724 - Introductions with Joachim Trier

Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and 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 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, Esko Voht. Welcome, Joakim.

0:02

Thank you. Hi. Good to see you.

0:36

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. So I thought that was when I knew I was in really good hands. Like, the opening sequence is brilliant. How we meet Nora is so, so good. When you've sucked your claws into us that, well, we're gonna follow you on your story, and it's just masterfully done.

0:38

Thank you so much. That's a big compliment coming from you. So thank you. Yeah, no, I'd love to talk screenwriting. I've collaborated for, you know, all the six feature films. There's a short films before that with Eskil Vogt as a co writer and I. 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. And that's kind of where the energy comes from when we start writing a lot.

1:08

Yeah. So 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.

1:44

And.

1:51

And in our bonus segment for premium members, I want to talk about screenplays on screen, because we have a screenwriter in this movie. Stellan Skarsgrd plays a writer, and the printed scripts we see in the movie are different than what I expect. And so I want to talk about sort of like 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. But I want to talk about the choices you made and sort of maybe some things that I'm Expecting as an American screenwriter that are just different than what you're expecting as a European screenwriter?

1:52

Yeah, no, let's get into it.

2:22

All right. Let's start with the start of this movie. And let's start with where this movie comes from. Because you're saying this is the sixth collaboration with Eskild on feature film. On 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?

2:24

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? So that was like some early stuff, like sort of the mystery of how we become who we become in a family. We thought kind of that idea of mirroring between sisters was interesting. So 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, Eskala and I. We meet every morning and we work from 9 till 4 or 5 in the afternoon every day on the weekdays. And some days we feel terrible. We don't feel we're doing much. And other days, everything happens in two days. You know, like, it's just this rushes in of ideas and structure. And so after we have structured everything and come up with what we want to do, there's a part of kind of two or three months at the end where Eskild actually writes it out. And then I go out of the room and I edit, I look at it, I come back into the room sometimes. And then finally we have a reading phase where we do sittings. Like we turn off the cell phone, we read it through to get a cinematic experience of reading it through in real time. And then we restructure a lot together. And those two weeks are the most productive, almost. Cause then suddenly you have to rewrite something quickly. You have to come up with new ideas. You have to change the structure. And then we go into the world and pretend it's our first draft. But, you know. So that's the process.

2:44

All right. It's a much longer process than I would have guessed for sort of getting to that first draft. So talk to us about what you're doing. So you're saying nine to four 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?

4:15

So I think what we're Aiming for is to find our own connection to the material. So I have not developed one screenplay or written a screenplay that I haven't filmed as a director. So this is like. 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. So we let a lot of stuff come up. Very often we start out with all, like, three, four different directions we want to explore and 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. And as an example, in this one, we were struggling to try to find something interesting in a. We didn't want to make it sort of just a domestic, you know, sitting around table talking, kind of move that doesn't interest in us. 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. So 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. So when we then finally found out it 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 sleight 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, 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. So when we have all that material, we start structuring it after a few months. And then we get kind of a timeline and we write kind of a step outline. And sometimes there are pieces or, you know, there's ambitions of pushing material together. So 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. And we know that we want a panic scene when she has dates, right. But we also know what the ending is. And, you know, how do we get there and 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. Like, so all of these things come together. So Eskel often says when he's asked, like, 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, you know, I know there are wonderful screenwriters who are like, I got the story, now I illustrate it. We kind of work the other way around. We want the material and the characters to come first.

4:35

So for listeners who haven't seen the finished movie yet, its story follows a Norwegian family, the two grown daughters and their father, who was 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? Like you said, it was about siblings. So you knew that. And at what point did you know that it was gonna 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?

7:30

I think three to four months in, it all clicked. We suddenly saw what it was going to be, and then we went on another round exploring character scenes and getting material, and a lot of stuff ends up on the floor. But 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 kind of true traditions a bit. On one level, I feel I grew up with a lot of American great character films. I remember Crane versus Kramer, undergraduate when I was a teenager, being like, amazing films and ordinary people. Films like Han and Her Sisters or Annie hall are amazing. Or the Breakfast Club, which was kind of a gateway drug to Ingmar Bergman because it was actually deep character studies done within a genre that seemed like it had levity. So on one hand, we love American character driven storytelling. On the other hand, we're also film geeks that love Fellini and Alain Rene 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. So we're kind of going between these traditions when we're writing these ideals, huh? So 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? And I don't know if this is the moment where I can use an example. Like the opening of the film, for example.

8:04

Oh, absolutely. So I want to segue right into that, because you're establishing in this opening sequence this narration about the house and sort of like what this is. And I'm wondering if you could. 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.

9:39

Yeah, please do. Yeah, yeah, I'll read off the screen.

10:01

So the film opens with this house. And 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. And in better condition, but there's something soulful about this one missing from the others. And then we're going to see this house in different times, different periods, inside and outside. But this narrator starts talking to us and Jokoba, could you read his narration?

10:05

Yeah, I'll read a 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 their 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, and 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. And before them, a number of people, pets, insects, also had their brief flash in the house's time. Four people have even died within the Walls of the house. Nora's great grandfather, Edward Irgens, 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. And I have to add, like the pictures are then telling a complete story of parents arguing here, of people coming and going. We are illustrating it with lenses and celluloid from different cameras through the 20th century and all of that stuff. So this is a good example of how we are dealing with kind of a cinematic language countered by a literary voice, so that the voice only tells a part of it, where the pictures kind of reveal more. And 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. And 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 in the lead of a theater play. And she's panicking.

10:30

Yeah. So this is about six pages of script. And it's an unusual choice to spend the first six minutes of your film establishing a place rather than the individual characters we're going to be following. But 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.

13:13

Yeah, yeah, No, I think absolutely. And I'm going to be very straight now. And so listeners should turn off because I'm gonna really explain stuff which an artist or a creative person should always be careful about. But I think I love the craft. I'm always, when I'm doing talks about screenplays particularly, or directing, I always imagine talking to a younger version of myself. And I always love when people were speaking straight about what they did. So 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. So 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 good 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. So 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. So I'm exploring something. We also learned that the house has had perspective on time. People come and go. They're born, they die. Time is short. This story is about reconciliation. It's about grown people realizing they don't have those difficult parents around forever. And 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 from our parents, but is there baby steps of reconciliation, we ask. So all of that is placed in the background, hopefully not too explicitly in that first part.

13:49

Yeah, you've primed the audience for what they're supposed to be looking for. And so I came out of the sequence going like, oh, no, the house is going to burn down. You establish like, this house is crucial to the film and something terrible is going to happen. Spoiler doesn't burn down, but something worse happens. It gets renovated. Something worse. I don't want to spoil it for people, but like, I didn't see it in audience, but I'm sure there's an audible gasp when people see what happens to the house.

16:13

I've experienced that and that's kind of funny. Yeah, it's turned very slick at the end.

16:37

But let's talk about. So I wrote Big Fish and Big Fish has a similar sort of set where we go through many, many years to establish sort of 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? Because it's not an obvious choice. And yet once you've realized that you want to make a novelistic film, you. A very novelistic device. What you just read could have been the first few paragraphs of a book.

16:42

Yeah, I think there are many reasons to choose this opening. So we love opening movies and we have several openings often and several endings. It's like 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. You know, they hopefully bought a ticket and go to the theater and they sit down, you got them, but you owe them something. So first of all, we want to establish a sense of narrative authority. I don't know if that's the right English word, but authority sounds a bit strict. But a sense of guidance that we really care. And we're gonna have fun here. We're gonna try to make a movie that takes you several places. You know, I often say to Eskel as a joke that why I love James Bond movies as a kid was, you know, you were gonna go to like an island with the palm trees and a beach. You're gonna go into the mountains. You're gonna going to be, you know, I'm going to take you several places. You bought a ticket to see family movie. But we're not going to get stuck by the kitchen table. So that's a promise. Right. So that's one thing that we know very early. We want to show a kind of formal playfulness because that's what we do in Oslo, August 31, a film we did several years ago, we start with a kind of documentary montage, or in the Worst Person in the World, we start with a kind of a narrative playful story of how the lead character can't figure out what to do with her life in a humoristic way. So there's that establishing of sense of humor and levity to it, but also the theme. So we knew that, but then also we cut contrast got straight to a very subjective, intimate, real time feeling of being behind backstage, going on stage 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 on stage. So to have that contrast in dramaturgical terms is what I'm, you know, that's what Eskal and I talk about it all. How can we make contrast? We have one post it note that's been hanging there for several films. We've ripped them down every time. It started all over with new skip, but the one that keeps sticking on the board is, remember contrast. So that's the whole thing. Like 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. So we start with a very clear dramaturgical contrast between the opening scene and the next one.

17:15

Yeah, your opening sequence goes through over a century and it's jumping forward versus a real time panic moment with Nora. So let's talk about Nora. Because a choice you're always making as a writer is are you introducing a character on a normal day or on an extreme day? And you made the choice like, this is Nora at a very big extreme. So we're seeing her, she's supposed to be going on stage in this play and she's having a panic attack. And she is both clearly a protagonist, but also the problem. And I love how you as the audience are not even panicked on her behalf. You're sort of 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. So this sequence is seven pages long. So we've had 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. And so the stage manager, great role, really great performance, but they're stage manager throughout. We don't give them a name because that way as a reader we know, like, okay, this is not a person who's gonna be coming back. Same with the director, Jakob. The actor gets a name because he's going to be coming back. And they're small things, but they just help the read. Because ultimately you're gonna be directing this and we're gonna get a sense of people's relative importance. But our first experience with them is on the page. And just making those choices help us know what to focus on, how to be thinking about this sequence, that we're.

19:48

Seeing the right things. Yeah. So we knew one challenge with the screenplay was we're gonna throw a lot of characters on everyone. I mean, the casting 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 kind of have similarities. It could be one family and all that. So a lot of work, and then we're jumping straight into theater world with tons of the side characters. And, I mean, we grew up adoring, really loving Martin Scorsese. The films, like, you know, obviously we all love Goodfellas, but also the Age of Innocence, like this incredible variety of characters. And then the task is, how are they important in different ways? So there's kind of a hierarchy of who you're gonna invest in emotionally. And that's my job as well as director. So Eskild always manages to do a good reading script. And we're, you know, credit to him because I think he's a. He's a much, much better writer than me. I think he's very smart about conveying what the film will feel like. And 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, and 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. So then you give them names and background and you discuss with it, who is this character? And all that. But as you're absolutely pointing out correctly, at this stage, we're throwing a lot of less central roles into the play.

21:17

Yeah, so we're meeting Nora here. We're sort of panicking with her and around her and about her. And ultimately she does succeed and triumph there. But in the sequence that's on the page versus what's in the film, some things have changed. And let's talk about some of the discoveries you make along the way. So, like, she kisses him backstage, which is not scripted. There's this sense of geography and space is going to be dictated by the actual place you end up picking and sort of how it's all gonna work. How do you find, as the director, who also helped write this film, that balance? And when are you taking off your writer hat and putting on your director hat?

22:50

I feel that I'm kind of developing the same thing all along, and that the writing is such a kind of central aspect of setting up the possibility of directing. But then I go to the National Theater, which is very hard to get into. It's the. Where Henry Gibson did his plays, you know, we were so lucky to be allowed to film there. It's a. It's a, you know, 150, almost 200 year old building. So 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, you know, and then I see a lot of possibilities and I note it down. We do floor plans, we shoot, and we shoot on video. We do this stuff. And I often bring it back to Eskal 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. So writing is spatial, writing for space. Eskel and I talk about it like 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 gonna leave you, and then they turn around and go over to the table, how far is that walk is gonna be tremendously important to the dramaturgical weight of that scene. So from the smallest to the biggest thing. So I go back and forth and then ultimately escalate is not precious. He trusts me as a director. I go and do my thing with my team, you know, but it's important. For example, this scene in the editing of the film is when we really. We shot a lot more for everything. That's what we do, you know, and 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 and, you know, we get to try a lot stuff. So for an ambitious film like this, in terms of all the spaces, remember, there are several montages where we actually have to like go through the century again a bit later in the film. So for the National Theater, for example, I had a lot of material. And in terms of character, what we realized was the buildup of panic is what we dropped. We got straight into the material.

23:27

Yeah, exactly. So people will put a link in the show notes to the English translation of the script. And there is a lot more lead up to it. And you are able to just come right to her at that moment. And it seems an obvious choice in retrospect because you've just established this narration about who she was. And so to see her as the adult figure in this moment of Panic makes sense. And yet you don't know that as the writer, you think you need more Runway for the plane to take off and you didn't.

25:30

Yeah, that's exactly it. And I find that during the editing of the film with Olivia Boogie Couttet, the editor who's done all the. All the same features that Eskal and I have written together, we have a very close collaboration and his job is to be a dialectically opposite to all the establishing. He's saying, do we need this establishing? People are smart, the actors are great. He's kind of coming in at the other end. And it's a wonderful dialectic always. So Eskil always says when we talk that ultimately Olivia makes us shine as screenwriters. But I must say, going back to the script, for example, I'm very proud about the script as a structure. And 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. And actually it's quite exciting to jump into the middle of it and discover it a bit backwards. And that goes for a few other points in the film as well.

25:56

Well, let's talk about the introduction of Gustav. So 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. So at this moment we are introducing another crucial player in in the film. We don't realize yet that he's going to have storytelling power, that the film is not quite a two hander because the other sister also can drive scenes by herself. Yet we've greatly changed the dynamic here. And what you were saying about sort of like the audience doesn't need to know. We often talk on the podcast about the difference between mystery and confusion. And we're not confused when this guy comes on. We're just curious. And 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 leaning in because we're curious, because we weren't told. And that's the power of holding stuff back.

26:57

Yeah, no, 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. Right. So is 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 Skarscore 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. But there's a moment in Notorious by Hitchcock, you know, when Cary Grant gets introduced later and you have a lot of examples in films and the way they do it because Ingrid Bergman has kind of established the lead and then you do it in co lead is there's a long track in on the back of the set of the party where he's smoking. And 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 gonna follow. And of course, it's Cary Grant. So we had the luxury of having Stellan Skarsgrd step out of a black card, which arrival we perceive.

28:04

Exactly.

29:20

And we use time, so it is that. And we follow him in and he looks around and he's not doing anything for a moment. But 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 kind of the remaining story of the house and the death of his mother and all this stuff. And in the film, again, let's sustain the mystery. Yeah, let's. Let's do that. And then we used 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 as finished. We just want to be there with them. We want to observe, we want to feel, we want to be in the spaces. You know, we'd just been on a montage not so long ago, and we want to be present, we want to explore the wonderful actors Doing the character work.

29:20

You know, so often in screenwriting, we talk about how you want to end a scene with enough momentum, like forward momentum. They sort of lean at the end so that you have some momentum going into the next scene. And your film does that all the time. But your film also makes a lot of use of blackouts. Like, we fade to black and then we come back up and basically it's. The curtain comes down, the curtain comes back up. And 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. Like, what was the discovery process there?

30:13

I would say that those blackouts, they're also not noted in the film. And 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 kind of freshness. And sometimes it's fun again to use the energy of an opening, you know.

30:50

Yeah.

31:09

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. Like, it's an invitation for interpretation, space. And sometimes we jump time. Oh, wow, something has happened. And it gives this kind of 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 kind of 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. And through these kind of chapters, we have an allowance to kind of jump somewhere else.

31:10

Yeah. So we had Ava Victor on the show recently. We were talking about their film, Sorry Baby, which has more formal chapters. And the chapters are important for us understanding, like, oh, this is not told chronologically. It's crucial for this. But in the case of Sentimental Value, we are sometimes shifting between who is really driving the sequence of the films. And 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 gonna see this house and these people in different seasons as well.

32:05

That's very important. And 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. You know, that we have that dynamic at play in the narrative structure of the actual film, which I think opens up different thinking.

32:33

Yeah, for sure.

32:56

Hopefully.

32:57

We have a couple listener questions here. Let's start with Jeremy in Montreal on scriptnotes.

32:58

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?

33:02

Hmm. So now, knowing your process and sort of 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. But tell us, in this movie and your other movies, what's been your process and how much of your endings shifted based on how the script turned out or how the film turned out?

33:17

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. And that final scene encapsulates both her anxiety of mirroring her grandmother and the mystery of transference psychologically. How come she feels the same depression as her grandmother? And 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. She'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 kind of sees his daughter and she knows it and she feels it and she does it well. And he looks at her and says after the take, perfect. And they don't know what to say to each other. And 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 probably gonna continue to have a complicated relations. But maybe they got closer. Maybe they saw each other in the act of creation, which is kind of 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. So 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. But 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.

33:35

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. But you are answering sort of the central dramatic question that you've established in the opening, which is to me was like, can this family deal with their sort of idealized versions of what their home life should have been? And it's only by creating this artificial house and this movie set that two of these characters are able to grapple with sort of what they actually wanted. And so it does feel like the right ending for the questions that you were asking of the audience at the start.

36:03

Well put. No, thank you. If it does that, we're very happy. So, you know, 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. You know, we try to create something which mirrors life on some level.

36:40

Question from Tomas in Brazil.

36:58

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?

37:00

This is such a great question because, of course, we have a movie within the movie. And where you have. You're casting an actress played by Elle Fanning in the film. And it's a question of is she even the right fit for this role that Gustav has written? So, 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?

37:17

Yeah, 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. So we have rehearsal, which just is, you know, a 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. I'm interested in them getting on the floor and trying scenes a bit, and then that will affect it. And then Esther and I tailor it a bit more to them. Very often it's very similar, but just nuances. So 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 kind of a joke. We wanted her to be a serious character that actually is pivotal and a catalyst to what happens to the family. So I think she's very important as the synthetic daughter in a way. Like she teaches Gustav something about himself. And 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. So, you know, she's very important, and it will help that a lot. But something that changed radically from the writing is the younger sister Agnes, played by Inga Ipstotelos. Because we cast and met a couple of hundred actors, you know, known and unknowns for this role. And Agnes in the script is more in her avoiding of conflict and wanting everyone to feel good. She's more like jovial, playful, kind of giggly, smiling, trying to avoid my sister and father arguing. But whereas Inge came in with this earnest groundedness, this sincerity and that power shifted the character tremendously because that is her. 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. So she's not avoiding by joking it away or being jovial. She's actually staying silent, looking and being pretty straight shooter when she actually confronts the others. And that was forceful and that was Inge 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.

37:39

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. The levels of looking into a mirror is so challenging at the scene works so well.

40:07

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 that. But, you know, it's almost like singing on the edge of a tonality or falseness, but still being in key. Like there's something really sophisticated. And 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 real daughters, it seems. But in that scene, she shows a different kind of vulnerability in acting style. So, like, Elle is really amazing. I think I'm very, very impressed with her.

40:21

Yeah. And so both Inge 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.

41:11

Peter says, I'm married with step kids 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.

41:20

At the desk, or at least buried.

41:43

Deeply enough in your subconscious so that you can be fully present with your family.

41:45

That's the million dollar question, isn't it? And that's what the film is about too. How do you transition so that you can be a parent?

41:51

Yeah. Gustav never mastered that skill. No, he's not good at it.

41:58

No, he didn't. He didn't. I mean, what I do is I communicate very deeply with my wife. And now we have two young daughters and we talk about it. And I try to look at it like it like a real important life task and that I try to be good enough. And I know I will fail some days, but I will also be better other days. But I find that during writing those are the best, 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. And then I think I try to tell myself this. I don't always manage, but I try to think I'm interested in characters and life. And I love being surprised by what happens in reality. And 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. So 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. So I try to tell myself that. But then there's also, like, a weird thing. All parents at the moment are guilty about using cell phones. And 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. So I'm trying all these things and I'm grappling with it and I'm trying my best. But 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.

42:02

Yeah, for me, I'm not putting myself in a way necessarily, but having a clear separation between this is my workspace and my home space is really helpful. So I'm lucky that my office is over the garage. And so just those 10ft going back into the kitchen, things are separated out. And then when I'm in production, a lot of times my daughter has been around and she's seen the work. And for her to see how much work there is and sort of the tedium of it, but also all the decisions and the questions and meeting who the people are around it. It's just like taking the mystery away has helped as well.

43:46

That's great. That's exactly it. And during shooting, I also take my family on set. And I was a child because my father and my grandfather. My grandfather was a film director. My father was a sound recordist. My mom did documentaries. I was on sets all the time. And I try. I have a couple of holy things also. Before I had kids, I kids quite late in my 40s. But 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. But 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 and they, you know, all these parents that do this wonderful work, it's actually joyous. It's actually wonderful to make movies. And it's a privilege so kids can see that and maybe will get them into the tribe.

44:20

Yeah, for sure. My daughter learned that she doesn't want to be in, like, the creative side of it all. She doesn't want to be a writer or director, but she loves production. And so through the Big Fish musical, she is there for all the tech rehearsals, which is incredibly tedious periods where they're adjusting lights like foot by foot. And she loved it, and so she loves production.

45:10

Wonderful, wonderful. And I have to give you a compliment for Big Fish because it's very relevant for Gustav Borg's character. You know, 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. And there's something kind of punk and crazy and wonderful about it that we are all ambivalent about. Right?

45:29

Yeah. 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 should have left with. It's time for our one cool thing. My one cool thing is something I was not aware of, a term which is kind of useful called the Lindy effect. So 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 start like, oh, they're going to only have a few years left. But for something like a Broadway show, if it's been open for two weeks, you'd expect, well, 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. And so momentum will keep things going. And 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, like, I don't have to see them that Often. But I know 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. And so in a time when it feels like things are often temporary or impermanent, it's recognizing the things that have been around for a while will probably still stay around for a while. So it's called the Lindy Effect. I'll put a link in the show notes to the Wikipedia article. But it's just a. I always like when there's a name for a thing that I just didn't know what to call it.

46:03

My goodness, that is beautiful. But the bad news is. So we won't get rid of the Oedipus complex.

47:26

Yeah, exactly. People are always going to bring that up.

47:31

So, no, 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.

47:35

I know Chris Ware. He does like, like, very cool books and things. I have a giant box of his comics.

47:52

Yeah. So that's the building project. It's 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. But I think the whole Ackman Novelty Library, which is available wherever they sell graphic novels, this way of dealing with space and characters is deeply inspiring. Well, long before I made Sentimental Value, I valued him as a great artist. You know, his books have been voted by New York Times to be the greatest graphic novels of all time and stuff. So he's quite renowned in that world. But in the movie world, I think everyone should have a look at his work in all his variations because it's formally triggering in the best way. Like, oh, my God, you could tell the story that way. You know, he has the whole story, which is told with one, one, how do you say, square per year of a character's life from birth till death or something. He just plays around with how we can elasticize and play with form of storytelling. And I think that's healthy for all of us to be inspired by. So shout out to Chris Ware, the master of doing character and space stories, I would say.

47:59

And that's our show for this week. Scriptness is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Cillelli. Our outro this week is by Jeff Hope and Richard Kraft. If you have an outro you can send us a link to askjohnaugus.com that's also a place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You'll find transcripts@johnaugus.com along with a sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. Scriptnotes Book is available wherever you buy books. You can find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow. You'll find us on Instagram @scriptnotepodcast. We have t shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You'll find those at Cotton Bureau. You can find show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a Premium subscriber. 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@scriptnotes.net where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we're about to record on Screenplay. It's on Screen Yakim, Congratulations on your film and it's been an absolute pleasure talking with you about screenwriting and filmmaking and parenthood. A great conversation. Thank you so much.

49:04

Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed this. Thank you.

50:16

It.

50:34