Joachim Trier: ​‘I cling to life’

Crafting a complex portrait of a fraught father-daughter relationship set against a grand dragestil family home in Oslo, Joachim Trier turns to family, ancestral traumas and art to convey all that can’t be articulated through language.

LWLies: The house doesn’t feel like home anymore, to any of the characters. How do you treat that subtle transformation when a familiar space becomes alien or hostile?

Trier: You make it sound like it’s a haunted house movie – I like that! When we remember, we need an arena, a stage for the memory. You can remember a moment from your life wherever you grew up in, and maybe you don’t remember in what order it happened, but you have a feeling of the situation. That feeling, to me, is very often connected to space. At its strongest, cinema can deal with that idea. In this film, we’re taking that very literally. For the sisters, after their mother dies, they come into the house and the younger sister Agnes says ​‘I always imagined I would love to live here, but we can’t afford to keep this house,’ and Nora’s like, ​‘you would want to live here?’ as if it’s the most alien idea in the world. There are these very different approaches to the same place. On top of that, the house has witnessed this tremendously long story, which is almost a representation of the 20^th century. So we’re playing around with the tropes of cinema to see the different layers of time, from the silent movie eras, into the ​’30s and ​’40s, up until the ​’80s, then up to the present day. The house is asking a bigger question about how short a human life is and at the core of this is understanding how little time we have with our parents and children. The house gives us all of this to play with.

We tend to be very protective of our childhood homes and resistant to change, and there’s something inherently violent about renewal. Originally, the house seems to represent an older, more private, emotionally compressed Oslo. I’m interested in its development as one that mirrors the transformation of the family, of the city around it.

Renewal is an interesting word. Towards the end of the film, there’s that idea of reconciling yourself with the paradox of memory, which is that you hold the past to remember. This is also a story about the Second World War’s effects on a family through several generations, the echoes of history. I’ve had that in my family. My grandfather was captured during the war because he was a resistance fighter against the Nazis. It tremendously affected him and the way he was. That ripples down through the generations. I’m pondering that on some level, we have to let certain things go. I look at my children and I don’t want to transfer a memory of that war into the fourth generation and the subtle, weird implications of that… On the other hand, I owe it to them to remember. As a society, we do, to not forget and not repeat even though at times it feels like we have forgotten too much. 

Gustav’s late mother is arguably one of the most powerful presences in the film. How did you shape her ghost?

It is a haunted house, isn’t it? Coping with the phenomenology of being through space, I think is fundamental. I don’t know why, I’m not a philosopher, but I question it. I experience it to be true. I was afraid of what the Americans would call ​“rubber ducking” which is the bad use of a Freudian idea that there is one trauma that explains it all. I don’t think life is like that, yet there is trauma. We know that the mother has implications of artistic interpretation in Gustav’s film, but we also know in the factual world of the National Archive, that Agnes goes and reads the report of her grandmother’s experience and the traumas of the Second World War. The voiceover says it was hard to explain how it affected her because they’re facts they already knew. That is interesting to me – that the artistic work over in that building of the National Theatre is connected to the experience of the factual world of the National Archive. At the archive, you have all the factual accounts of every life that’s been, and with The Second World War, the memory, the responsibility as a society to place that somewhere. And on the left side of the brain, you have the theatre where we’re asking ourselves ​“Who are we? Who are we?” through fiction, through a different language. Between those two things, this family is trying to reconcile something and to have the ghost of the grandmother floating over this yearning to understand ourselves, it creates an energy in the story. 

There’s a reference to ​‘The Seagull’ in the film that made me think of how Chekhov explores creative failure as an emotional architecture that’s raised inside, rather than a single event. Like a curse passed from parent to child. There’s a tragic but hopeful question there about whether the next generation can find a way to create without repeating the pain.

That’s a beautiful perspective. The funny thing about fiction and ghost stories, and the determinism of the Greek myths up until the Renaissance, Shakespeare, up until Chekhov and the break into the modern theatrical traditions, is that they align themselves with a feeling that we all find true: There is a language underneath everything, between parent and child, where traumas can be transferred without ever pointing to them in the social language that we call language. That space of unspokenness, those glitches, those slow feelings that derive from our survival techniques of empathy, bring damage, but also bring healing. The unspoken space of trauma is very similar to the unspoken space of art, where the sublime exists. In this story, we’re trying to talk about how a father and a daughter are so similar, they’re saying exactly the same things, but they are completely unable to manage the social language. The reconciliation has to happen through action, and the action is the idea that art can reconcile something without being tied up to having a big talk and then everything is fine. Nothing is ever going to be fine, but you can reconcile yourself more with the fact of what you weren’t given as a child. In Chekhov, you have that questioning of this exact subject.

It’s interesting how Gustav snubs the theatre, it brings forth this tension between artistic forms.

What I like about Gustav Borg is he likes the tactility of the world, the close-up, the wind and the trees… You don’t have the wind and the trees in the theatre. Cinema as the latest artform was always looked down upon; it was vaudeville, it was vulgar. Cinema was always popular, and that was used against it in terms of artistic measurement. It’s like pop music! It’s not about the idea of popularity being a virtue, but it’s the fact that pop culture can have a simplicity. It can strike in its clarity, straight to your heart, in a simple form. It’s a form of modernism. It’s a part of the 20^th century that I embrace because I love cinema and pop music. Don’t look down on us because there’s a clarity to the form we’ve chosen to speak in. Gustav Borg and I share that. On the other hand, I hate his disapproval of his daughter’s wonderful theatre work! I love the theatre! I’ve wept at the end of theatre plays that were not the best because I see the struggle of the actors and it moves me. That aspect of the artistic endeavour of the stage is incredible. Someone’s there night after night like, ​‘I’m going to try to be Hamlet’ – god dammit that’s hard! I think it’s a beautiful artform, but I don’t want to create theatre in my films. I want cinema to have a purity, and to do specific things. I yearn for movement and memory, and spaces that are varied, and different times, and I want it to move around. I want the broader experience of a world.

Was the relationship that Julie had with her father in The Worst Person in the World an early seed for the themes you’re exploring here?

Julie’s father is more frail. Gustav Borg is more charismatic and impressive, but there are similarities there in that they are both incapable of emotional intimacy and communication. I’ll make another one. We’ll call it the Trilogy of Daddy Issues! [Laughs]

Music often plays a very important role in your films. With this one, there was a lot more space for silence.

Silences can have enormous power, exactly because in this film, they’re talking their way through, around and away from things. Words matter tremendously, but we were trying to build a film where we don’t do the big musical crescendo and that’s the biggest emotion. If you’re in a theatre and suddenly there’s silence, there’s the added context of the cinema space in that moment of silence in the movie that I really enjoy. That was one of the biggest kicks about this film – to see it with big audiences. I remember in Cannes, there was this satisfaction of 2,000 people completely breathing together, silent with the sisters and feeling for a moment, that the empathy machine of cinema was creating space. It’s really sweet. I have no clue what they felt, but I felt we did it together, for a moment. Silences are underestimated in movies.

There’s something about the act of returning – to a house, to a memory – that runs throughout your work…

When you’re creating something, you half-know what you’re doing and you half-don’t. Meeting people like yourself at the end of that, you’re getting mirrored back what you’ve done. This is actually all about memory, space, and identity, what cinema can talk about at the existential level of our experience. It’s the idea of the past inside us that the camera can’t see, and how to find ways of getting inside. You put up a camera, you see a face, it’s turned into an object. How do you transcend that? How do you exactly make that interesting and go beyond the exterior image? So the idea of returning, when you see it in Reprise, it’s a repetition of a romantic journey back to Paris, the idea that you can’t go back in time. That’s been following me through my films. I guess I really care about the classic theme of mortality. We are withering and dying and it’s a slow, ongoing process. And me, I cling to life. My characters too. I’ve had characters who are not clinging to life and don’t know how to live, but those dynamics are what create the drama in what Eskil [Vogt] and I write. This film is really about that, to me, in a deeper sense and in a collective sense, more than any of my other films. Worst Person, Oslo, August 31^st, Thelma, they’re very much about solitude. Sentimental Value is more polyphonic.