Stellan Skarsgård - 'Sentimental Value' [LIVE]

26:34He was also a craftsman, and he was amazing with painting with colors. But then he tried to intellectualize it, and he failed completely. And Sven did not try to intellectualize it. He was a master of light, and what he had learned by working so much with Bergman was where is the essence of what's going on on the screen. and usually it is in the eyes of the actor. There's no one who has done lit actors as good as he has. He's got two Oscars for it, but I don't even think they know that it was the reason. But for instance, in the Oscars, he said to me, I was going to choose my costume and I took some shirt that was torn and it was like that and it bared my chest partly.

27:40I said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You can't have that. Why not? I said, no, no, no. Because it steals the light. What? It steals the light from your face. because where the eyes of the audience go is to the lightest part of the image. Not even most directors knows it, but they go there automatically. So he knew all about filmmaking, but he didn't have the language for it. So when he was a director, he said, oh I don't know what to say to those actors he said to me how shall I explain it and he was worried because he had a stage actor that came in and did too much and I said I tried to find something for him to say and I said make it more simple and there's oh yeah simpler simpler that's it and then he used simpler for the rest of the shoot

28:49Scott Feinberg:And we'll just say that some of those other actors on that film in particular, a pretty unbelievable cast, Liv Ullman, Max Fonsito, Erlen Josephson, and you are the principal cast. Not bad. Okay, so this brings us to 1996 and the movie that I think really exploded your career, I think it's fair to say, and also was the beginning of one of your most important, if not your most important collaboration, and that is with Lars Montreer. This was his first English-language film, Breaking the Waves. You're playing Jan Nyman, this worker on an oil rig. It's off of a Scottish village in the early 70s, falls in love with a woman in the village who has some issues of her own, but it's this great love affair until tragedy strikes.

29:43Scott Feinberg:how did you first even hear about the existence of Breaking the Waves? Well, there was a Swedish producer who sent me three scripts. And it was one film that I didn't do. It was another film that was a first-time director, and I did that. And the third one was Breaking the Waves. And I'd seen Lars' films, and I said to myself that I want to work with this director when he gets interested in people. Because his first films were extremely cold, in a way. They were technically brilliant, but they did not touch me. And he noticed himself. That's why he did the dogma thing. He took away his own tools that made it so, to let it become more spontaneous and irrational and come alive.

30:42So, and I said yes to it. I read the script and I said, oh, fuck, finally a love story I can relate to. And it's why I thought that was, it was a film about the essence of love. It wasn't whether you would get the girl or get married to her or get laid. It was a film about the purity of love, and that made it very beautiful to me.

31:14Scott Feinberg:When you initially were getting involved with it, your co-star was not Emily Watson, who had ended up being and who ended up getting nominated for an Oscar, and that was her first film role, and it began her career. It was, I read Helena Bonham Carter at the beginning, Is that right? When you, and you and she, I guess, together went to meet Lars for the first time. What were your first impressions of Lars? Well, my first impression of him, it was, he was, I was more famous than him. And I came to his home and he was this little man and he was very shy. and he said to me that, and I approached him to hug him and he said, I'm not a very physical man.

32:09I don't like physical contact, he said. And I said, and I hugged him, of course. And he moved weirdly for a while, but then I let go of him and he became normal again. But that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Helena wasn't there. She was there already. But we had this meeting with him, and we talked about the role and everything, and we were going to do it. And then in the car from there to the airport, I think I rode with Helena, while I'm carter. And I said to her, if you're smart, you do this. I said to her. And then she turned it down because of who, Why would she do a sort of be naked with a strange Danish director who's not known and an even stranger Swedish actor who's not known?

33:18So she said no. And then after the film had opened and it was a huge success in Cannes and everything, I meet, I'm at a party in Los Angeles and I see Helena Bonham Carter far away. And I say, and I sort of look at her like this. Questioningly. Yeah. And she says, I know, I know, I know.

33:48Scott Feinberg:In, okay, so that movie, I just want to ask you about your experience doing it because again, And obviously you would sign up again many times to work with Lars. On this one, it's almost entirely a handheld camera work by Robbie Mueller. It's your character for the first half or whatever it is, is incredibly physical. And I think probably so that we further appreciate what a loss when he has his accident. but what was it like for you to then for the second, the back half of it have to essentially act from the neck up? Like, is that anything, had anything prepared you for that before?

34:36Well, in a way, I mean, sometimes you have to because you're in close-up, you have to act from your neck up. So you used it, but it's confining. but you don't it's not bad it's something you like actually because all you've got is your face your eyes and that's what you really want to act with

35:02Scott Feinberg:Would you have guessed during making that movie that it was turning into something really special or did you have to see the where it was accepted and the way people reacted to it which just for the record, world premiere at Cannes, North American premiere at Toronto, U.S. premiere at New York Film Festival. Obviously, you know, people went pretty nuts for it. The film won the jury prize in Cannes, named the years, the best film of 1996 by the National Society of Film Critics, nominated for the best picture, Golden Globe, on and on and on. But did you realize while you were making it that this was headed towards something special or you had to see it to know that.

35:42No, you didn't know, you never know what impact a film will have, but you know if it's going to be good. I knew it was going to be good, but I did not know that anybody would like it. It's not the same thing. And it's also, it has to do with when does the film come out? What else is out on the market at the same time? It has to do with the political, I did a film that I thought was very good, taking sides with this transcebo. It's about the denazification process of Germany. And I'm playing Willem Förtwängler, which is a conductor. And Harvey Keitel plays a denazification officer. And it's taking sides, it's called.

36:37And it's about But when are someone guilty of something? When do you, what are the, what is your possibility to make the right decision in a historical situation and stuff like that? It was a very nuanced film. It was about nuances. And it had premiere in Toronto the day after 9-11. there was no nuances anymore so so it it it has has to do with where it allows the film and of course we were very happy about it i would assume that these next few that i'm going to bring up

37:26Scott Feinberg:came about because of the the response to breaking the waves into your performance in it starting with Good Will Hunting. In that, you play this arrogant MIT professor who winds up kind of championing a janitor who has great intellectual promise named Will Hunting, played by Matt Damon, who, along with Ben Affleck, had also written this. This is Gus Van Zandt directing it. And what I thought was kind of interesting was that you really likened Van Zandt as a director to Von Trier. Do you remember why you felt that way? Is it the way they work with actors or what? It's, I mean, Lars Fattier, after he's done his first films, he lets go of the actors.

38:15He just shoots them. And sometimes he doesn't even block the scene or explain the scene away. And he says, yes, let's do it. And then he can sort of, he say, well, let's do a more funny version or a sad version or something like that. And what he gets is, Breaking the Waste would have been horrible to watch if it wasn't for that method. Because it is in terms of writing, it's like the radius of the lost arc, you know, is for melodrama. It is for melodrama, for what radius of the lost arc is for action. Every scene is like the peak scene in a melodramatic film. It's a construction. But it becomes, you don't see the construction because you see live people and you see Emily Watson's fucking face, which is gorgeous and alive every second.

39:23You don't feel the construction. And that is the genius thing about it. So Gus Vincent, he says, very sweet, and he loves making films, and he loves what you're doing. And he says, let's do a take. And we do a take. And he says, oh, yeah, oh, it's lovely. Let's do another one. And then he said, yeah, yeah. And he goes on for 10 takes. And he says, yeah, oh, great. And then he has, the actor becomes more and more bold for each take. It becomes bigger and bigger and sort of interesting things come up and things happen with the actor. And when he is finished, he has 10 takes with a variation of acting that is wonderful.

40:17So he's got a huge source material and he cuts it. He's got the decision. And Lars von Trier is like every director, he's a control freak. He has the decision in the end to control it. So it's the kind of sampling that he has.

40:37Scott Feinberg:Well, so Good Will Hunting is the first of three important movies that you did in 97 that year after Breaking the Waves. The next one I'm going to bring up is Steven Spielberg's Amistad. You're playing an abolitionist in that. A lot of your scenes are opposite Morgan Freeman. I would think it probably was a pretty exciting big deal to be working with Spielberg, but people may not know, and I'd love for you to add additional context, but my understanding is that you had, to some degree, interacted with him before because when he was looking to cast the role of Oscar Schindler in Schindler's List, to some extent you were part of that conversation.

41:19Scott Feinberg:How far along did that go? I don't know if it was before or after. Yeah, no, Schindler was four years before Amosat. I don't know. I was the part of the conversation, if you're not getting it. So he was talking to Liam Neeson, and it worked very well. Well, and kind of interestingly, you played another character in another movie who ended up saving a lot of Jews during the Holocaust, if I remember. I'm blanking on the name of the film, but that was another one that you did. Very different, but interesting. Okay, and then the third of those 1997 films, Good Will Hunting, Amistad, and then the original Insomnia, later remade five years later by Christopher Nolan, but this was the directorial debut of Scholdenberg.

42:18Scott Feinberg:I hope. Harry Chauvin, yeah. Yeah. And also kind of a hit at Cannes and the beginning, really, of this whole idea of like Scandi Noir, right? Like this little sub-genre, not saying little to be dismissive, but like it's took on a life of its own. What, you know, just for people who need a reminder, this is a guilt-ridden cop. We won't get into why. Can't sleep. But that was a pretty interesting one. Anything you want to say about that one? We worked on the script a lot to get it working. But what I had to do as an actor in that one, it is that he doesn't show anything, this cop.

43:11I mean, he's a tough guy. but it's something happens in his you have to feel at the same time that is uh his anxiety and and everything that's going on inside him and that is only visual through the eyes so i i said to eric that you have to you have to when you shoot this you have to you have sure that you get this guy's eyes, even if he's not talking, because something will happen in them that you might need. So we took off the matte box on the camera because the matte box is this big, you know. So it sort of makes your you put your other actor beside the camera and you put him absolutely close to the lens, because then you get your eyes towards the lens and they can see your eyes better.

44:14It's what I thought of was, why do people like the eyes of people so much, of other people so much? Why? Because they see things in the eyes that they can't see. And Ingmar Bergman said something. He was sitting beside the camera and was staring at the actor. And he said, I see everything that the actor does, but at the rushes then, I see even more. So it's something magic about him. And we used that this time. And we had the matte box, but we took away the matte box and we put black wrap around the lens to get it as close as possible. So that was a cool trick.

45:04Scott Feinberg:All right, let's note your follow-ups with Von Trier. The first one after Breaking the Waves was Dancer in the Dark. Four years later, playing a doctor who works with this Czech woman, played by Bjork, who in 1964 has emigrated to America where she's going blind, trying to come up with the funds to pay for an operation to keep her son from going blind. You come into this kind of a musical melodrama, wins the palm at Cannes. It couldn't be more different from Breaking the Waves, but was the experience the same? Well, I was, at the time, I was busy, so I couldn't do a big role in it, so I had to do a small role in it, and I gladly did it.

45:55I did shoot one day. But then Lars had some problems during the, And he thought that he didn't get along with Bjork and Bjork didn't get along with him. And there were two control freaks that were used to get what they wanted. So it was very, I mean, I came to the set. When I came from Stockholm and I came to the studio lot in Copenhagen, the producer, I see a car coming and stopping, screeching down. and the door flies open and the producer comes running up to me and says, ah! And starts crying. And then I knew something was wrong. But it's, I don't think Lars or Björk really sort of hate each other or anything like that.

46:54Lars doesn't hate her at least. But they definitely didn't go well.

47:00Scott Feinberg:Yeah. The next one, three years after that, which I know, it was so weird, but I still think it's one of the best movies I've ever seen. And I think it was included just recently on the New York Times list of the best movies of the 21st century is Dogville, in which you play Chuck, this married father who's seduced by a newcomer to a small town in Colorado during the Great Depression and later does not behave well around her. We won't spoil. But this was released, again, in the aftermath of 9-11 at a time when America was just getting into Afghanistan and Iraq, widely seen as kind of an indictment of American society in a way, which then people – it's always something with Lars.

47:51Scott Feinberg:In this case, people said, well, how dare you? You have never even been to America. He then says, well, the people who made Casablanca had never been to Morocco. It just was this back and forth. But how, when you talked about it or read it or whatever, when you then spoke with him, how did he explain to you what he was going for with this film? I didn't have to explain it to you. I mean, it was pretty obvious. But he was trying to do the American trilogy. I don't know if he, I mean, he starts with an idea of a triology usually, and he doesn't finish it. It's just a sort of getting started. It's an injection of things.

48:38I just want to remind, if people haven't seen it or they don't know, on top of the story being a bit unusual, the way it's told, there's no walls, there's no roofs,

48:51Scott Feinberg:there's no whatever, everything's kind of demarcated by chalk on the ground and stuff like that. So just as an acting proposition for you, is this more like theater than film? Or how would you describe what it was like for the actors? Yeah, well, it's another step on his way to take away his tools. he took away he took away everything the only thing that was left was the camera and the text and the actor and that was a minimalistic thing that was I mean it sort of a test on his own capacity of telling a story and he did it very well his scripts are very well written you can just publish it don't bother doing a film about it But he does, and I'm glad he does.

49:48But they're very good. But the thing is that as an actor, when you came into that set, it was high, like two meters high over a soundstage, and it was just lines on the floor that were supposed to be the walls and the street and everything. And you're used to it. It's the way you rehearse in the theater. It's the normal that you tape up the set on the floor first and you have a rehearsal room. So it was not a big shock to me. It was sort of, in a way, liberating.

50:34Scott Feinberg:Eight years after that is, again, with Lars, Melancholia, playing Jack, this advertising executive, who's the boss of a woman, of the bride, that's getting married, Kirsten Dunst, and the best friend of the groom, played by one Alexander Skarsgård, I believe. And first of all, had you ever worked with one of your kids before that? I worked with Alexander when he was seven years old, and I think, and Gustav, about the same age. Well, I work with them now and then. But people want us to do something. Oh, why don't you do something together? Well, show me something together. I mean, they don't come up with anything good, more than the marketing idea.

51:26Scott Feinberg:Well, so with Melancholia, gets accepted to Cannes, was very well reviewed, but was sort of, to some degree, derailed by that infamous press conference there where you and the rest of the cast are sitting there with Lars and he says he tried to make a joke. It did not go over well about Hitler and Nazis and whatever. And it kind of seems to have really harmed his career, at least in the immediate or at least the perception of him or whatever. You remain a very loyal friend and advocate who I know you feel he's largely misunderstood, how would you explain what's really going on there? Is he just kind of a strange sense of humor?

52:18Scott Feinberg:And with that movie in particular, it would probably hurt to see all that work get a little bit lost in that. Were you there? Not that year, no. No, no. Because I talked to a Hollywood reporter, a journalist about it. Oh, me. So you're not guilty. Not guilty. The thing is, everybody in that room knew Norris, and they knew that he was not a Nazi. They knew he was the opposite of a Nazi, And yet all the papers had, I'm a Nazi as a headline. And people who only read headlines get the idea that he's a Nazi. But that's not what he said. He was doing a bad joke about him having, he grew up with a Jewish father.

53:18And it turned out when his mother was dying, after his father had died, she called him, she called him in and said, your father is not your father. It's my boss who's your father. And his boss was a German. So he said, I'm not a Jew. I'm a German. I'm a Nazi. And that was what it was. And it's, what I said to the Hollywood Reporter, I started shouting at him when I met him later. And the reporter said, I didn't do anything. I wrote exactly what, it was the headlines that were put in. So it was a lot of editors that were putting in headlines. But the thing is that it still is. When I meet people, especially in the United States, because you have a tradition in the United States of taking a word for a word, not the intention of the word is not counted.

54:22and that is sort of a binary way of seeing it but evil and good and bad and so on and so you take it by the word you can't say you have a lot of banned words in the United States I don't have my kids they have no words that are banned they can't say any word it depends on what they say and the attention of it

54:49Scott Feinberg:Well, I know he, after that, did not understandably do as much press with other projects such as Nymphomaniac, where he'll still be very provocative in his films and subject matter or whatever, and this one maybe as much as any. And I know there are times where people ask you, how does it work with Lars? Could he send you anything and it's an automatic yes? How do those conversations go? And I think to illustrate the answer to that question from what I've heard, can you share how that conversation, how the outreach went with Nymphomaniac? Yeah, of course, I love the band and I love his work. and he is, doesn't mean I agree with everything.

55:39Like you don't agree with everything with your wife. So it's, but he called me and said, Stelan, my next film will be a porno film. And I went, all right, Lawrence. And he said, and I want you to play the male lead. Thank you, Lawrence. but you will not show your dick until the last moment and it will be very froppy yes Lars I'm coming

56:13Scott Feinberg:and just to just to remind folks this is your character is Seligman the guy who finds in an alley a beaten up woman who he brings back to his apartment to take care of at which point she shares her story of life as a sex addict, Charlotte Gainsbourg's character. And the thing that people often say going back to breaking the waves through that is that he puts his female characters through some crazy stuff. But it's also true of, I think that's a bit reductive, right? I mean, yes, certainly I'm thinking like Dogville. You could see where people get that impression. But I mean, again, you feel, I think, that that's not a fair assessment of...

57:09Well, he's written the most beautiful female roles. He's not a misogynist. He's writing female roles where they are, it's really about him. He's the female roles when he's writing. And there's not many actresses that would wish him not doing his female roles. It's cruel.

57:44Scott Feinberg:There have been, over the last 20 years, some really interesting kind of projects that did not get necessarily seen by the whole world, including the last film directed by Milos Forman, Goya's Ghosts. You're playing Goya. You also did another Czech film, The Painted Bird, right, with Harvey Keitel again. that was in 2019 the same year where that was the Czech Oscar entry for international feature and then that same year you also were in Out Stealing Horses which was the Norwegian entry for the Oscars these are some of the great but maybe less widely seen I know also Frankie and Alice with Halle Berry as the therapist of a woman who's got multiple personality disorder and and again, some of these Lars von Trey projects that have been spread out in that period.

58:46Scott Feinberg:But you've also, in the last 20 years,

58:51Scott Feinberg:racked up the stats that have made you a spot on these lists of the actors whose films have collectively grossed more than anybody else in history. That, I think, to some degree, started with the two early Pirates of the Caribbean movies for Gore Verbinski. That's Dead Man's Chest in 2006 and At World's End in 2007. I don't know, were they shot at the same time? They were. You had, so those, 2008 was the first Mamma Mia, which had its own sequel in 2018. There was the franchise Angels and Demons or the installment of that with Ron Howard.

59:43Scott Feinberg:All the Marvel movies as Dr. Eric Selvig, the astrophysicist who helps Thor. That's Kenneth Branagh's Thor in 2011, Joss Whedon's The Avengers 2012, Thor The Dark World, I think 2013. Joss Whedon again, Avengers Age of Ultron 2015, 15, Taika Waititi, Thor Love and Thunder 2022. Another big hit movie with a filmmaker who I'll ask you about, David Fincher with Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. But I guess just first of all, for you, when you go on to a set like Pirates of the Caribbean or Dune, which we'll separately come to a bit more. Is your way of approaching the job any different than it is when you do The Painted Bird or whatever, just a more intimate project?

1:00:41It's not really. But you have to know what kind of film you're in. You have to know what is needed of you.

1:00:55Because, I mean, And if like a big Hollywood picture where you're playing the bad guy, sometimes it is necessary only to be bad in it, like in Dune. It is an image of something. It's not a psychological thing. If you do a small independent film, it's a psychological thing. You have to not explain the person, but you have to carry everything with him. In Dune, it's visual. You see him and you're scared, and that's it. But it's a different way to get to that too.

1:01:44Scott Feinberg:So yeah, I guess let's bring in Dune. That's the first installment, 2021. The second, 2024. For Denis Villeneuve, you're playing, just to remind folks, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, the leader of this effort 20 ,000 years into the future to take control of the mineral-rich, sandworm-infested planet of Arrakis from the house of Atreides. It's, anyway, it's hard to synopsize, but it's obviously, you know, just when people talk about world building in movies, the ability to create a whole universe is, it's pretty incredible what happens with those movies and with Denis generally. but I guess one question there is to connect Pirates of the Caribbean to the Dune those two groups of movies that you've done I think in both cases largely certainly not against your wishes you were not doing CGI to transform into these you know the barnacle crusted guy in the first or this you know Colonel Kurtz kind of guy in the second, you prefer practical, like actual sitting in the chair and having it done to you for seven or eight hours.

1:03:07Scott Feinberg:Is there a reason for that? More than, well, I don't like pain. Well, it is, there was the first time on the Pirates of the Caribbean films, I was supposed to have CGI I was just to have a little hint of the seafood in my face but

1:03:40Joel Howard who did the paint work on me he was fantastic and I saw it when he worked on me and I looked at it and it was an artist at work and I liked his art and I was not in every day. I mean, I had a pretty light schedule for both of those characters. So we decided that he should do it. And that meant that also I had the right costume. I had a huge coat that also was wet and weighed probably 20 kilos. And everything in that, and I was constantly wet too. I mean, they poured it. Gorbanski poured buckets of water on me and he enjoyed it. And everybody else on that ship came in and they put on pajamas and put some dots in the face and that was it.

1:04:42But the thing is, you get your physicality, your, you change. You can't help changing. It is something beautiful happening. And like the fat guy, it really changes you.

1:05:03Scott Feinberg:Okay, there are three last projects that I'm going to bring up and then we'll close after that with some questions from the audience. But we have to discuss what a lot of people regard as one of the greatest TV programs of all time now, and that's Chernobyl 2019. HBO limited series, you received a Golden Globe and a nomination for an Emmy. This was something that everybody saw, everybody was talking about. Just to remind folks, you're playing the, you know, Soviet Communist Party guy who, Deputy Prime Minister, I guess, heading the commission on the disaster there in 1986. It's interesting because like Craig Mazin, who did it before that, was kind of known for one of the sequels to The Hangover.

1:05:55Scott Feinberg:And I mean, nothing really would have prepared people for how great this ended up being. What stands out when you think back about that one? I almost turned it down because I just got the first episodes of the script and doing another Russian guy with sort of being nasty to people. I don't want to do it. But then he sort of, as Craig wrote more and sent me more pages, I saw the development of the character. It was a man who believed in something totally. He defended it totally until this started to crack. and threw the crack-sipped-in doubt to him. And then it became very interesting to me. But we didn't know it would become such a success.

1:06:59We thought it would be a very small niche thing. But HBO at that time, they wanted to do it anyway because they thought it was good.

1:07:13Scott Feinberg:another great uh project in the world of tv which has certainly i think gotten better in in art in the united states over the time that since you've been acting is andor which is just wrapped up on disney plus you play uh luthan rail the antique stealer who's really a rebel leader who recruits Kashin and or Diego Luna's character for, um, to be part of the resistance, I guess. Um, in the first of the two seasons, uh, first one was back in 2022, you have this kind of monologue for the ages. And I saw that someone recently asked you about what it's like to learn and deliver something like that, where there, it's pretty comprehensive and, um, and if it's different or, you know, just what your experience was.

1:08:06Scott Feinberg:And you said something which I had not seen anywhere else. So either they made this up and it's not true, or if it is true, I wonder if it's okay to ask you. I think they reported that you had said that at some point not that long ago you'd had a stroke and that that has made it different the way you approach a monologue like that. Well, thankfully I didn't have a stroke before that monologue. Oh, it was after. I had a stroke after, so I had it between season one and season two. And I'm not totally recovered from that stroke, and it's terrible because I don't remember lines, for instance, so I have to have a prompter in the ear.

1:08:53But we've found a way to do that pretty well, so that works now. But like a situation like this, I would have been much more intelligent and much more fun. So it hurts. Well, you've been great.

1:09:12Scott Feinberg:I wouldn't worry about that. Oh, thank you. I actually, I sort of had to drag it out of it. No, no, no, totally. Now you tell me you didn't actually have a stroke. Okay, so finally, and this I'm so, I told you backstage, I'm so excited to get to ask you about. There was a movie at Cannes that I saw, you know, it's all happened within the last two months called Sentimental Value. You play this guy Gustav Borg, veteran filmmaker who for years kind of neglected his wife and children for his career, now wants to reconnect with the daughters in particular, the older daughter who has become a theater actress in her own right, played by Renata Reinspe.

1:10:01Scott Feinberg:who previously worked with the same director, Joachim Trier, on The Worst Person in the World, which a lot of people loved. She is not sure she wants to deal with her dad anymore. And we won't say more than that because a lot of people are still catching up on it. But one of the just great movies of recent years and a really great performance by you. And I guess I wonder, when did Joachim, if I'm saying it correct, I think I, hopefully I am, your other career in your career, when did he first sort of register on your radar as a filmmaker even? And then how did this one come about? Well, I've seen his films and I've seen this filmmaker who is very, very much into, I keep talking about the eyes and the faces and the actors, because that is what we've got to offer.

1:11:01I mean, there are guys that are good at action and they only, they don't need faces. but I've seen him see the actors he's worked with and notice what they're doing and pulling it out of them and I've seen it more he's become more and more skilled for each film and also intelligent and fun in terms of cinematic sort of sort of playfulness like in the worst person in the world when she runs through Oslo and Oslo is all frozen but everybody is frozen but she and it's playfulness that is very generous so that's what I've seen and he came to me about a year before we started and said he had a script and I would have said yes immediately but I held back I didn't say anything and then he came and met me and I wanted to say yes but I held back I was a little so I tried as long as possible to say, not say yes but of course I said yes and it was also his way of talking about the project and his presence and he's a very, very lovely man and smiling and trusting the actors, really.

1:12:44Scott Feinberg:So you have, as we've established, worked with a ton of filmmakers of all different varieties of personality and disposition and all of that. I imagine that some of them were perhaps a bit narcissistic or neglectful of their families or things that this character could be accused of. Whether you want to name sources or not, were there actual people who you drew upon to play this guy? I first, I sort of, well, this is a director who's not a very good father. And so I looked at all the directors and I said, no, don't go there. You don't have to. Look at yourself. And I looked at myself and I said, yeah, I'm an artist.

1:13:31I'm not a very good father many times, and sometimes I'm a good father, and I'm flawed. We're all flawed. There's nothing as, I don't think it's, you can be a good parent, not a perfect parent. You'll get accused from your kids anyway, but you can be, you can do as good as you can.

1:13:54Scott Feinberg:So you're, in this film, you have scenes with Renata, Renata. You have scenes with the actress who plays the other daughter, Agnes, who's played by somebody who I had not seen before but was really impressed by Inga, its daughter Lilius, I think is how maybe you say it. Lilius, excuse me. Then there's also Al Fanning as the non-family member who he interacts with as he's making his movie. Anyway, you have a lot of interesting scene partners here. Was there one scene, as you think back, that challenged you the most on this one, that you're maybe proudest of how it all turned out?

1:14:39the last scene was challenging in the way that it was it could have I mean it's a script that can be very soppy and very sweet overly sentimental and stuff, it's called sentimental value but of course Joe Akimi doesn't do that He's very restrained. But he, as an actor, you have a scene that on the paper is,

1:15:20that is difficult to do without becoming too emotional, too, too. So you try to find a way to do it. And I thought I found a way, but then he also does a thing which saves it more. He leaves the camera on for a while, quite a while, the end. And there's even more coming. So that end scene is a tribute to him and a tribute to me. but I had a wonderful time I mean I had three beautiful girls to play with all the time and we had a lot of fun doing it and we're all very various grades of experience but at the same time the way he works with actors getting them as good as amateurs we all became amateurs and we actually play in the same movie, we play the same material and you can't tell the experienced one from the beginner.

1:16:36Scott Feinberg:As we've established over the course of this conversation or reminded people, you've been doing this for a long time. You've done, like any career that's decades long, I'm sure it's felt like there's been peaks and valleys and whatever, a lot of great work. But how did it feel, A, to see this film for the first time and B, to see the really pretty effusive, overwhelming response in particular to your work? It's not like you're somebody we haven't seen before or whatever. So I think it's an extra compliment that people can still be surprised and blown away and see you almost like a new person or a new discovery with the way you are in this film.

1:17:25Scott Feinberg:So I guess I just wonder, after all these years, what's it like to kind of have a moment like the one that began, I guess it can, and is hopefully going to go for months to come? First of all, it's of course wonderful because it is a film. It's a film that when I read the script and I knew Joachim was going to do it, I knew this is going to be good. It was the same thing I felt when I read Breaking the Waves. But as I said, you don't know how it's going to land. And then it landed the way it does. And it was overwhelming. But I also know that it's, I know this business. I know how short-lived the fucking fame is.

1:18:12So I don't care. But at the same time, you know, it's fun to be surprised by yourself. I'm surprised by me and that's fun that's cool and the other I mean being surprised is one of the benefits of this profession you're never better than you do a scene that surprises you but it's and it's also I mean I'm soon dead so I gotta take care of those moments that I've left

1:18:53Scott Feinberg:well on behalf of the festival and the Hollywood Reporter and myself can't thank you enough for taking the time to do this and congratulations on the award tomorrow night if people here have not yet seen sentimental value I believe you have the opportunity to do that today which is something that folks back in the United States will not have for a few more months so take advantage of that and yes just thank you again Stellan Skarsgård really appreciate it thank you very much

1:19:27Scott Feinberg:Thanks for listening to Awards Chatter. We really appreciate it and would really appreciate you taking just a minute more to subscribe to the podcast and to leave us a rating and review on your podcast app. And to follow us on Twitter and Instagram, where our handle is at Awards Chatter. On those platforms, we announce upcoming guests and provide details about special live recordings of the podcast that you can attend. Until next time, thanks again for tuning in.

1:19:55I didn't like what you said, Odin pauses, about the future. This is the love story of real hinge couple Odin and Edward, written and read by me, Curtis Garner. Listen to the free audiobook now. This episode is brought to you by ChatGPT.

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