00:00I started out making skate videos and filming as a child and I think honestly to be a bit
00:05psychological about it I think it was a way also to try to sustain time or grab time pieces of time
00:11and I think that's the magic of cinema. We grab something that's actually kind of out of our
00:16control at best. I'm Jochen Trier, I'm the director of Sentimental Value. I brought you to Oslo
00:23to the location where we shot the family house in our film. This is director's on location.
00:37I think regardless of how much I'd love to intellectualize and analyze things I think
00:44the instinctive is really what I run off of creatively most. In this house I could in terms
00:50of craft immediately see tons of possibilities to fit the story that Eskil and I in meticulous
00:57detail had written for an imagined house. A lot of the boxes were checked in this house but also
01:05from a filmic perspective working with Caspar Tuxen, a wonderful cinematographer, I like and he
01:12loves backlighting, side lighting, having exterior light be the key of most daylight scenes and it's
01:20hard to find a house with these kinds of windows. The way of looking down axis is what we think about
01:27in terms of craft a lot. There are a cross axis on the first floor here that we can look at later so
01:33those two axes are at play in our story and a part of this story is not just talking about characters
01:41it's also trying to use a visual language to engage the audience in coming home to this house trying
01:50to tell a story where the audience at the end of the film has experienced a place of a home and a house
01:57and its history and trying to achieve that on a conscious slash unconscious level for the audience
02:03so that when we leave the house it means something in emotional terms.
02:25I talked to Eskil about a story we never made which was
02:29we had a friend who got really drunk one New Year's Eve and tumbled into a taxi and woke up
02:36with a $200 bill on having been asked to drive home to his childhood home and woke up in the back
02:43of a cab outside of a home where his parents still lived far outside in a different town and had to
02:49humbly go without his wallet ringing on the doorbell asking his dad to come out and pay the taxi bill
02:55drunk as hell you know so there's something about that and Eskil and I often thought about stories
03:00of people returning to places that weren't theirs anymore or something so in a strange way all of
03:06that percolated into this story I think the production design team did a great job at emulating in a
03:12studio a replica of the first floor and the second floor of this house and we dressed that for all the
03:18period work and at some point the people that live in the house were invited to come and look at a
03:24perfect replication of pretty much based on how this house actually also looked in 1935 and we had big
03:33lead screens outside the windows that also emulated perfectly what the surroundings looked like
03:38well researched photorealistically so as you walked into the house you were in the 1930s
03:44and the people from this house one of the the brothers that have been living here a grown man
03:50teared up and said my goodness it's like a time machine what we love about films or filmmakers very
03:55often is their tone this is also what can turn people off I mean you you you know all your friends
04:00loves love a piece of music or a film and you just don't get it like the tonal frequency doesn't
04:05strike you on some level I mean I think tone and and style is really at the core of creating films
04:13the production science department and also head of props headda virik who's incredible all papers all cups all
04:39things filling in drawers opening cupboards everything needs to have a sense of a lived life
04:46that's the kind of movies we make I'm interested in that it could give poetic surprises you know there's
04:52a moment in the film which is one of the few hints at what really happened to the mother of the sisters
04:57and her demise where there's a little remember to turn off the stove note that Nora rips off and
05:06that's something that happens because the people that take care of these things really care and
05:11it matters to them some of them are in the script and some of them are also developing that creative
05:16bond between the crew that everyone needs to be geared into the story we're telling I mean I'm always
05:22cautious of the word story why uh because it reminds me of a literal thinking around cinema and
05:30cinema should be something more than just telling stories uh it should also be about experiencing
05:35people in places and stuff like that but we do tell stories at the end of the day and we do care
05:40about the details that creates a story outside of the image that you see I think that's when story is
05:46really interesting when you understand that every character every place is the tip of the iceberg of lived lives
05:51so it's it's kind of weird to be back actually after a year uh and the the wonderful people who
06:00lent us the houses move back in with their stuff and you know but actually we use this couch there's
06:06there's still some remaining elements maybe they were a little bit inspired by how we we dealt with
06:11it in the film who knows so let's go into what is the psychologist office in the film where the mother
06:18has her therapy sessions the stove was always in the script and we had to find a house with a stove
06:24so this was lucky and the the wonderful thing is that this room could certainly be a
06:31psychologist's office because the clients could arrive through a separate door rather than to go into
06:37a family house right they could even wait out there and then been taken into treatment and out again
06:42and she could kind of lock off the house and have her professional life in here
06:47yet having the stove be the the audio connection point to Nora's room upstairs which is just above
06:55here and that whole idea that we thought was fun about someone having listened in to their mother's
07:03psychology sessions and what that does to a child i think many of us as children feel sometimes we
07:10maybe all children at some point feel that they listen to too many things that they shouldn't have
07:16understood maybe that's becoming a human being the way you enter the adult world is tricky for
07:23everyone but i think this this idea of the stove was kind of interesting and fun i think one of the
07:28reasons we chose this house was this axis we call it the dynamic between the living room and that
07:35back room down the hallway where see many things happen the house being a witness to all these
07:41occurrences and events the things even that the family don't know how to talk about so this is this
07:47is an important this is an important axis right here and we see also the entry space here
07:55to the front door where we see several people arriving uh rachel comes in here at some point and
08:02sees the house for the first time gustav comes to the funeral uh and we learn the spatial feeling
08:09of the house through recognizing this axis and how the rest of the flat or the first floor plays out
08:15i mean there are there are things on the floor that we wanted and we could actually use so for example
08:20this scratch from this door is real now they've fixed the door but it but here on the floor it's actually
08:28real it's the kind of thing that a child would notice it's very interesting to hang out with
08:33children because they are very often smaller and they notice tactility and things that we as filmmakers
08:40also love to look at i mean i think that there are different types of of people that make films
08:44some people do completely imagined worlds and that's wonderful i am not like that i love the idea that
08:50everything is material a human life that an actress lived that somehow coincides with a character in
08:57they're able to use it in indirect ways maybe even hidden from the audience but it still
09:02materializes in an emotional expression that's material a real house is material the seasons the
09:09grass the trees outside that we see in such a beautiful house because of all the windows that's
09:13material a city in its development in its sociology in its lived life for many people is material
09:20so how do you manage that material into the kind of film or story you want to make that's the
09:26thing and to try to find a a tonal coherency in that so that it becomes one one filmic space
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