Director Joachim Trier Tours the Home From “Sentimental Value”

Vanity Fair

Presented by Rolex | Director Joachim Trier brings us to Oslo, the location where he shot the dragestil house in 'Sentimental Value' starring Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, and Elle Fanning. Learn about Joachim's journey of finding the house with the right windows and axes, using visual language to engage the audience, and so much more.

Transcript

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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