Sentimental Value, the newest film directed by Norwegian auteur Joachim Trier, is the rare kind of art about artists that actually shines light on the meaning of making art. The film follows renowned director Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) reuniting with his estranged daughter Nora (Renate Reinsve), a theater actress, when he attempts to cast her in an autofictional film. As their reunion evokes decades of resentment within Nora and her sister Agnes, they must all confront their emotions to decide if amends can be made. On November 4th, the Yale Film Society hosted an advance screening, generating passionate responses from Yale students, including Irene Kim and Asa Xiao from The Yale Herald. Recently, Trier and co-screenwriter Eskil Vogt joined a Zoom conversation with college writers across the United States organized by the film’s distributor NEON to discuss the complicated relationship between artists and their art.
Trier and Vogt’s closeness made their working method with Sentimental Value quite unconventional. The duo became friends in their teens and have worked together since Trier’s 2006 breakout film Reprise. Growing up in Norway, they took inspiration from around the world—Vogt showed us books on Godard and Hollywood from his shelf during the interview. During the writing process for this film, Trier and Vogt sat on Vogt’s couch every morning for a year. “Some days, we just nerd out and listen to music and talk about movies.” Trier explained, “Other days, we suddenly feel we’re doing well and we’re focusing on ideas that we develop together.” Their unique collaboration also allowed them to “be more personal.”
As artists, Trier and Vogt felt a commitment to portray Nora and Gustav with complexity and empathy. “We are rooting for art, you know,” Trier said. “We want the art to be good, to show that their artistic life has been valuable to them.” Vogt elaborated on how their art serves as a window into their psychology: Nora, afraid of intimacy in her life, finds what she needs by going on stage, despite her consistent stage fright; Gustav, a nuanced and sensitive man, fails to communicate his sensitivity to others except through art. Ultimately, Trier wants the audience to treat life choices like becoming an artist with curiosity: “For many years in my life I didn’t have family. Now I do and I’m very grateful for it, but that life can be many things and there are many ways of living a life.”
Reflecting on his own filmmaking process, Trier expressed similar sensibilities to those of his characters. “Being a filmmaker is a mixture of being a poet and a military general,” Trier declared, explaining the difficult nature of the job as a balance of simultaneously being vulnerable, professional, and sociable. This mixture explains the strangely moving combination of distance and tenderness at work as (spoiler alert:) Nora finally decides to work with Gustav.
Both Trier and Vogt also expressed frustration at the financial aspect of filmmaking, an increasingly common struggle that directors like Gustav and Trier face. Still, like Nora, he gains immense satisfaction in working through the difficulty of artmaking: “I find that in creative work, the stuff that you’re most scared about is also where your adrenaline, your focus, drives you to your best work.”
Ultimately, they hope to convey to their audience the delicacy of storytelling through this film, both in its narrative and its meta form. “Art has an ability to mirror and reflect on our lives in fundamental ways that we don’t have other places to do it. It’s outside the social language.” Like Gustav, Trier believes in the capacity of cinema to convey difficult truths. They told us they tried“to make a film that thinks and ponders upon what the narrativity is at the core, what that creative act that we need to survive is, and how we keep negotiating it with each other in all our differences to try to find a more hopeful version of that story.” As Nora and Gustav finally look into each other’s eyes after a take, Trier and Vogt expose us to new possibilities in creativity and life.