Mr. Trier, as a filmmaker, do you ever get nervous on set?
Well, I sometimes feel this anxiety of performance. A lot of the time, I feel that I’m failing. I’m strange in that way. But I think when we create something, a combination of confidence and talent is necessary to create something of value; you’ve got to question it and then find it. Question it and find it.
Do you always have to question it? There’s always that little bit of self-doubt?
That’s the mixture! I don’t mean to sound stupid about this, but it is natural to feel that — I say this often because I think of young directors who might be listening or reading: it’s natural to feel that you’re fucking it up along the way. It happens every time, every time I see the first cut of the film that we put together, I’m devastated! Every time I call my wife or my friends or my mother or whoever and I say, “I fucked it up this time,” and then at the end of it, I feel okay. I resolved what I can do with this. But that’s the way it is. So I’m never fully getting used to it.
“I see the effort and the humanity of wanting to be there for us. That effort is at the core of the creative impetus.”
I suppose that mixture is part of the humanity of being an artist, no?
When I go to the theater, for example, I see the live performance actors as a metaphor for all creativity. At the end of even a bad play, I can sometimes start crying because I see the effort and the humanity of wanting to be there for us. That effort is at the core of the creative impetus. I mean, I’m sure there are artists who say, “I write for no one,” but I haven’t met them. I think most artists are eager to try to convey something, to be seen.
Maybe it’s more radical to be in touch with that side of ourselves these days… You even said at a press conference recently that tenderness is the new punk.
I’m asking myself sometimes, what is the radical position right now? When everything is very polarized, you need to be vulnerable and tender and listen to the other side and admit that I don’t know the answer. I’m mad at many things, but what do we do, you know? Sure, I’m risking people saying about me, “Oh, he’s sentimentalizing things, he’s emotional…” But fuck it, I’m going for it. I think tenderness might be the most needed and tricky thing right now. I’m saying that as someone that came out of the nineties and was kind of ironic about it and felt that we had to challenge the sleepiness of language all the time. I’m trying to yearn for clarity, I guess that is what I’m trying to talk about.
How does that manifest in your films?
With my recent film Sentimental Value, I had actors I’m very proud of, and they gave me real emotion many times. That’s what we’re going to show. I also turned up the colors. We did a color palette that’s very difficult to balance because we were going for real exposure. We’re not doing any cool tricks in this one. And for me, that’s a metaphor for emotion.
Sentimental Value
’s Gustav Borg, played by Stellan Skarsgård, is really a flawed and emotionally illiterate person — this isn’t the first time your films have explored such a character.Well, I have explored more sensitive characters but I think my interest in this type of character is generational. I grew up in the eighties when a lot of fathers left and tried to start a new family. My generation is better at divorces than the previous one… So I’m curious about that! Growing up with parents that endured the Second World War and said, “Let’s put on a brave face and buy plastic and have nice houses in the fifties,” there’s something about that generation that bore some wounds of survival. I don’t want to generalize but there’s a certain stiff upper lip-ness of the men from that generation. I don’t identify with it, although I’m sure I have my shortcomings. It’s an entrapment of a male persona that I think a lot of people are grappling with.
Yourself included?
The older I get, the more I’m seeing how the Second World War affected my grandparents tremendously, my grandfather was in the work camps and barely survived in Norway. As a child that was a big story far away, and suddenly I’m older, I’m seeing how quick time moves, and they’re gone now, there’s no witnesses… I’m thinking about my own kids and seeing how that grief has resonated into my life. I’m wondering, does it stop with me? How’s it going to impact the next generation? So all I can talk about is family.
“I’m interested in fast and slow. Is the universe just a quick explosion that we experience in very slow motion?”
I understood that the crack in the foundation of the house was a kind of metaphor for that intergenerational trauma. Is that right?
I live in a country where everything gets warm and cold every season, it’s a tremendous change, you have minus 20 or 25 degrees Celsius in the winter, and it can be very hot in the summer. So I’m used to cracks in buildings, and as a kid, I was obsessed with cracks! I hate saying it’s a metaphor, but I think for a child to give a purposeful meaning to it when she’s writing this essay about the house… I found it kind of an interesting idea. I like the idea that the house falls apart slowly, as if the house has a different understanding of time. I’m interested in fast and slow. Is the universe just a quick explosion that we experience in very slow motion? I thought the crack fitted into that.
The house must have been a really crucial location to find and get exactly right.
It was tricky, because a part of me needed a house I could shoot a lot of stuff in. And I love to shoot against the light, I love to have people backlit. I don’t show static things so much; sometimes I do, but I also do movements of repetition in the house so it needed to fit in its material. I was super happy when I found it and I knew in a moment when I walked into it. I went back and rewrote the script to fit the house I found into it.
Your films are often celebrated for the connection between environment and character psychology. Where does your inclination to the visual come from?
I grew up really admiring people like Michelangelo Antonioni, who did what I call in cinematic terms, spatial treatment. As well, Yasujirō Ozuin the Japanese director is an inspiration for me in the way that you structure repetitions. Of course, someone like Bergman taught us about close ups, it’s a Scandinavian tradition of the intensity of close ups that are not close ups, where you get everything. But in general… I’ve filmed since I was a child with a camera in my hand. I’m just a film person.