‘Sentimental Value’ | Anatomy of a Scene

Hi, I’m Joachim Trier. I am the director and co-writer of “Sentimental Value.” So we wanted the film to start with a strong character scene, and Renate Reinsve was always in our mind when we wrote the character of Nora, the oldest daughter in this family, and we put her professionally as an actor in the National Theater, where Renate has actually done some work herself in real life. We did a lot of research in this old, beautiful building where Henrik Ibsen used to do his original plays and for the first time in the late 1800s, so it’s rather a renowned building. So Nora has stage fright. She’s a star. She is going to go on stage as the lead in this big production about a witch hunt in Norway in the late medieval times that Eskil Vogt and I invented and wrote. We had to create a theater piece in here. But she’s scared of going on stage. And here we have Anders Danielsen Lie as well, our wonderful friend from many films, and he plays one of her colleagues at the theater. I was interested in exploring the approach avoidance mechanism of stage fright, which almost as a picture of something bigger, as something that we can all feel that we’re deeply drawn to something that makes us who we are, yet we are either disgusted or scared of it: to be that thing which we could be. That ambivalence really sets us into a strange place for the character, but also a very, I find, intriguing place because it’s very much what the film is about is about the ambivalence between people who are working artistically and the inability to create a life and a home outside of that kind of fictional space that they work within. We also wanted to have a bit of fun in the beginning, have a bit of a dynamic scene. There’s a bit of running. There’s comedic bits of her asking her colleague to slap her even though he doesn’t want to. But it goes deeper. This is a real sense of deep anxiety in her. Renate is an incredible actor. And it was quite hard for her, actually, to go into this because she doesn’t have stage fright, but she has to open up the possibility of it in herself. And I think she does an amazing job. All these people around her, some of them are actors, some of them are non-actors. We tried to find a group that would show how the ensemble spirit at a theater functions. The film is also very much about the two families, the family on a film set or in a theater troupe, and the family at home, and how you move between them. So I thought there was something kind of like the mice in “Cinderella” the beautiful — they’re stitching up her dress, and when she’s about to appear on stage, no one in the audience will see how everything is just stuck together by duct tape and anxiety and people barely making it. It looks very elegant and impressive. And I think that’s for all of us who create something, even movies. It’s barely stitched together by gaffer tape, and we just hope that the audience will feel something and engage with it. It’s the mystery of creating something. There’s also the comedic idea of the pressure of an audience anticipating. And I think after “The Worst Person in the World,” I think Renate, my co-writer Eskil Vogt and myself, all of the team, we had a bit of stage fright. We had a bit of writer’s anxiety. We had a bit of performance anxiety of, how are people going to deal with our next one? Maybe they won’t like it. All of that comes into being creative. I’m a third-generation filmmaker. My grandfather was a film director. My parents were in movies. My other grandfather was a painter. I know about this almost shameful need to express yourself in public and then at the same time feeling sometimes very low about it. And insecure and on some strange level, I believe that vulnerability is what also creates a space for the audience to engage with art. Hopefully mirror themselves. See that this is a human thing. It’s not just a sophisticated construction. It’s something where it’s living and breathing and there’s risk in it. And that makes me very moved when I go to the theater, which is by the way, not my world at all. I had to do a lot of exploring. I’m a 100 percent film person. I grew up loving movies, and theater was something I’ve always admired, but I get moved by the risk that the actors take, the vulnerability of going on stage to pretend you’re “Hamlet” for a whole night. There’s something beautiful about that. And finally, we see here Nora gaining the power in herself to pull this off. And she’s actually a really good actor.