Director Joachim Trier Tours the Home From “Sentimental Value”

I started out making skate videos and filming as a child.

And I think honestly, to be a bit psychological about it,

I think it was a way also to try to sustain time

or grab time, pieces of time.

And I think that's the magic of cinema.

We grab something that's actually

kind of out of our control at best.

I'm Joachim Trier.

I'm the director of Sentimental Value.

I brought you to Oslo to the location

where we shot the family house in our film.

This is Directors on Location.

[gentle upbeat music]

I think regardless of how much

I'd love to intellectualize and analyze things,

I think the instinctive

is really what I run off of creatively most.

In this house, I couldn't, in terms of craft,

immediately see tons of possibilities

to fit the story that Eskil and I in meticulous detail

had written for an imagined house.

A lot of the boxes were checked in this house.

But also from a filming perspective,

working with Kasper Tuxen, a wonderful cinematographer,

I like and he loves back lighting, side lighting,

having exterior light be the key of most daylight scenes.

And it's hard to find a house with these kinds of windows.

The way of looking down axis

is what we think about in terms of craft a lot.

There are across axis on the floor here

that we can look at later.

So, those two axis are at play in our story.

And a part of this story

is not just talking about characters,

it's also trying to use a visual language

to engage the audience in coming home to this house.

Trying to tell a story where the audience

at the end of the film has experienced a place

of a home and a house and its history,

and trying to achieve that

on a conscious slash unconscious level for the audience,

so that when we leave the house,

it means something in emotional terms.

[furniture crashing] [Nora grunting]

Nora?

[speaking in foreign language]

[indistinct]

[door squeaking] [birds chirping]

I talked to Eskil about a story we never made,

which was we had a friend

who got really drunk one New Year's Eve

and tumbled into a taxi and woke up with a $200 bill

on having been asked to drive home to his childhood home

and woke up in the back of a cab outside of a home

where his parents still lived far outside,

in a different town and had to humbly go without his wallet,

ringing on the doorbell, asking his dad to come out

and pay the taxi bill drunk as hell, you know?

So, there's something about that.

And Eskil and I often thought about stories

of people returning to places

that weren't theirs anymore or something.

So in a strange way,

all of that percolated into this story, I think.

The production design team did a great job

at emulating in a studio, a replica of the first floor

and the second floor of this house.

And we dressed that for all the period work.

And at some point the people that live in the house

were invited to come and look at a perfect replication

of pretty much based on how this house

actually also looked in 1935.

And we had big LED screens outside the windows

that also emulated perfectly

what the surroundings looked like.

Well researched photo-realistically.

So, as you walked into the house, you were in the 1930s.

And the people from this house,

one of the brothers that have been living here,

a grown man teared up and said,

My goodness, it's like a time machine.

What we love about films

or filmmakers very often is their tone.

This is also what can turn people off.

I mean, you know all your friends

love a piece of music or a film, and you just don't get it.

Like the tonal frequency doesn't strike you on some level.

I mean, I think tone and style

is really at the core of creating films.

[gentle music]

[character speaking in foreign language]

[raindrops pattering]

Production Design Department

and also Head of Props, Hedda Virik who's incredible.

All papers, all cups, all things filling in drawers.

Opening cupboards, everything needs to have

a sense of a lived life.

That's the kind of movies we make.

I'm interested in that.

It could give poetic surprises, you know?

There's a moment in the film, which is one of the few hints

at what really happened to the mother or the sisters,

and her demise where there's a little,

Remember to turn off the stove, note that Nora rips off.

And that's something that happens because the people

that take care of these things really care

and it matters to them.

Some of them are in the script

and some of them are also developing that creative bond

between the crew that everyone needs to be geared

into the story we're telling.

I mean, I'm always cautious of the word story.

[Interviewer] Why?

Because it reminds me of a literal thinking around cinema

and cinema should be something more

than just telling stories.

It should also be about experiencing people in places

and stuff like that.

But we do tell stories at the end of the day,

and we do care about the details.

That creates a story outside of the image that you see.

I think that's when story is really interesting

when you understand that every character,

every place is the tip of the iceberg of lived lives.

[gentle upbeat music]

So, it's kind of weird to be back actually after a year.

And the wonderful people who lent us the house

has moved back in with their stuff and, you know?

But actually we used this couch.

There's still some remaining elements.

Maybe they were a little bit inspired

by how we dealt with it in the film.

Who knows?

So, let's go into what is the psychologist office

in the film where the mother has her therapy sessions.

The stove was always in the script

and we had to find a house with a stove.

So, this was lucky.

And the wonderful thing is that this room

could certainly be a psychologist's office

because the clients could arrive through a separate door

rather than to go into a family house, right?

They could even wait out there

and then being taken into treatment and out again.

And she could kinda lock off the house

and have her professional life in here.

Yet having the stove be the audial connection point

to Nora's room upstairs, which is just above here.

And that whole idea that we thought was fun

about someone having listened in

to their mother's psychology sessions

and what that does to a child.

I think many of us as children feel sometimes we,

maybe all children at some point feel

that they listen to too many things

that they shouldn't have understood.

Maybe that's becoming a human being.

The way you enter the adult world is tricky for everyone.

But I think this idea of the stove

was kind of interesting and fun.

I think one of the reasons we chose this house

was this axis, we call it.

The dynamic between the living room and that back room

down the hallway where, see, many things happen.

The house being a witness

to all of these occurrences and events.

The things even that the family

don't know how to talk about.

So, this is an important,

this is an important axis right here.

And we see also the entry space here to the front door

where we see several people arriving.

Rachel comes in here at some point

and sees the house for the first time.

Gustav comes to the funeral.

And we learn the spatial feeling of the house

through recognizing this axis and how the rest of the flat

or the first floor plays out.

I mean, there are things on the floor

that we wanted and we could actually use.

So for example, this scratch from this door is real.

Now, they've fixed the door.

But here on the floor, it's actually real.

It's the kind of thing that a child would notice.

It's very interesting to hang out with children

because they are very often smaller

and they notice tactility and things

that we as filmmakers also love to look at.

I mean, I think that there are different types

of people that make films.

Some people do completely imagined worlds

and that's wonderful.

I am not like that.

I love the idea that everything is material.

A human life that an actress lived

that somehow coincides with a character

and they're able to use it in indirect ways.

Maybe even hidden from the audience,

but it still materializes in an emotional expression.

That's material. A real house is material.

The seasons, the grass, the trees outside

that we see in such a beautiful house

because of all the windows, that's material.

A city in its development, in its sociology,

and its lived life of many people is material.

So, how do you manage that material

into the kind of film or story you wanna make?

That's the thing.

And to try to find a tonal coherency in that,

so that it becomes one filmic space.

[gentle rhythmic music]