in Sentimental Value, to have an organic, dramaturgical feeling of this story is now ending, but there’s just enough to keep thinking about.
Getting that balance right, I think, is the magic we’re trying to achieve. That Nora, again, spoiler alert, forgive me, listeners, but Nora actually ends up doing the film with her father. That final scene encapsulates both her anxiety of marrying her grandmother and the mystery of transference psychologically, how come she feels the same depression as her grandmother.
That comes from the absence of her father, who himself had a difficult time being a child because what happened to his mother and all that stuff, but not explaining it. In the scene they do, he’s making a piece of art because he’s so incapable of talking in the social language to his daughters, he’s very clumsy. He’s a difficult-avoiding father, but at the same time, in that writing, he sees his daughter and she knows it and she feels it, and she does it well. He looks at her and says, after the take, “Perfect.”
They don’t know what to say to each other. The fact that they don’t embrace and have a conversation of resolution, which to me would be a lie, I don’t think that Nora and Gustav could just hug and it would all be fine. They’re probably going to continue to have a complicated relationship, but maybe they got closer. Maybe they saw each other in the act of creation, which is where they fled. They are very similar. They both fled into the creative, maybe also because that’s where they feel they can function, so that they meet in there, in that fictional room somehow, we thought was important.
To that question, which is a wonderful question about endings, getting an ending and writing towards it will very often give you a sense of what your middle part of the film needs to be and how luxurious you can just have character scenes in front and play as opposed to setting up the turning point when it goes towards an end. I will say this, what changes a lot is all those scenes leading up to the ending. We always have too many endings, too many resolution scenes in a way that we get rid of in the editing.
John: Another way to address this is that the ending, you’re saying it’s not a conclusion. It’s not the end-all be-all resolution of everything. You are answering the central dramatic question that you’ve established in the opening, which is, to me, was, can this family deal with their idealized versions of what their home life should have been?
It’s only by creating this artificial house and this movie set that two of these characters are able to grapple with what they actually wanted. It does feel like the right ending for the questions that you were asking of the audience at the start.
Joachim: Well put. Thank you. If it does that, we’re very happy. That’s what we’re trying to say, is that we have what I would call a more thematic closure without it being a cheesy happy ending that I don’t believe is like life. We try to create something which mirrors life on some level.
John: Question from Thomas in Brazil.
Drew: “Have you ever written a character whose traits and way of speaking were clear in the script, but during the casting process, you couldn’t find anyone who matched that? Or you chose someone who ultimately didn’t fit what you were looking for? Did you ever adjust the script because of this, whether during rehearsals or other stages?”
John: This is such a great question because, of course, we have a movie within the movie where you’re casting an actress played by Elle Fanning in the film. It’s a question of, is she even the right fit for this role that Gustav has written? Joachim, how do you as a director grapple with this when you have a role that is specific and you’re trying to find a person who can embody that character?
Joachim: That’s a great question. This is really at the core of character work, isn’t it? Both as a writer and director and the actors. We have rehearsal, which just is the time for the actors to look at the script and talk to me and get to know each other. It’s not about table reads. It’s not about having them sit around and half-fake read the script aloud. That’s not my vibe.
I’m interested in them getting on the floor and trying scenes a bit, and then that will affect it. Then as to whether I tailor it a bit more to them, very often it’s very similar, but just nuances. Two good examples from this film. One is Elle bettering the character. We did not want Rachel Kemp, the American star that comes to Europe, to be in a film to become a joke.
We wanted her to be a serious character that actually is pivotal and a catalyst to what happens to the family. I think she’s very important as the synthetic daughter. She teaches Gustav something about himself. She also, by stepping away from the role, opens up that this project, this film they’re making inside the film, is of a different nature than any other film that Gustav maybe has even made.
She’s very important, and Elle helped that a lot. Something that changed radically from the writing is the younger sister, Agnes, played by Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, because we cast and met a couple of hundred actors, known and unknown. Agnes in the script is more in her avoiding of conflict and wanting everyone to feel good. She’s more jovial, playful, giggly, smiling, trying to avoid the pivot, “My sister and father arguing.”
Whereas Inga came in with this earnest groundedness, this sincerity, and that power shifted the character tremendously because that is how she holds her place in this complicated family dynamic, is through silence, observation, and honesty, in a straight way that the others are always avoiding. She’s not avoiding by joking it away or being jovial. She’s actually staying silent, looking, and being a pretty straight shooter when she actually confronts the others. That was forceful. That was Inga bringing that in. Actually, the dialogues didn’t change that much, but the interpretation of the scenes from an actor point of view changed a lot.
John: I’m sure I could have an hour-long conversation with you about Rachel is doing a scene from the script at a table and just how you have a conversation with an actor who’s playing an actor who’s playing a role as the levels of looking into a mirror is so challenging if the scene works so well.
Joachim: I’m so impressed with Elle because I don’t know if people understand exactly what you’re pointing out, how difficult it is to play inside the film and crying and being genuine, but yet doing it slightly within a style that makes us unsure as an audience, whether is this the kind of film that Gustav Borg is making? It’s not bad, but it’s almost like singing on the edge of a tonality or falseness, but still being in key.
There’s something really sophisticated. Then Elle shows us at the end when she leaves the film, she breaks down and she weeps and gets this fatherly hug from Gustav that he’s unable to give his three daughters, it seems. In that scene, she shows a different kind of vulnerability and acting style. Elle is really amazing, I think. I’m very, very impressed with her.
John: Both Inga and Elle are nominated for their work, which is not surprising. They’re both incredible in it. Let’s do one last question here from Peter.
Drew: Peter says, “I’m married with stepkids and early-ish in my screenwriting career, I’ve realized that when I’m struggling to crack a story or feel like I’m facing a creative brick wall in my script, my inner frustration can spill over into my mood when I’m spending time with family, especially if I haven’t had a chance to decompress from the work. Do you have any good transition habits that help you leave creative work frustration at the desk, or at least buried deeply enough in your subconscious, so that you can be fully present with your family?”
Joachim: That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? That’s what the film is about, too. How do you transition so that you can be a parent?
John: Gustav never mastered that skill. He’s not good at it.
Joachim: No, he didn’t. What I do is I communicate very deeply with my wife. Now we have two young daughters, and we talk about it. I try to look at it like a really important life task, and that I try to be good enough. I know I will fail some days, but I will also be better other days. I find that during writing, those are actually where I’m the best at it in a strange way, because I go home and I don’t have the adrenaline and the stress of shooting so that I can go home.
I try to tell myself this. I don’t always manage, but I try to think I’m interested in characters and life. I love being surprised by what happens in reality. If I lose that contact, I will also lose my writing skill, because those are the kinds of films– I’m not entering into space in the movies, primarily, that I make. Actually being with people around me and my family can really, suddenly, surprisingly, if I let it go, come back to me as inspiration in indirect and strange ways. I try to tell myself that.
Then there’s also a weird thing. All parents at the moment are guilty about using cell phones. Doing a ritual of putting away the cell phone can almost be like a ritual of letting something go. You can actually use it to double up on the fact that I’m putting something aside symbolically when I’m home. I’m trying all these things and I’m grappling with it and I’m trying my best. I think it’s a relevant question for creative people to ask themselves. At the end of the day, I think we need to get our family to accept that we are as we are and to be open about it. I believe in transparency.
John: For me, I’m not putting my cell phone away necessarily, but having a clear separation between this is my workspace and my home space is really helpful. I’m lucky that my office is over the garage. Just those 10 feet going back into the kitchen, things are separated out. Then, when I’m in production, a lot of times my daughter has been around and she’s seen the work. For her to see how much work there is and the tedium of it, but also all the decisions and the questions and meeting who the people are around it, it’s just taking the mystery away has helped as well.
Joachim: That’s great. That’s exactly it. During shooting, I also take my family on set. My grandfather was a director. My father was a sound recordist. My mom did documentaries. I was on sets all the time. I have a couple of holy things. Also, before I had kids. I had kids quite late in my 40s. I try not to give anyone guilt when I make movies about going home to the family.
I always want to have straight talks because I know how hard it is. I was a child in the film family. Also, on the other hand, bringing kids on set and being nice about it. I love that people bring kids on set and I meet them. All these parents that do this wonderful work, it’s actually joyous. It’s actually wonderful to make movies and it’s a privilege. Kids can see that and maybe we’ll get them into the tribe.
John: For sure. My daughter learned that she doesn’t want to be in the creative side at all. She doesn’t want to be a writer or director, but she loves production. Through The Big Fish musical, she is there for all the tech rehearsals, which is incredibly tedious, periods where they’re adjusting lights, I guess, foot by foot. She loved it. She loves production.
Joachim: Wonderful. I have to give a compliment for Big Fish because it’s very relevant for Gustav Borg’s character. This idea that the histrionic crazy father, the one that exaggerates, it’s a double energy. It can be terribly annoying, but it can also be the most wonderful thing in the world because it’s truly that crazy, open, creative part of childishness that has prevailed inside a human being that should be grown up and responsible. There’s something punk and crazy and wonderful about it that we are all ambivalent about.
John: It’s an immaturity that as you grow yourself, you start to recognize like, “Wait, it’s unfair that I didn’t get a mature person in that role,” but that’s what you’re left with. It’s time for our wonderful things. My wonderful thing is something I was not aware of, a term which is useful called the Lindy effect. The Lindy effect is basically, for some technologies or ideas or cultural things, the longer they’ve been around, the longer they will stay around.
Generally, as things get older, you expect like, “Oh, they’re going to have a few years left.” For something like a Broadway show, if it’s been open for two weeks, you’d expect like it’s going to be open for at least another two weeks. If it’s been running for two years, it’s probably going to be running for another two years at least. Momentum will keep things going.
I think that also applies to friendship because as I think back to my friends from high school or college that I keep up with, I don’t have to see them that often, but I know that I’m still going to be friends with them until the day I die because that’s just things persist because they’ve actually been around for a long time. In a time where it feels like things are often in temporary or impermanent, it’s recognizing that things that have been around for a while will probably still stay around for a while. It’s called the Lindy Effect. I’ll put a link in the show notes to the Wikipedia article. I always like when there’s a name for a thing that I just didn’t know what to call it.
Joachim: My goodness, that is beautiful. The bad news is so we won’t get rid of the Oedipus complex.
John: Absolutely. People are always going to bring that up.
Joachim: Listen, that was lovely. I can’t follow that up other than to say that I have a recommendation that I feel that I haven’t really put out there yet, that I owe, which is Chris Ware, who is a graphic novelist.
John: I know Chris Ware. He does very cool books and things. I have a giant box of his comics.
Joachim: That’s the building project is like a box, but he’s also made more classical story graphic novels. I think maybe the most famous one is Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid in the World. I think the whole Ackman Novelty Library, which is available wherever they sell graphic novels, his way of dealing with space and characters is deeply inspiring.
Long before I made Sentimental Value, I valued him as a great artist. His books have been voted by New York Times to be the greatest graphic novels of all time and stuff. He’s quite renowned in that world. In the movie world, I think everyone should have a look at his work in all its variations because it’s formally triggering in the best way.
Like, oh my God, you could tell the story that way. He has a whole story, which is told with one, how do you say, square per year of a character’s life from birth till death. He just plays around with how we can elasticize and play with form of storytelling. I think that’s healthy for all of us to be inspired by. Shout out to Chris Ware, the master of doing character and space stories, I would say.
John: That’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Jeff Hoeppner and Richard Kraft. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with the sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.
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Thank you, thank you, thank you to all our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net. You get all those back episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on screenplays on screen. Joachim, congratulations on your film. It has been an absolute pleasure talking with you about screenwriting and filmmaking and parenthood. A great conversation. Thank you so much.
Joachim: Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed this. Thank you.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Here in the bonus segment, I want to talk about screenplays on screen. As I’m watching your film, Gustav shows up trying to convince his daughter to be in his movie. He has his script in a shopping bag. It’s just a bundle of loose pages that he hands over to her. She rejects the script at that point. That script will become– It’s not quite a MacGuffin, but we’re going to see that script a lot throughout the rest of the course of the movie.
Often when we see that script, we’re seeing spiral-bound copies of the script. There’s an English version and a Norwegian version. Are those forms I would expect to see if I were actually in Oslo shooting a film? Because we’re used to, in the US, scripts that have two brads in them. We’re used to a certain idea of a script, and they don’t look like that. Talk to us about the screenplays in the movie and in real life.
Joachim: Completely. Thank you for that question. I’ve never been asked that. The spiral back is very often what we give everyone because you can actually fold it completely over without hurting the pages. They’re quite solid. There’s a little transparent plastic cover on the front and a thicker something on the back. That’s what we give to the whole team, to the actors, everyone, usually, unless people ask for different things.
Very often, I would say something like Gustav Borg would just print it out at home and bring it in a plastic bag. That’s completely his character to do that. He calls his script, there’s a beautiful Norwegian word that we consider to call Sentimental Value.
John: Which is?
Joachim: It’s the Norwegian term of homesickness, but it’s called hjemlengsel, which is home-longing. It’s in Norwegian. It’s a more soft, poetic, it’s like what a child feels when you’re at camp. It’s not sickness, it’s more aggressive, it’s longing. Your heart feels it. It’s a softer term, more melancholic somehow. He calls this film home-longing. You see it in Swedish, which is almost the same as Norwegian, hjemlengtan, which is this equivalent. In Swedish, it means the same as Norwegian.
That’s the name of that script. You see it, if you see it on a big screen, you can see what the script is called. If you see it on TV, you probably can’t. That’s cinema. The thing about it is that– Eskil and I have read a lot of American scripts. You tell me, when you read our script, which I now realize [crosstalk]
John: It’s the same. All the layout and all the things are the same. It’s just that, literally, the binding of it was just such a different experience. The spiral binding, it makes sense. Of course, if you have pages that you were going to swap out, it’s much more difficult to swap out in a spiral down like that. That’s why, in the US, we more often use three-ring binders for those scripts because then you can just pop in the new pages if something small has changed.
Joachim: What we do is we give sides on the day to everyone and talk about that in the morning meeting with the actors. I have this rule that we never want to give new material to actors less than at least four or five, ideally, a week before we shoot something, or I have a personal conversation about them on the day and we change something.
I don’t want to throw it at people. I want people to almost forget the text because they know it so well. They need that time to learn it and forget it, and then do it. You know what I mean? There’s this intuitive way of dealing with text that I idealize in directing with actors. What I would say is that you’re absolutely right. You could change them out, swap them out.
There’s always a discussion on this. How do we do the numeric system? By the time we shoot, I also have floor plans. I do a lot of pre-production. I actually do a big production. I have floor plans for everything. I have new sides that we might have refined and all that stuff. The screenplay itself is just one of the tools that we have at our disposal as a blueprint.
John: In the course of the film, Gustav says, like, oh, here’s the English and the Norwegian versions of the script. It says Norwegian. Gustav’s character is natively Swedish, but he’s working in Norwegian. For you as a filmmaker, when do you actually make the English version of a script?
Joachim: We do it early on for financing to get all our wonderful partners to remember just without going into that whole thing. This is the co-production between the UK, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. Then we also have a wonderful Neon, the American distributor who supported it from before it was even finished as a piece of writing. We have a lot of people coming in and want them all to read and talk to them about what we’re doing.
English matters for a lot of these languages. We also do a French translation, which we work on a lot, English, French, and Norwegian versions. In the Norwegian screenplay, there was also for Elle important that she could read it in English. In the Norwegian screenplay, all of the English dialogue is in English because the film has some English dialogue for Stella and Elle’s characters particularly. There’s never one which is all Norwegian in this case.
John: There’s not a sense that the canonical real version of the movie is the Norwegian screenplay. They’re all equally valid documents for you, or at least the English and the Norwegian?
Joachim: No, the Norwegian one is the real one because it’s the one we shoot with the real Norwegian dialogue that keeps changing and stuff. We don’t always update the international English one. In the case of Elle and Stella and speaking English, that would be equally the original, of course, because they are speaking English in the actual film.
John: Joachim, thank you so much for talking about the screenplay and for writing such a great screenplay and directing such a great movie. It’s an absolute pleasure talking with you.
Joachim: Thank you for having me. This was fun.
John: Thank you.
Links:
- Sentimental Value | Screenplay
- Joachim Trier
- Notorious (1946)
- The Lindy Effect
- Chris Ware
- Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware
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- Outro by Jeff Hoeppner & Richard Kraft (send us yours!)
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