724 - Introductions with Joachim Trier

0:01Hello and welcome. My name is John August and you're listening to episode 724 of Script Notes. It's a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, how do you best introduce your characters and their world to the audience? We'll discuss with an expert on the topic. Joachim Trier is a writer and director whose credits include Louder Than Bombs, Worst Person in the World, and this year's Sentimental Value, which is now nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay for him and his co-writer, Esko Vogt.

0:35Welcome, Joachim. Thank you. Hi, good to see you. It's great to have you here. I loved your movie. I'm so happy it got this amazing reception. It is just a terrific film. I want to talk about how it came to be, but I specifically want to focus on how you introduce the audience to both the world and to the characters. So I thought that was when I knew I was in really good hands. Like the opening sequence is brilliant. How we meet Nora is so, so good. When you've sucked your claws into us that well, we're going to follow you on your story. And it's just masterfully done. Thank you so much. That's a big compliment coming from you.

1:11So thank you. Yeah, no, I'd love to talk screenwriting. I've collaborated for, you know, all the six feature films. There's a short films before that with Eskel Vogt as a co-writer. And I find that we are drawn to, on one hand, of course, wanting to do movies in a tradition of clarity of storytelling and all that. But more than anything, we are interested in the ambiguity of character. We are interested in building stuff around the psychological mechanisms and the yearnings of people. And that's kind of where the energy comes from when we start writing a lot. Yeah, so I definitely want to focus in on that initial part of the process.

1:48We'll also answer some listener questions that were relevant to your film. And in our bonus segment for premium members, I want to talk about screenplays on screen because we have a screenwriter in this movie, Stellan Skarsgård plays a writer. And the printed scripts we see in the movie are different than what I expect. And so I want to talk about sort of like how we depict screenplays and screenwriting in movies because it's a thing that actually weirdly comes up a lot in movies because writers are often writing about writing. But I want to talk about the choices you made and sort of maybe some things that I'm expecting as an American screenwriter that are just different than what you're expecting as a European screenwriter.

2:22Yeah, no, let's get into it. All right, let's start with the start of this movie. And let's start with where this movie comes from because you're saying this is the sixth collaboration with Eskil? On feature film level, yeah. Talk to us about where an idea comes from. What is the discussion before there's any words put on paper? What was the impetus behind sentimental value? It started with wanting to talk about siblings, two sisters, two adults who are negotiating how come they feel so different about who they are as a family and why are their experiences so individually different from each other?

3:00so that was like some early stuff sort of the mystery of how we've become who we've become in a family we thought that kind of that idea of mirroring between sisters was interesting so the way we work just to tell you a little bit about that is that we sit for about a year in a room together Eskel and I we meet every morning and we work from 9 till 4 or 5 in the afternoon every day on the weekdays and some days we feel terrible, we don't feel we're doing much and other days everything happens in two days, you know, like it's just this rushes in of ideas and structure. And so after we have structured everything and come up with what we want to do, there's a part of kind of two or three months at the end where Eskil actually writes it out.

3:44And then I go out of the room and I edit, I look at it, I come back into the room sometimes. And then finally we have a reading phase where we do sittings. Like we turn off the cell phone, we read it through to get a cinematic experience and reading it through in real time. and then we restructure a lot together. And those two weeks are the most productive almost, because then suddenly you have to rewrite something quickly, you have to come up with new ideas, you have to change the structure. And then we go into the world and pretend it's our first draft. But, you know, so that's the process. It's a much longer process than I would have guessed for sort of getting into that first draft.

4:20So talk to us about what you're doing. So you're saying nine to four every weekday. What are you actually doing? Is it all conversations? Are you mapping stuff out on a board? How do you know that you're making any progress? What is the work in that daily session? So I think what we're aiming for is to find our own connection to the material. So I have not developed one screenplay or written a screenplay that I haven't filmed as a director. So this is like when we do a film, this is what we do for a few years. A bit more like someone who worked with a novel perhaps. So we let a lot of stuff come up.

4:56Very often we start out with all the three, four different directions we want to explore and then something eventually after a couple of months we see we have much more material or more yearning to tell something rather than something else and as an example in this one we were struggling to try to find something interesting in um we didn't want to make sort of just a domestic you know sitting around table talking kind of movie that doesn't interest in us like the chamber drama we want it to be cinematic we want to have conceptual formal scenes that we play around with, almost like set pieces. So what we do is we gather material, a lot of material, almost like actors exploring the life of characters and then just playing those few scenes.

5:37So when we then finally found out there was also the father's point of view and the daughter's and more of a polyphonic, multi-voice, multi-character story. And it had that kind of novelistic feeling is what we were after. They're not that we want it to feel like a book. We very much want it to be cinematic. But what we're yearning for is the sleight of hand that you get when you read a book and you don't quite know how you thematically get involved in what you're getting involved in in terms of thinking. That's the kind of thing we're trying every time. It's that through character, you get involved in a space in the movie where there's space for some thinking and philosophy around life and existence and how little time we have.

6:19And why is it so difficult to be in a family and all that stuff. we don't want it to be on the nose. So when we have all that material, we start structuring it after a few months. And then we get kind of a timeline and we'd write kind of a step outline. And sometimes there are pieces or, you know, there's ambitions of pushing material together. So it's not like a story arch just yet. It's more like we know we want a montage that's like an essay about a house told from one of the characters. And we know that we want a panic scene when she has stage fright. but we also know what the ending is and we, you know, how do we get there?

6:54And then there's this, how do we get into a situation where the other sister could go to the National Archive because that's an interesting building and that's a cinematic thing. Like, so all of these things come together. So Eskil often says when he's asked, like, use the word storytelling. We're slightly ambivalent because the storytelling, the structuring is something we almost want to hang our material and our characters on. It's not like one of these wonderful, you know, I know there are wonderful screenwriters who are like, I got the story. Now I illustrate it. We kind of work the other way around.

7:27We want the material and the characters to come first. So for listeners who haven't seen the finished movie yet, its story follows a Norwegian family, the two grown daughters and their father, who is a famous film director trying to make an autobiographical film at their longtime family house. How many of those things I just described in this logline existed in early stages of these discussions? Like you said it was about siblings, so you knew that. And at what point did you know there was going to be two sisters? At what point did you decide that their father was a character? You said polyphonic, that we're able to switch to his point of view.

8:02When did you start to have those realizations? I think three to four months in, it all clicked. We suddenly saw what it was going to be. and then we went on another round exploring character scenes and getting material and a lot of stuff ends up on the floor but it gives us a deep sense of who they are. I would say that just for the listeners who aren't that familiar with what we do that we are in between kind of two traditions a bit. On one level, I feel I grew up with a lot of American great character films. I remember Kramer versus Kramer and The Graduate when I was a teenager being like amazing films and ordinary people, films like Hannah and Her Sisters or Annie Hall are amazing or The Breakfast Club, which was kind of a gateway drug to Igmar Bergman because it was actually deep character studies done within a genre that seemed like it had levity.

9:00So on one hand, we love American character-driven storytelling. On the other hand, we're also film geeks that love Fellini and Alain René and Godard. And how do you do that modernistic, break the form, make some hard edits, not make it all fluid, make the audience have to fill in the blanks a bit. So we're kind of going between these traditions when we're writing these ideals. So when we gather material, we want, for example, when we do character scenes, how can we avoid it just being done through dialogue? How can we make a formal scene? And I don't know if this is the moment where I can use an example like the opening of the film, for example.

9:40Oh, absolutely. So I want to segue right into that because you're establishing in this opening sequence this narration about the house and sort of like what this is. And I'm wondering if you could, could we actually have you read a bit from the English version of the screenplay? Because I thought the narration voice over here is so important in terms of setting things up and it's so unusual and so unique. Can I just share my screen and have you read this? Yeah, please do. Yeah, yeah, I'll read off the screen. That's great. And so the film opens with this house. And I love how you describe the house.

10:08This is a venerable old house in Oslo, sorely in need of a coat of paint. Other houses in the neighborhood may be more modern and in better condition, but there's something soulful about this one missing from the others. And then we're going to see this house in different times, different periods, inside and outside. But this narrator starts talking to us. And Joakim, could you read his narration? Yeah, I'll read the narrator. her. When she received the essay assignment to write a story as if one were an object, she immediately knew that she would choose to be their house. She described how the house's belly shook as she and her sister ran down the stairs and out the back door, the house's butt, taking the shortcut to school for a hole in the fence and a neighbor's lawn before they turned into the road and the house could no longer see them.

10:59Her mother pointed out that it was a bit inconsistent that the house could also see behind its back as if a house couldn't have eyes in the back. She remember wondering if the house preferred to be light and empty or full and heavy, if it liked being trampled on or that people crashed into its walls, the eager dog claw scratched the floorboards. And she thought, yes, it liked being full and that the marks were just scrapes like you get playing tag or soccer. Her father said that the crookedness was an old flaw discovered right after the house was built 100 years ago. She wrote that it was as if the house was still sinking, collapsing, just in very slow motion and that the entire time her family had lived there was just a split second in midair and before them, a number of people, pets, insects also had their brief flash in the house's time.

11:56Four people have even died within the walls of the house. Nora's great-grandfather, Edward Irgens, died in the bedroom on the second floor from the Spanish flu. In the same room where his granddaughter, Edith, was born just seven years later, which was now her parents' bedroom. And I have to add, like, The pictures are then telling a complete story of parents arguing here, of people coming and going. We are illustrating it with lenses and celluloids from different cameras through the 20th century and all of that stuff. So this is a good example of how we are dealing with kind of a cinematic language countered by literary voice so that the voice only tells a part of it where the pictures kind of reveal more.

12:42And I'll jump back into the narration's voice. Her teacher gave her an A and her father had loved it. She dug out the essay when she was looking for a monologue for her auditions at the theater academy, but was disappointed because it seemed so unemotional. She therefore chose Nina's monologue from the Seagull instead. And then we do a hard cut in the film. And we're at the National Theater. Nora is now a grown woman, an actor, very accomplished, about to go on stage and the lead of a theater play. And she's panicking. So this is about six pages of script. And it's an unusual choice to spend the first six minutes of your film establishing a place rather than the individual characters we're going to be following.

13:26But what you're doing so masterfully is saying, this place is going to be important. And most crucially, the people who live in this house and their relationship with each other and with this physical space is going to be so important. This is a movie that's going to involve death. It's going to involve noise and fighting, but also this idealized version of what a house and a home should be and how everyone's perception of it is going to be different. Yeah, yeah, no, I think absolutely. And I'm going to be very straight now. And so listeners should turn off because I'm going to really explain stuff, which an artist or a creative person should always be careful about.

14:00But I think I love the craft. I'm always, when I'm doing talks about screenplays, particularly directing, I always imagine talking to a younger version of myself. And I always love when people were speaking straight about what they did. So here's the thing. This sequence sets up themes, as you were just pointing out, and character, which are the two things that we care the most about. Themes, in my opinion, or motifs are, this is the area that I want you to think about when we go through the story. So what we're learning is Nora as a 12-year-old, being the oldest sister, we learned that. Parents, quite dysfunctional, arguing a lot.

14:37But she is avoiding describing that, even though the film shows it to us, by being creative, by telling a story, by being the good daughter, by being someone who, in a psychodynamic term, sublimate her pain, I'm being very literal now, into something creative already as a child, as we all do. Children do this. All people, whether they choose to be artists later in life, dance and sing to make their parents happy. We tell stories to try to understand who we are. All of this stuff is inherently human, in my opinion. So we set that theme up that in this creative family, that's her choice. And she's longing to become an actress.

15:21We later learned that's also an avoiding mechanism. Yet, paradoxically, it also gets her closer to herself. It's a double bind of the creative role in life that we both avoid ourselves and get closer to ourselves in strange ways that, to me, Joachim Trier, the filmmaker, is still mysterious. So I'm exploring something. We also learned that the house has had a perspective on time. People come and go. They're born, they're die. Time is short. This story is about reconciliation. It's about grown people realizing they don't have those difficult parents around forever. And within that limited space and time that we have together, how are we going to deal with that?

16:01Maybe we're never going to get what we quite want from our parents, but is there baby steps of reconciliation we ask. So all of that is placed in the background, hopefully not too explicitly in that first part. Yeah, you've primed the audience for what they're supposed to be looking for. And so I came out of the sequence going like, oh no, the house is going to burn down. You've established this house is crucial to the film and something terrible is going to happen. Spoiler, it doesn't burn down. But... Something worse happens. Something worse happens. I don't want to spoil it for people, but I didn't see it in an audience, but I'm sure there's an audible gasp when people see what happens to the house.

16:37I've experienced that, and that's kind of funny. Yeah, it's turned very slick at the end, isn't it? But let's talk about, so I wrote Big Fish, and Big Fish has a similar sort of set where we go through many, many years to establish sort of what is the underlying dynamic here and prime the viewer for this is what to watch out for. These are the things you're going to keep seeing again and again over the course of the movie. How early did you and Eskil find that this was going to be the way into the film? because it's not an obvious choice. And yet once you've realized that you want to make a novelistic film, it's a very novelistic device.

17:09What you just read could have been the first few paragraphs of a book. Yeah, I think there are many reasons to choose this opening. So we love opening movies and we have several openings often and several endings. It's like the freshness of an audience meeting a film is just a remarkable moment. And one needs to be smart about it. It's a luxury in a way. You know, they hopefully bought a ticket and go to the theater and they sit down. You got them, but you owe them something. So first of all, we want to establish a sense of narrative authority. I don't know if that's the right English word, but authority sounds a bit strict.

17:46But a sense of guidance that we really care and we're going to have fun here. We're going to try to make a movie that takes you several places. You know, I often say to Eskel as a joke that why I loved James Bond movies as a kid was, you know you're going to go to like an island with the palm trees and a beach. You're going to go into the mountains. You're going to go to a cool city. It's going to be, you know, I'm going to take you several places. You bought a ticket to see a family movie, but we're not going to get stuck by the kitchen table. So that's a promise, right? So that's one thing that we know very early.

18:17We want to show a kind of formal playfulness because that's what we do. In Oslo, August 31st, a film we did several years ago, we start with a kind of documentary montage or in The Worst Person in the World, we start with a kind of a narrative, playful story of how the lead character can't figure out what to do with her life in a humoristic way. So there's that establishing of sense of humor and levity to it, but also the theme. So we knew that. But then also we cut contrast, got straight to a very subjective, intimate, real-time feeling of being behind backstage, going on stage as an actor and having stage fright and panicking completely, which is the opposite.

18:55It's a formal opposition. It's not about montage and moving in time and space freely. It's sticking in that anxious space of going on stage. So to have that contrast in dramaturgical terms is what I'm, you know, that's what Eskel and I talk about at all. How can we make contrast? We have one posted note that's been hanging there for several films. We've ripped them down every time it started all over with a new script, but the one that keeps sticking on the board is remember contrast. So that's the holy thing. Like contrast of scenes, contrast of characters, the formal devices, the character explorations, the unexpectedness.

19:34Remember that the dynamic of contrast is at the key of making interesting material. It sounds childish, maybe, and obvious, but it's really good to bear in mind. So we start with a very clear dramaturgical contrast between the opening scene and the next one. Yeah, your opening sequence goes through over a century and it's jumping forward versus a real-time panic moment with Nora. So let's talk about Nora, because a choice you're always making as a writer is, are you introducing a character on a normal day or on an extreme day? And you made the choice, like, this is Nora at a very big extreme. So we're seeing her, she's supposed to be going on stage in this play, and she's having a panic attack.

20:15And she is both clearly a protagonist, but also the problem. And I love how you as an audience are not even panicked on her behalf. You're sort of panicked on behalf of the stage manager and everyone who's acting normally, just trying to get her to effing go on stage. It's a really funny sequence and it's harrowing. It's just a great way into it. So this sequence is seven pages long. So we've had a six-page opening and then it's the seven-page sequence. Some simple things you notice on the page. You never name characters who are unimportant. And so the stage manager, great role, really great performance, but they're stage manager throughout.

20:52We don't give them a name because that way, as a reader, we know like, okay, this is not a person who's going to be coming back. Same with the director. Jakob, the actor, gets a name because he's going to be coming back. And they're small things, but they just help the read because ultimately, Jakob, you're going to be directing this and we're going to get a sense of people's relative importance. But our first experience with them is on the page. And just making those choices help us know what to focus on, how to be thinking about the sequence that we're seeing. The right things, yeah. Yeah. So we knew one challenge with the screenplay was we're going to throw a lot of characters on everyone.

21:24I mean, with the casting department worked for one and a half years getting this cast together. We're super proud of it. Also, people have to look like themselves at various younger stages. And the previous family of the 20th century going 100 years back also needs to kind of have similarities. It could be one family and all that. So a lot of work. And then we're jumping straight into a theater world with tons of the side characters. And I mean, we grew up adoring, really loving Martin Scorsese. The film's like, you know, obviously we all love Goodfellas, but also The Age of Innocence. like this incredible variety of characters.

21:58And then the task is, how are they important in different ways? So there's kind of a hierarchy of who you're going to invest in emotionally. And that's my job as well as director. So Eskil always manages to do a good reading script and we're, you know, credit to him because I think he's a much, much better writer than me. I think he's very smart about conveying what the film will feel like. And we know that we will do more shooting-like scripts later on and that I will go with the actors, all of them. I even rehearse or meet smaller parts. Sometimes I cast amateurs and I want them to get to know me so they feel safe on set.

22:33And so they don't come and feel like as a day player, they're not up for the task. So then you give them names and background and you discuss with them, who is this character and all that. But as you're absolutely pointing out correctly, at this stage, we're throwing a lot of less central roles into the play, yeah. So we're meeting Nora here. We're sort of panicking with her and around her and about her. And ultimately, she does succeed and triumph there. But in the sequences on the page versus what's in the film, some things have changed. And let's talk about some of the discoveries you make along the way.

23:06So she kisses him backstage, which is not scripted. There's the sense of geography and space. It's going to be dictated by the actual place you end up picking and sort of how it's all going to work. How do you find, as the director who also helped write this film, that balance? And when are you taking off your writer hat and putting on your director hat? I feel that I'm kind of developing the same thing all along and that the writing is such a kind of central aspect of setting up the possibility of directing. But then I go to the National Theatre, which is very hard to get into. It's where Henry Gibson did his plays.

23:42You know, we were so lucky to be allowed to film there. It's a, you know, 150, almost 200 year old building. So I get those late Sunday nights after I played to go there and research with my team, my AD team, my production designer, the cinematographer, you know. And then I see a lot of possibilities. And I know that now we do floor plans, we shoot and we shoot on video, we do this stuff. And I often bring it back to Eskel and explain it to him so we can do a quick redraft so that the team that comes in later will feel that it becomes an organic process of reaching that space. So writing is spatial.

24:17Writing for space. Eskel and I talk about it. Like the banal example is all writers feel is that if a character is in a kitchen and it's important that they are looking into the fridge as someone saying, I'm going to leave you. And then they turn around and go to the table. How far is that walk is going to be tremendously important to the dramaturgical weight of that scene. So from the smallest to the biggest thing. So I go back and forth and then ultimately Escalade's not precious. He trusts me as a director. I go and do my thing with my team, you know. But it's important, for example, this scene in the editing of the film is when we shot a lot more for everything.

24:56That's what we do, you know. And we invest a lot to go on screen, which is the magic of having less resources go above the line in Norway and more below the line because I shoot for 60 days. And, you know, we get to try a lot of stuff. So for an ambitious film like this, in terms of all the spaces, remember there are several montages where we actually have to like go through the century again a bit later in the film. So for the National Theater, for example, I had a lot of material. And in terms of character, what we realized was the buildup of panic is what we dropped. We got straight into the middle of it.