There is a scene in Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier’s Oscar-tipped family drama, in which an ageing director played by Stellan Skarsgård tells his estranged daughters, “You can’t write Ulysses driving to soccer practice.” Ostensibly, it’s an off-the-cuff comment about nobody in particular. Implicitly, it’s a defence of his own glaring absence from their lives growing up. Neither of the women are buying it.
For what it’s worth, the actor playing Gustav agrees with the statement. “It’s true. You cannot,” says Skarsgård, on a layover in London before flying back to Sweden for the holidays. The 74-year-old star of Mamma Mia!, Chernobyl and Dune is not ashamed to say he wasn’t the sort of dad to stick around at his kids’ football training. “It would be so boring,” he huffs with some melodrama. “I would die.”
The tug of war between art and family is one of many conflicts in Sentimental Value. In it, Skarsgård’s Gustav attempts to reconcile with his grown-up daughters Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas). Nora, a successful theatre actor, is caught off guard when he offers her the principal part in a film he has written for her. When she refuses, he casts a young American star (Elle Fanning) who becomes an unwitting participant in this family’s decades-long discord.
The film received a 19-minute standing ovation when it premiered this summer in Cannes; it scooped nine Golden Globe nominations and is considered a serious contender for next year’s Oscars. I speak with Trier and the cast across several weeks, some in person and others over Zoom from Norway. Lilleaas phones from her car in Oslo; elsewhere in the same city, Reinsve’s young son bounds over to show his mother a drawing mid-conversation.
“Sorry,” Reinsve says, admiring the artwork and scruffing his hair before sending him on his way. Reinsve is most famous for the self-searching 30-year-old she played in Trier’s prize-winning The Worst Person in the World. Released three years ago, that film awakened the world to Reinsve’s charms and skill on screen. She won the Best Actress award at Cannes for her performance, plus a Bafta nod.
Joachim is very aware of what he’s asking people to sacrifice in terms of family, because he’s making the same sacrifice
Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas
Trier says he has since heard from some of the world’s most starry stars that they think Reinsve is phenomenal. Certainly, she is part of the reason Skarsgård signed on to the film. “She’s one of a generation, the kind of actor with translucence,” he says. “You can see all the feelings, what is going on inside; she can blush on cue.”
Working together again felt like the natural choice, Reinsve and Trier both say. He wrote Nora specifically for her, and indeed, she slips into the character so fluidly – Nora’s pain, humour, and prickliness conforming to her contours, the way water fills a vessel.
One hopes a similar breakout awaits Lilleaas, whose detailed, naturalistic performance as younger sister Agnes is among the film’s most touching. Unlike Nora, whose every facet of life feels coloured by her father’s abandonment, Agnes has found contentment working as a historian with a family of her own. Still, when Gustav comes crashing back into their lives, she finds herself bound by her identity as the family pacifist. And while Trier did not write Agnes for Lilleaas, the actor shaped the character in ways he did not foresee.
“We had been looking for someone who would be giggly and avoidant of emotion, someone who was trying to make everyone feel good, and Inga was not that,” says Trier. “She had a grounded sincerity, and I realised that’s much more interesting.” His comments chime with what Lilleaas told me a week earlier: “The role becomes a combination of you and the character – and it doesn’t have to be literal, but it is truthful.”
Lilleaas had initially been puzzled when her audition began with a 90-minute conversation about her life and backstory. Likewise, Fanning says she shared personal stories that Trier used to “rewrite my character a little”; when Rachel arrives in Oslo for rehearsals on Gustav’s film, she is out of place and out of sorts. She feels lost and is longing for something more meaningful, and hopes that this film will be it. As someone who has been acting since they were two, Fanning says she can empathise with those feelings of wanting more for yourself: “You can’t help but feel the ebbs and flows of being in this industry, and at times, feeling that defeat. I’ve certainly felt that before.” On what Trier sees in Reinsve for Nora’s character, Reinsve laughs and suggests she wouldn’t begin to pretend to understand.
As for Gustav, some men might be offended to learn that the role of an absent father and egocentric artist was written with them in mind. Skarsgård knows better. “It’s never an insult, because I don’t play myself usually,” he says. “I don’t think they can know my personality. And I never thought of Gustav as being like me in any way. Our situations are similar, but it’s totally different. Or at least, I thought so until my son saw the film and said to me, ‘You recognise yourself?’” He laughs. “I said, no! But of course, they see things that I don’t see – but you can never satisfy a kid. You can never be a good parent to a kid, because truthfully, they have things to complain about because we’re only human – and they’re not perfect either. So you’ve got to live with it.”
Unlike his character, Skarsgård has a good relationship with his eight kids, seven of whom have followed him into the business. But he admits now that he can see some parallels. “I realised more that maybe I wasn’t totally present when my kids were growing up,” he says, quickly adding, “but I have eight kids – it’s f***ing impossible.” Later, he says: “I have been very tolerant to my kids, and they have to be tolerant of me, too. I’ve let them go and do whatever they want, and they can let me go and do whatever I want.”
Family thinking no doubt impacts the way Trier runs his sets. “He is very family-oriented,” says Lilleaas. “We try to end on time so that people can go home. He’s very aware of what he’s asking people to sacrifice, because he’s making the same sacrifice.” It’s as much a result of having kids of his own – the home where they shot Sentimental Value was close enough to Trier’s apartment that he could be back for bedtime – as it is of having once also been a child, waiting for his parents to get home from set. Trier is a third-generation filmmaker, “so I know what it means”, he laughs.
These interviews all take place separately, but without fail, all four actors speak at length about trust and the unique way that Trier facilitates it through weeks of rehearsals. “The reason I do a lot of rehearsals with actors is not really to read the text or figure out the story, it’s to get into the groove of the trust thing, where they get accustomed to taking a risk doing something unexpected, and I catch them,” says Trier. “It’s like a trust fall exercise that you need to get warmed up.”
That trust fall is at the heart of his collaboration with Reinsve. “I know so deeply that I’ll be taken care of as an actor, so I can be free to mess up and f*** up a scene, or be really bad sometimes, because to be that free is very risky,” she says. “And it’s very scary. I wouldn’t dare doing that with anyone.” Likewise, Fanning says she can trust that Trier is “seeing everything you’re doing and what you’re trying to do, because he’s not off in a tent looking at a monitor; he’s right in the room with us in the scene.” It’s why Trier will never relinquish the final cut of his films. It’s not a power move with the studios, he insists, but “the actors put their trust in me, and if some third-party group would take that away, it would diminish that”.
Similarly, the point of the rehearsals is never to drill the scenes to perfection. “Joachim, he is very well prepared, but his preparations never become rigid,” notes Skarsgård. “He never says, ‘It’s like that. You should do it like this,’ but you investigate the role together. You feel relaxed and you can do anything.” In that way, Skarsgård continues, “this Trier is a lot like the other Trier”, referring to Danish director Lars von Trier, with whom he has worked several times. Skarsgård recalls walking onto the set of his first Von Trier film, 1996’s Breaking the Waves, and seeing a sign reading: “Make Mistakes.” There were no signs on the set of Sentimental Value, but the message was clear.
Trust and mistakes, and trusting someone enough to make mistakes, is how Trier hopes to capture something real. “You can allow yourself to go there, you don’t have to push to get to an emotion. You just see what comes up and that is very scary. But when you feel seen, you become very brave,” Reinsve says.
Skarsgård says pretty much the same: “As an actor, your experience gives you tools, but the tools are boring and the tools are dangerous because you can rely on them and make a film with your tools and think, ‘Oh, it looks pretty good.’ But it’s not good because it doesn’t have the irrationality of life.”
Trier will often give his actors the same note: “Go back to zero.” In his words, it means getting rid of intention. “Not using muscle memory but being brave enough to see if it can appear by itself.” Trier isn’t interested in seeing an actor’s quote-unquote skill, or – to borrow Skarsgård’s term – their tools. Going back to zero is how you get scenes like the one in which Agnes visits Nora’s apartment to convince her to read their father’s script. Talking afterwards, Nora asks her younger, more even-keeled sister how she emerged from their childhood seemingly less scathed. “I had you,” Agnes replies, weeping as she climbs onto the bed, hugs Nora and says, “I love you.” None of that was in the script.
All four actors have earned Golden Globe nominations for their performances, with Oscar nods perhaps soon to follow. It’s strange to think that for Skarsgård, whose career traverses more than a few watermarks, it could be his first. “I’ve done pretty well without them,” he laughs. “But of course it’s exciting and good for the film – and good for cinemas.” Skarsgård is speaking about Netflix, which is lightly spoofed in the film when Gustav sells his script to the streaming giant. “The biggest behemoth in the cinema industry is Netflix, who want only a one-week window for their films in cinemas,” says Skarsgård. Translation: “Kill the cinema! Netflix has an ambition to kill the cinema. It’s so f***ing scary.” He hopes the prestige and allure of the Oscars may help to keep Netflix at bay – and if he comes up against his actor son Alexander, in the running for his BDSM flick Pillion, this awards season? “The gloves are off.”
But before then, there is much campaigning to be done. In a stroke of marketing genius, at the film’s Cannes premiere, Fanning wore a T-shirt reading “Joachim Trier summer” – a play on the Charli xcx “Brat summer” memes proliferating at the time. So what does a Joachim Trier summer consist of? Trier laughs: “There was a newspaper that said it means walking into a party and feeling alone, or being melancholic in the morning, or lonely by the sea.” Maybe it is all of the above. Summer may be over, but as Fanning says: “I guess it’s a Joachim Trier autumn, winter, and spring, too.”
‘Sentimental Value’ is in cinemas
