If you walk through the elegant neighborhood of Frogner, in Oslo, you may notice a house that doesn’t fit in with the understated apartment buildings and embassies nearby. It’s not that the house is ugly or run-down. Rather, it evokes a cottage from a fairy tale. Clad in dark wood with a steeply gabled roof, it has squiggles of cherry-red trim, like decorations on a birthday cake. Norwegians call such architecture dragestil, or “dragon style,” a late-nineteenth-century aesthetic recalling Viking ships and wooden-stave churches. To Joachim Trier, the Norwegian director whose new film, “Sentimental Value,” is partially set at this address, the house is “a bit like Pippi Longstocking’s. There’s a feeling of something wild and soulful in the middle of something more mannered and polite.”
Although it’s a cliché to say that a place can be as much of a character in a movie as a person, it’s a cliché that Trier has made his own. In three of his previous six films—“Reprise” (2006), “Oslo, August 31st”(2011), and his breakout hit, “The Worst Person in the World” (2021)—Oslo has been far more than a backdrop. His characters are constantly roaming the city, and Trier highlights its melancholy beauty: its lush but empty-looking parks; its moody indigo fjord.
In May, when “Sentimental Value” premièred at Cannes, where it received the Grand Prix, one of the film’s stars, Elle Fanning, appeared at a press conference in a T-shirt that said “Joachim Trier Summer.” The previous month, the pop star Charli XCX—who’d coined the term “Brat Summer” to promote an album in 2024—had performed at Coachella, including Trier’s name in a strobing slide show listing artists deserving of their own summer. Trier told me that, in Norway, there had been many jokes about what a “Trier Summer” might mean. Though his films are formally playful and, at times, droll, they are also intimate explorations of difficult emotions. Among the recurrent themes are suicide, mysteriously intractable sorrow, and failed attempts at familial and romantic connection. Trier said, laughing, “A Norwegian newspaper was, like, ‘Joachim Trier Summer? What’s that? Being depressed? Being lonely at parties?’ ”
In October, I spoke to the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard, an early admirer of Trier’s who has become a friend, of a particular sort. The first time they talked, at a literary festival in New York, in 2016, Trier told Knausgaard a secret about himself, and since then they’ve met about once a year, for long conversations. “We talk about incredibly personal things,” Knausgaard said. “There is some sort of safe space with him, and he’s very honest and very interested in other people and their relationships.” In between those meetings, they are rarely in touch. Nonetheless, Knausgaard said, if he were drowning, Trier would be one of the people he’d most want to see in an approaching lifeboat. The previous day, Knausgaard had been to a screening of “Sentimental Value” in London, where he lives. (The film opens in the U.S. on November 7th.) “I was enormously touched by it,” he said. “I was actually crying.” Knausgaard texted Trier afterward to say, “I know where the bar is now—you’re over it.” Knausgaard told me, “I wanted to just go home and write about relationships and families. I thought, That’s where you should be, where you touch other people’s emotions. Not in a hollow—sorry—Hollywood way, but in a way where there are many things you can reflect on later.”
The phrase “Joachim Trier Summer” wasn’t exactly Knausgaardian, but it struck me as not entirely empty. There is something wistfully summery about “Sentimental Value,” as there is in nearly all of Trier’s movies—a sweet but sharp longing that feels tied to the northern light and its long, seductive fade. Anders Danielsen Lie, a gifted actor who has been in four of Trier’s movies (and, remarkably, is also a physician and a public-health official in Oslo), said that, for him, a Joachim Trier Summer was “walking through Oslo in June, early in the morning, coming home from a party, and the smell of the lilacs.” He added, “Looking at Oslo through the lens of his films has enhanced my sensory experiences of the city.”
In “Sentimental Value,” the dragestil house reverberates with the joys and the sorrows of successive generations. In a prologue—Trier is unfashionably fond of them—a young girl who lives there, Nora, describes the place with a tender, anthropomorphizing curiosity. She wonders whether the house prefers to feel “empty and light” or “full and heavy,” and notices a crack that crawls up one wall, “as if the house was sinking, collapsing, only in very slow motion.” Nora grows up in the house with her beloved sister, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), her depressive therapist mother, and—until he abruptly moves out—her overweening film-director father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård).
The movie jumps forward several decades. Nora (played by Renate Reinsve, the star of “Worst Person”) is now a successful theatre actress who—as she tells her married lover one morning in bed— is eighty per cent fucked up. After her mother dies, Gustav reappears and lays claim to the house, which his family has long owned. In a fraught attempt at reconciliation, he asks Nora to star in his next movie. (His arts of persuasion frequently run up against his egotistical bluntness: “It’s not that I hate theatre,” he tells Nora, the theatre actress. “I just hate watching it.”) When she refuses—it’s not a juicy role she wants from him but, rather, parental attention—he casts a young American star (Fanning), to whom he effortlessly becomes a nurturing mentor.
As the consequences of Gustav’s awkward overture to Nora play out, the daughters come to a new understanding of their sisterly bond, the tragedy that shaped their father’s childhood, and the ways that art can and cannot help us reach one another. The old house, with its built-in bookshelves and an iron stove through which Nora can eavesdrop on her mother’s therapy sessions downstairs, suits this sort of family, with its confident taste and delicate secrets. But the house is also a benignly indifferent witness to the happiness and the strife that occur within its walls—and to the heartbreaking transience of human lives.
Trier and his location scouts searched for the right house for nearly a year. In the end, he found it a five-minute walk from the apartment where he lives with his wife, Helle Bendixen Trier, an architect and an experimental-theatre artist, and their two daughters, who are four and one. He loved the house’s big windows, which allowed him to occasionally shoot from outside, “as though the house is looking in” on the people within, and the way the light drifted across the interior walls in the course of a day. Even the house’s actual residents were the right types—one was a post-punk musician Trier admired. “It had this vibe of the family having come from old money, but then the people who lived in it later being more cultural types, with interesting curiosities,” Trier said. “It had a melancholic feeling of a grand past.”
Using this location had personal benefits: on the days he was filming at the house, he could see his daughters for breakfast and put them to bed. Trier deeply understands a director like Gustav, with his art-monster tendencies and half-blundering, half-charming attempts to reach his daughters, but he hardly wants to be Gustav. In fact, much of Trier’s process seems to be about finding ways to buck that model. It helps, as Helle told me, that Trier is “endlessly fascinated” by other people’s psychology—“penetrating the top layer of big emotions and trying to understand why people are like they are. That is a constant conversation, at home and with our friends.”
Trier, who is tall and slim, with closely trimmed hair, a stubbly beard, blue eyes behind tortoiseshell glasses, and a penchant for black chinos and sneakers, looks like your favorite history teacher. On set, he bounces with a natural athleticism. He used to race down ski slopes; he has gone more slowly ever since an accident in 2019 which nearly necessitated the amputation of his foot. Trier is gregarious and emotionally accessible, prone to clasping his hands together in enthusiasm, uttering an exuberant “Exa-a-actly!” when he agrees with a comment, and tearing up while directing. (He also got misty when I recounted something kind his wife had said about him.)
This last tendency is one he shares with the director of photography on “Sentimental Value” and “Worst Person,” the Danish cinematographer Kasper Tuxen. “A lot of D.P.s are kind of super-masculine,” Trier said. “Kasper is so sensitive and lovely—he’s really engaged with what the actors are doing.” Tuxen told me that it posed a technical hazard to film scenes he found especially moving. Trier’s movies are shot on 35-mm., and Tuxen scoots in close to the actors, often on a rolling stool ignominiously known as a butt dolly. “Shooting on film, you have an actual optical-glass viewfinder,” Tuxen said. “It’s beautiful for seeing things clearly, but the condensation from a wet eyeball is a problem. When my operating eye gets wet, the glass gets fogged up. So I need to use a heated viewfinder, to cook my tears.”
The American director Mike Mills (“Beginners,” “20th Century Women”) is a close friend of Trier’s; he also works with Tuxen. Mills and Trier both approach filmmaking with an unabashed sincerity, even as they play around with winking archival montages, flash-forwards, and other arch techniques. The two have regular Zoom conversations that can last for hours, and they share preliminary cuts of their films with each other. Mills said that he and Trier, “two very therapized men,” were uncomfortably aware of film history being “filled with narcissists who maybe made great films but were horrible to be close to.” He went on, “If you’re the type of person who sees a lot of that as being a dead end, or problematic, or not leading toward happiness or a richer life, how do you react to that?” Like Trier, Mills has a tendency to make therapeutically savvy remarks, then worry aloud that they sound pretentious.
I ran Mills’s comments by Trier when I met him for coffee during the New York Film Festival. In directing, Trier said, “there’s a lot of heavy lifting, both in getting your creative control and in getting everyone on board—leading a big team of people early in the morning when they’re tired, and half of them have undiagnosed A.D.H.D. but you love their energy.” This situation “can encourage macho behavior, because you’re a leader—the militaristic general.” When Trier needs to rally his troops, he deepens his voice, claps his hands, and announces, “politely but sternly, like a teacher—‘We gotta focus, everybody!’ ” He prefers to operate in a mode “of tender encouragement, because people work better that way—at least, the people I want to work with.”
I visited the set of “Sentimental Value” last October. The shoot was on a soundstage a thirty-minute train ride from downtown Oslo. Inside was a re-creation of the first and second floors of the house in Frogner. To film a montage of the house at various historical junctures, from the nineteen-tens to the nineteen-eighties, it had been easier—though not easy, and not inexpensive—to build a replica than to retrofit the actual house. A production-design team had layered the walls of the imitation house with a palimpsest of wallpapers; when the scenes for one time period were done, the team peeled off a layer to reveal the one underneath.
That day’s shoot was set at a house party in the sixties, when the place was occupied by Gustav’s aunt, Edith, his mother’s sister, who lives openly with her girlfriend. Gustav’s mother, we’ve learned, joined the resistance during the Nazi occupation of Norway and was imprisoned by the Gestapo. She later died, by suicide, when Gustav was young. Edith likes to crank up the music at her parties when the neighbors complain—one of them, she’s sure, ratted out her sister.
Trier ushered me into the fake house as if he were hosting a party, walking me past a table strewn with wineglasses and crumpled napkins. “This is the house at its most lived-in and worn,” he said, pointing out the carefully crackled paint on a doorjamb. He and Tuxen discussed a shot they wanted to get of stomping shoes scuffing the wooden floor. The party, Tuxen explained, was “one of the events that has been marking the house with traces of life.”
The dancing at the party scene had been meticulously blocked, but Trier urged the performers to cut loose. “This is a beautiful moment of liberation and happiness,” he said. As Trier explained to me later, such gatherings are where the young Gustav learns to be a provocateur “throwing off the old chains of neo-bourgeois postwar consumerism.” It’s a crucial transformation for Gustav, even if, in the film’s present day, the “provocations have become kind of stale and chauvinistic.”
The actress playing Edith, Mari Strand Ferstad, told Trier that she had to “remember even during this party about my sister that I lost.” Ferstad would convey that mournful awareness with subtly defiant gestures as she turned up the record player. I knew that Trier would capture this silent subtext. His films have an abundance of closeups, and he has an unusual patience for lingering on an actor’s face in the interstices of a conversation, allowing viewers to infer, or imagine, what’s inside a character’s head. Trier told me, “People say that movies are really all about space and the big picture and the wide shots, but I do feel that I’m deeply moved by being close to people in the cinema in a way that, socially, you are not allowed to be.” In daily life, he lamented, “you’re not allowed to sit and stare at someone’s face!”
Trier went on, “I like to sit right next to the camera and look at actors, and that’s what rehearsals are about a lot”—getting them comfortable with his proximity. Because of this intense scrutiny, he said, “I don’t cast anyone I’m not really interested in—because then, halfway in, you get into trouble.” He noted, “There’s a tradition in the Nordic countries of major closeups. Dreyer’s ‘Jeanne D’Arc’ is maybe the most famous example.” It was also true of Ingmar Bergman’s films, where a “central theme is being so close, in romantic or family relationships, and yet feeling that you’re still a mystery to others.”
When I asked Skarsgård, who is seventy-four and has acted in art films and blockbusters alike, how working with Trier was distinctive, he immediately said, “His fixation with the actors’ faces. He sees everything you do. He sits beside the camera, not looking at the monitor. Because that is his material. It’s not what you say or the dialogue—it’s what happens on the faces. As an actor, it’s a gift to have a director who is so interested in what you do when you don’t do the text.”
In the party scene, though, there would be plenty of swooping camera movements as the guests revelled. “I’m ali-i-i-ive,” Trier sang out once or twice, snapping his fingers along to the raucous Johnny Thunder tune on Edith’s turntable. A lifelong lover of music, he d.j.’s at a club in Oslo several times a year, playing soul, funk, and house tracks. He is fond of mentioning that he was thrown out of a punk band for being a bad drummer. His favorite term for the troupe of regulars he assembles around him—from Reinsve to Lie to his co-writer, Eskil Vogt, who has worked with him on all his films—is “my band.” Trier puts together the soundtracks of all his movies; they’re sometimes culled from playlists he’s made for Vogt and himself to listen to while writing. “Sentimental Value” makes potent use of poetic, lushly orchestrated songs from the seventies by Terry Callier and by Labi Siffre. It’s the kind of music “you could say veers into easy listening,” Trier told me. “But I like that you can take soul music and make it light, create levity with strings and so on. I like that dynamic in movies, too—nice light and colors but, at the core, real sadness.”
Trier’s début movie, “Reprise,” came out in 2006, when he was thirty-two. It’s a funny, rueful film about two young friends in Oslo, Erik and Phillip, who become authors. It charts their humiliations, achievements, and romances, as well as Phillip’s mental breakdown, all while hopping nimbly through time, both real and imagined. We see flashbacks to awkward teen memories (Erik’s progressive mom finding porn on his computer) and exuberantly hypothetical scenarios of the friends’ literary triumphs (first books that sell poorly but whose “enigmatic nature would’ve made them cult classics,” as one of Trier’s wry narrators tells us). “Reprise” wears its cinematic influences—from the French New Wave to talky guys-coming-of-age movies like “I Vitelloni” and “Diner”—with a gently satiric charm.
“Reprise” marked the first time Trier worked with Lie, and Trier’s discovery of the physician sealed his determination to find actors who could fully inhabit the kinds of characters he and Vogt created. Trier had told the casting director on “Reprise” that he needed actors who looked as if they could have actually written novels. Many weeks and several hundred auditions later, the casting director asked Trier, “Is it enough for the young men to look like they’ve read novels?” Then Trier saw a casting tape that Lie had made. Lie was finishing medical school and preparing to work at a psychiatric hospital. But he had acted in one film as a child, and the script spoke to him. He was also, Lie told me, “very into philosophy and language, and the relationship between language and thought.”
In the auditions, Trier asked each actor to name a cultural artifact—a movie, an album—that they loved and describe what it meant to them. He recalled, “I was looking for dudes who mirrored friends I loved, who cared about weird stuff. And Anders was, like, ‘Well, the film that really made an impact on me was Pasolini’s “Medea.” I saw it and I started studying Greek. Biggest mistake of my life—I wasted a year on that!’ ” Trier was sold, casting Lie as one of the protagonists. (Lie, for his part, remembers being struck by how “a film director could be interested in both French philosophy—Lacan and Roland Barthes, all that—but also punk rock.”)
Lie starred in Trier’s next film, “Oslo, August 31st,” too, giving a quietly devastating performance as a drug addict, also named Anders, who has been released from a rehab center so that he can attend a job interview at an arts magazine. Anders wanders Oslo like a spectre. He visits an old friend, an academic who’s married, with children, and who presents a picture of domestic happiness, though one flecked with the commonplace irritations that Anders seems unwilling to abide. After screwing up his job interview, Anders tries to see his sister, who’s been burned by him one too many times and sends her girlfriend to run interference. He goes to a party and stays up all night with fun-loving strangers, leaves increasingly desolate messages for an ex-girlfriend who never picks up the phone, then relapses and overdoses, intentionally, at his parents’ house. It’s hard to know quite why Anders can’t rally; he’s intelligent, good-looking, and loved, however exasperatedly. But most of us have known people like Anders, or felt enough of his frustrated despair, to recognize what plagues him: he’s an irredeemable disappointment to himself.
Perhaps the most wrenching scene is one in which Anders, seated alone in a busy café, tunes in to ordinary conversations around him. “It’s the core of the film,” Knausgaard told me. “What he thinks, and what you think, is, Oh, that’s so banal, it’s just not important. People just pretending, and so on. But they’re connected to life, they are actually living, and that’s what life is—those little things. Which he isn’t connected to.”
Knausgaard had been equally gripped by “Reprise.” Before Trier, he said, “Norwegian film was O.K., but I never experienced it as thrilling.” “Reprise” was “almost shocking—is this possible? For us, it was the world we knew—the jokes that circulated, the ambitions that we had, our way of talking.” And it was “very advanced in the way of telling the story. It’s not the usual realism.”
Norway was not especially affluent until the extraction of oil from the North Sea, in the seventies, began to raise the standard of living dramatically. In part because Norway lagged economically behind its Scandinavian neighbors for much of the twentieth century, it did not develop the kind of robust and heralded film industry that Sweden and Denmark did: no Bergman, no Lars von Trier. Lars Thomas Skare, an Oslo-based producer who was an assistant director on “Worst Person” and “Sentimental Value,” told me that Joachim Trier’s work represented “a kind of pop-cultural mishmash of ideas from France and from international films while still retaining a Norwegian soul.” Part of what made “Oslo, August 31st” so powerful, Skare thought, was its “very specifically Norwegian theme, which is: How can a person be so privileged and still be so broken inside?” Skare explained, “We have it so well off that it also breeds depression, in a way. Because we don’t have an immediate struggle in our life and our society that we have to focus on. Therefore, we tend to be very introspective, which also leads to a lot of people’s ruin, I think. That sort of first-world-country depression—it really touched upon that.”
These themes had resonance beyond Norway, of course, and Trier’s films have increasingly found international success. “The Worst Person in the World” was nominated for two Academy Awards—Best International Feature and, unusually for a foreign-language film, Best Original Screenplay.
“Worst Person” tells the story of Julie, a native Oslonian who turns thirty in the course of the film, as she puzzles out what to do with her life. After quitting medical school—surgery is “too much like carpentry,” she tells her mom—she works in a bookstore while experimenting with photography and writing. During this period of professional confusion, she begins an intense relationship with Aksel, an older graphic novelist with a cult following (played by Lie). But she soon feels trapped in the orbit of his focus and success. “I’m playing a supporting role in my own life,” Julie says. He’s ready for kids; she’s not sure that she ever will be. Julie crashes a wedding party where she meets a guy her own age, Eivind, (Herbert Nordrum), a nonintellectual barista. In a lesser movie, he would be played for laughs as a jacked doofus; here, the character is more nuanced—Eivind seems like a sexy, emotionally plausible alternative to Aksel. In a glowingly flirtatious sequence, they experiment with skirting, but never quite crossing, the line of cheating. (Eivind has a partner, too.) They smell each other’s sweat, whisper a secret in the other’s ear, watch each other pee. Then they part. In an inventive scene in which Julie runs to find Eivind again, Oslo kindly stops and freezes for her—a sequence shot with extras standing stock still, not with C.G.I.—so that she can capture stolen time with him without having to end things yet with Aksel. “Worst Person” is a rom-com, but its themes are much darker than most: the brutal intrusions of mortality; the way that the passage of time can expose, like a receding tide, the detritus of our plans and dreams.
Julie is a wonderfully complex character: ambitious but indecisive, outspoken but confused, alert and observant, full of mischievous life. Some viewers find her impulsiveness more irritating than endearing. But several women I know told me that the movie captured the illusory open-endedness of modern young adulthood better than any film they’d seen. A colleague remembered seeing “Worst Person” with friends just before college graduation and “dubbing it our generation’s ‘The Graduate’—but, instead of our anxieties stemming from expectations that we were supposed to get married and have kids, our anxieties were stemming from the fact that we weren’t expected to get married and have kids, and, instead, we could do whatever we wanted.” To me, it felt like an “Annie Hall” for a new generation, with a heroine who is as uncertain as Diane Keaton’s character but grows up more.
Reinsve won the Best Actress award at Cannes for “Worst Person.” Trier had first worked with her in “Oslo, August 31st,” in which she played a small part with just one line—but he had never forgotten how emotionally vivid she could be onscreen. He and Vogt wrote the part of Julie with her in mind. In the film, Reinsve’s dark-brown eyes shine brilliantly with tears as well as with mirth, and, thanks to her translucent complexion, she is one of the most eloquent blushers in movie history—the pinkening tip of her nose alone speaks volumes. When “Worst Person” came out, the American director Alexander Payne wrote Trier a note, asking, “Is there nothing she cannot do, no emotion she cannot feel and show?” Payne has cast her in his next film, which will shoot in Denmark next year. “You see thoughts ripple across her face,” he said. “She does the whole transition of one thought to the next with all the micro-thoughts in between.”
Ironically, the only movie of Trier’s that was not critically adored in the U.S. was the one he made completely in English, “Louder than Bombs” (2015). After his first two films, he got plenty of offers to go to Hollywood. He turned most of them down. But he did go to upstate New York, with Norwegian producers and financing, to shoot “Bombs,” a story about a family dealing with complicated grief after the death of the mother, a war photographer (Isabelle Huppert). It’s a well-crafted picture, but it lacks the brio and the insouciant cultural specificity of the Oslo films. The Hollywood Reporter deemed the movie “cool and diffuse where it should be affecting.”
Trier returned home to Oslo but, perhaps anxious not to be seen as retrenching, he tackled a new genre. “Thelma” (2017) was a psychological horror movie tinged with a dark eroticism, in the mode of Nicolas Roeg’s “Don’t Look Now,” one of Trier’s favorite films. A college student from a protective evangelical family begins experiencing mysterious seizures, and telekinetic powers, when she finds herself sexually attracted to a female friend. For Trier, making “Thelma” was challenging in an invigorating way. “Some of the stuff in ‘Thelma’ was some of the hardest C.G.I. you can do—ice and fire and human skin,” he said. Somehow, it served as a psychological reset for him. His next feature, “Worst Person,” became the third film in what is now known as the Oslo Trilogy.
In Norway, Trier sometimes gets criticized for focussing on the urban intelligentsia he knows best. A friend who was spending time in Oslo this fall texted me that her friends—mostly from the same cultural stratum themselves—have liked “Sentimental Value,” which has already been released in Norway. But she noted that she was hearing comments “about people being tired of him making movies about well-off white Frogner people.” Trier has obviously heard such complaints. “The biggest tragedies and complexities I’ve seen in human life have been of a quite intimate and internal sort,” he volunteered when we met in New York. “Sometimes people criticize my films for being about more privileged people and for not being social comments on how sociology and class affect people. But I would slightly disagree, to defend myself. I would say different classes also have different problems”—“spiritual and psychological struggles that I do think are O.K. to focus on. That I care deeply about.”
Trier was born in Copenhagen in 1974, into the kind of sophisticated, creative family—richer in cultural than financial capital—you often see in his films. His father, Jacob, a Dane, was a jazz musician and a sound designer for movies, and he sometimes brought Joachim on set. Trier recalled, “I learned to stay silent or you go home—the grownups are playing!” Trier noticed that some directors said hello to him, whereas others couldn’t be bothered. The Swedish director Jan Troell, who made “The Emigrants,” was “gentle and including and nice to the kids that came on set—he became a hero of mine,” Trier said. “Much later, I realized how much that had affected me. I want the set to be a nice place.”
Trier’s mother, Hilde Løchen, had started out as a director herself but ended up in television journalism, eventually leading the news division of Norway’s main broadcaster, NRK. The Triers have Jewish ancestry, but most family members are left-wing atheists who married Protestants. Trier’s paternal grandfather, Ernst, was a talented painter of modernist landscapes who never quite fulfilled his early promise. Trier’s maternal grandfather, Erik Løchen, was a jazz musician and one of Norway’s better-known filmmakers. Løchen’s “The Chasers,” a fourth-wall-breaking feature about a love triangle playing out on a hunting trip, showed at Cannes in 1960, alongside “L’Avventura” and “La Dolce Vita.” Another Løchen work, “Remonstrance,” from 1972, was ostentatiously meta: it’s about a film crew making a political movie, and it was designed so that its five reels could be shown in any order. The film baffled his countrymen, Trier said: “No one in Norway cared about that type of movie then.”
Løchen was bold in other ways, too. Like Gustav’s mother in “Sentimental Value,” he was imprisoned by the Nazis—in his case, for about ten months—for his resistance activities as a university student. Trier, who was eight when Løchen died, remembered him as a joyful companion on skiing trips. Only later, talking to his mother and piecing together that Løchen had likely been tortured in captivity, did he realize that his grandfather had been a “tormented man” who never got over his wartime trauma and tried to “counter it by making art.”
In “Sentimental Value,” there’s a powerful scene in which Agnes, Nora’s sister, goes to Norway’s national archives to review the files on her grandmother’s imprisonment. Trier made a similar pilgrimage to view his grandfather’s files. “It was extremely emotional to see the arrest card,” he said. “And to imagine how scared he was. He was a young man, studying law, someone who believed in a free society and was living under terrible conditions in a totalitarian, Nazi regime. And he lost many friends.”
Trier’s parents divorced when he was in his teens but stayed friendly, often spending Christmas together. He never felt any great urge to rebel against them—they made their careers look fun and fulfilling. After his father worked on a film in Brazil, he brought back trunks full of samba and bossa-nova recordings; the young Trier loved it all. He also recalls, “I was playing with cameras before I could write,” adding, “The generation after me had video cameras, but this was Super 8, so I could play around with film and send it to Kodak, and when it came back we’d watch it onscreen. They were family movies, but, because my father was also shooting real movies, he’d explain to me more about how things worked.” (Trier’s siblings are also in the visual arts: Emil, who is seven years younger, makes documentaries; Elli, twelve years younger, is a photographer and an exhibition designer.) When Trier got into cinema, as a young teen, he went through a mildly obnoxious spell of challenging his parents’ knowledge of film history. “But they actually had seen ‘Last Year at Marienbad,’ so it wasn’t so easy,” he said.
“I’m the most inbred thing you’ll find,” Trier told me once, laughing. “It’s embarrassing. My rebellion has not been about ‘Oh, I’m going to be an artist,’ and my family saying, ‘Wha-a-at? How will you make money?’ ” Instead of defining himself against his family, he felt a self-imposed pressure to extend its legacy. In some ways, he said, the “biggest blessing was that I didn’t run out of motivation, even though I can see through myself” so clearly. He explained, “I can see all this transference of two grandfathers who felt like they failed artistically in some ways, and how that transferred through my parents,” and then to him. Trier added that, “after a couple of films, and a bit of psychoanalysis,” he no longer feels troubled “about being so clearly the product of this family dynamic.” Now, he said, “I am grateful for it.”
When Trier was twelve, he got into skateboarding (and, later, making skate videos). The sport was transgressive, in a way—it was prohibited in Norway from 1978 to 1989 for being too dangerous for youth. The year the ban lifted, Trier became the country’s national champion, specializing in rugged stunts using infrastructure like rails and stairs. Skating, he said, gave him “a feeling of being part of a society that didn’t understand the freedom I was seeking.” He still wasn’t rebelling against his parents, though; they felt the ban was stupid.
Trier isn’t the only skater turned indie director: Mike Mills and Spike Jonze also emerged from this subculture. Jonze and Trier learned how to capture fluid moments on camera by making videos of their friends doing tricks. Mills told me that the D.I.Y. ethos of skating had also been an important influence on all of them. “Many skaters own a company, or make their own boards, or do their own graphics,” he said. “It makes for cultural entrepreneurs, which is essentially what an independent filmmaker is.”
Trier’s wife, Helle, thought that skating had shaped her husband’s aesthetic in some additional ways. If you’re a skater and you don’t remain “aware of both what’s ahead and what’s beneath you, then you fall and you hurt yourself”—a good metaphor, she thought, for the way a director has to anticipate problems while also staying in the moment with his actors and crew. “But it’s more than that,” she said. “Being a skater, you’re moving around in the city and finding places where you can do your tricks, so it’s an incredible way of getting to know a city. That kind of relationship to place has played a major role in how he treats Oslo as a character, as something that almost has a skin.”
Prefiguring some of the themes of Trier’s films, the skating subculture introduced him to “people on the edge,” as he put it to me. “I’ve lost several friends to heroin,” he said. “And I can still see them in my skate videos.” He went on, “Two of my friends are famous rock musicians of my generation. They developed confidence from skateboarding. But other people didn’t know how to find their way to civilian life.” When Trier decided to give up skating and pursue filmmaking, he announced as much to his friends, and it felt “like a little bit of a coming-out.” But “they were, like, ‘Of course.’ ”
In 1993, when Trier was nineteen, he began working as a camera assistant on a TV quiz show—trailing the camera operator to keep all the cables attached and untangled. One day, Eskil Vogt, who was the same age, turned up on set as another assistant. They sized each other up skeptically. Vogt, the son of a banker and a nurse, was understatedly cool, in black jeans and Doc Martens; Trier had on baggy skating pants. “I knew people like Eskil,” Trier recalled. “But he probably thought I was a superficial skater idiot who didn’t care about all the beautiful books he was reading.”
At lunch, though, the two began chatting, and discovered that they were both cinephiles (as well as readers of French theory and fans of “The Simpsons”). “He knew a lot more about Fellini and European art house,” Vogt told me. “I knew a little more about American indies. I had a lot of VHS tapes he wanted to borrow. And we liked a lot of the same books. Immediately we became best friends. After a couple of months, we were spending every day together, going to the Cinemateket”—a film institute in Oslo—“and then renting another film and watching it in the basement of his parents’ house.”
Trier recalled, “Apart from my wife, it was the most radical, important meeting of my life.” There was a kind of “romantic feeling” about their passion for movies. Trier and Vogt compared notes and were thrilled to discover that, before they knew each other, they’d attended some of the same obscure screenings—two of the maybe four people in a theatre for, say, a soulful Japanese gangster movie.
Even as a teen-ager, Vogt said, Trier had been “analytical and eloquent,” and curious about other people in a way that “opened them up.” He told me, “You know the cliché of boys and young men not being able to speak about their emotions? Joachim was the opposite.”
When Trier was in his early twenties, he began studying at the European Film College, in Denmark. In 1998, he moved to England, where he’d been accepted at the National Film and Television School, near London. Both he and Vogt, like the two young writers in “Reprise,” felt they had to get out of Norway—it was, as they once wrote, a “boring suburb on the outskirts of Europe.” Two years after Trier decamped to England, Vogt moved to Paris, to study directing. (He has since made two of his own features.) Vogt and Trier maintained their friendship by taking advantage of student discounts on the Eurostar train.
While in school, Trier directed three shorts in London but never found a writing partner there whom he really trusted. He had plenty of ideas but didn’t enjoy writing on his own, in part because he has a form of dyslexia. Trier turned to Vogt for help, and they’ve been collaborators ever since.
The two still write together in the same room—these days, in a Bauhaus-style office building overlooking the hilly park where, in “Oslo, August 31st,” the Anders character and his old friend have a charged conversation about mental illness. I was surprised to see how small the room was—perhaps eight feet by twelve feet. Tall bookshelves were packed with volumes of film history and back issues of Sight and Sound; there was a standing desk, a small gray couch, and a red velvet chair that looked as if it might have been torn out of a movie theatre. The friends still start on a new project the way they always have—by talking every day, for weeks, about what’s on their minds at that stage of their lives. Before “Sentimental Value,” their touchpoints included the phenomenon of people growing up in the same family but with sharply different experiences of it. Before “Oslo, August 31st,” they discussed the grief and mystery of losing friends to suicide or drug addiction. Vogt called this process an “unprofessional” and inefficient way of working, and observed that it yielded screenplays that weren’t particularly plot-driven. The meandering informality of the approach used to frustrate him, but he’s come to appreciate it, both creatively and otherwise. He explained, “When I’m alone, there are times when I don’t write, or I end up spending hours on the internet, and I ask myself, ‘Ugh, what did I do?’ ” But he could go home after a day when he and Trier had talked about movies, music, and life without writing a word and still feel that he’d been productive.
Trier’s collaborators often say how loyal he is, and he often speaks about his artistic partnerships in familial terms. So it’s perhaps not surprising that he and Helle both mentioned how intertwined their creative and domestic lives are, and how much they like it that way. They met in 2019, when she successfully interviewed for a job in the art department on “Worst Person”; she turned it down, suspecting that they might fall in love. But Helle, who projects a calm, grounded intelligence, has read and given feedback on the last two Trier-Vogt scripts, and she often goes on set. She teaches architectural-design courses in Oslo, and she and Trier have invited her students over to watch films. “That’s a choice that people in quite intense creative jobs have to make,” Trier said. “How, or how much, we will include each other?” As someone who preferred “inclusion,” he had been relieved and delighted to partner with someone who preferred it, too.
I asked Helle if she’d ever consider leaving Oslo, where she and her husband seem so comfortably nested among friends and students and collaborators, not to mention well served by Norway’s benevolent parental-leave policies and subsidized child care. “If you’re indirectly asking, ‘Are we going to move to L.A.?,’ then no,” she said, laughing. “At least for now, this is where he makes films.” She mentioned that Trier doesn’t develop a lot of projects simultaneously, with stars “attached,” as in Hollywood. “He does one project at a time, and that project has a life of its own, and it wants things like a child would, and we just have to make that work in our family—structure our lives around that. If the films take us somewhere else, then of course we will go.”
One morning in May, when the lilacs were already blooming in Oslo, I met Trier and Renate Reinsve at Kunstnernes Hus, or Artists’ House, a gallery and a screening room housed in an attractive functionalist building from the nineteen-thirties. It’s one of Trier’s favorite places in the city—the epilogue of “Worst Person” was filmed there. Kunstnernes Hus has a café, and that day it was filled with groups of hip-looking mothers and their gleeful toddlers; a few lone guys, in jeans and sneakers, tapped on laptops. I was surprised, given the echt-Trier setting, that nobody came over to make a movie pitch, or even nodded in the I-know-who-you-are-but-I’m-not-going-to-bother-you mode of New Yorkers. Trier said that sometimes when he is d.j.’ing a “drunk person will come up to say my last film was shit.” But there was a “discreet boringness” to Oslo, he said, and he had no need to maintain a low profile there.
Reinsve came in wearing a black leather jacket and chic high-waisted gray trousers. She and Trier hugged. After expressing jittery excitement about Cannes, which was imminent, they launched into deeper territory. “In our working relationship, I understand, on a profound level, what you want to express,” she said.
“I know you do,” said Trier, leaning over to clasp her hand.
“But I also get the space to express something,” she said. “I was very moved by that again, when I saw the movie.”
The two are close—Reinsve told me that she planned to visit a bookstore down the street to buy Trier something by Carl Jung, as part of an ongoing campaign to prove that Jung was more insightful than Freud. Reinsve, who grew up in a village southwest of the capital, had acted mostly on the stage before getting the small part in “Oslo, August 31st.” “Worst Person” was her first leading role in a film, and she went into it with her theatrical training in mind. “I remember talking with Joachim about how can I really find the character, should I do this or that choice, should I do something specific with her body here that’s significant? And then he talked to me about letting go and just being me, almost going into it like we were making a documentary.”
This made sense to her. Reinsve told me that she had “watched a lot of documentaries to see how people would react not when they’re creating something but when they’re observed—their micro-expressions.” Animation similarly interested her, “because you have very clean emotions, you don’t have the ego of the actor layered on top.”
While filming “Worst Person,” Reinsve said, Trier often talked to her about “going to zero”—not “preparing anything, not feeling anything” beforehand, “and then going into the scene and just letting it happen.” Under these circumstances, “more complex emotions would arise”—she might laugh in an otherwise sombre scene, or just allow herself to experience the emotions of the dialogue as if for the first time. “If he saw me straining a little, he would say, ‘Go back to zero,’ ” she recalled. At times, this approach created the disorienting sensation that she wasn’t really acting at all. “That was really scary,” Reinsve said. “But it also created an honesty.”
Trier told me that he dislikes it when he senses that an actor has “the intention of showing me, at the camera when I’m sitting there, ‘Look, I’m telling your story.’ That’s what I want to get rid of.” He is fond of quoting Goethe, in German, on this point: “So fühlt man Absicht und man ist verstimmt.” (“You feel the intention, and it bothers you.”)
Trier insists on having final cut on his films, primarily because it allows him to protect actors who have given unguarded performances. He once mentioned to me how grateful he was that Anders Danielsen Lie had been so willing to participate in depictions of male shame and defeat, such as the scene in “Worst Person” when Julie and Aksel have sex for a final time just after she’s broken up with him. Afterward, “he is standing there in a T-shirt with his dick out, feeling vulnerable. It’s not the heroic guy at all. It’s ‘I’m being left! I’m lonely! I feel like a loser!’ ” As Trier told me in another conversation, “The way you look at a body, a person, the emotions, how you treat all that—I’m the one they trust. So if I can’t make the final call on it? . . . The actors have brought their lives, their emotions—they’ve taken the risks.”
To further push against artificiality, Trier said, he has leaned on his experience making skate videos. The key to those early experiments had been to remain quietly recording while friends hung out and practiced stunts, so that he’d be ready when a memorable event spontaneously happened. “Luck favors the well prepared,” he’d said to me on set. The actors in his films rehearse for weeks, in the exact locations where they’ll be filming, but once shooting begins he urges them to try what he called “jazz takes”—looser, often weirder riffs on the readings they had rehearsed. These might or might not end up in the film, but the emotions in them, he believes, usefully rumble beneath the surface of straighter takes.
Stellan Skarsgård told me that “all directors are control freaks,” and that Trier is no exception. But Trier has the virtue of knowing what he can’t and shouldn’t control. He “prepares very, very well,” Skarsgård said, noting that Trier can effortlessly “discuss the essence of your performance.” But then “he lets go, because he knows that’s the only way to give the actors freedom enough to create real life, believable life, irrational life.”
The conditions of filmmaking in Norway favor this intimate and relaxed approach to working with actors. Public funding is generous, and the money comes in early if the Norwegian Film Institute considers a script to have artistic value. Trier spent sixty-four days shooting “Sentimental Value.” A comparable indie film in America would likely be shot in less than a month.
Perhaps the most touching performance in “Sentimental Value” comes from Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, who plays Agnes, Nora’s younger sister. Whereas Nora has acute stage fright and other obvious signs of anxiety, Agnes is more self-contained: she’s a historian with a husband and a son with whom she shares a contented home life. Lilleaas makes clear, though, that Agnes is exquisitely attuned to the shifting moods of her less stable sibling.
Lilleaas told me that, when she auditioned for Trier, she was a little startled to find that the first thing he did was sit down and chat with her for half an hour—“about who we are, and what we think about our family, about being parents. We could immediately talk about things that normally take me a long time to be able to share with people.” If she didn’t get the part, she thought, she’d at least treasure the conversation. On set, he talked to her about the importance of making “mistakes” in her performance. “Please make the mistakes,” he said. It made her feel freer and safer, she said, “because you know if you fail your failure will not be rejected, or held against you.”
At one point in “Sentimental Value,” Agnes visits Nora’s apartment and gets her to read the script their father wrote for her. To both sisters’ astonishment, Gustav’s script reveals an empathy he had rarely shown them in real life. Talking afterward, Nora asks Agnes why she emerged from their family in so much sturdier shape than Nora had. “I had you,” Agnes says, weeping.
Lilleaas told me that, when they were filming, “in that moment I wanted to hug Renate. That was my impulse. But I was holding back.” That very second, Trier whispered, “Just hug her.” She went on, “I also said ‘I love you,’ which wasn’t in the script. It doesn’t necessarily need to be said, but I felt so much in that moment that it was true.” The hug, Lilleaas recalled, led Reinsve to improvise, too: “First she says ‘Likewise,’ and then she realizes that’s too impersonal, and she has to say ‘I love you’ back. She wants to say it back. I love that detail.” Lilleaas said of the hug, “I’m so happy I did it. And that was because I feel like Joachim saw me in that moment. That made it possible.” ♦
