Joachim Tri­er: ​‘We need to feel that we have choic­es which can change our lives’

After a pre­mière in com­pe­ti­tion at Cannes which net­ted star Renate Reinsve the Best Actress tro­phy, and a whirl­wind world tour packed with crit­i­cal acclaim and a slew of glitzy award nom­i­na­tions, Dan­ish-Nor­we­gian film­mak­er Joachim Tri­er reflects on the per­son­al details at the heart of his char­ac­ter-dri­ven dram­e­dy The Worst Per­son in the World.

LWLies: This is the final film in your Oslo tril­o­gy, fol­low­ing Reprise and Oslo, August 31^st. I’d love to hear about your rela­tion­ship with the city in your work.

Joachim Tri­er: I grew up in Oslo, so it’s intu­itive mate­r­i­al. I know what streets are cool and what streets I wouldn’t want to film on, and I have a good sense of how those nar­ra­tive parts fit togeth­er. As an exam­ple, Axel, lives in a more posh, cul­tur­al part of town, where­as Eivind lives in Tøyen, which is the more new­ly gen­tri­fied hip neigh­bour­hood. It’s very much like East and West Lon­don. Dif­fer­ent parts have been gen­tri­fied or had a rebirth. It’s fun to play around with that. But I’m also report­ing on a city in devel­op­ment, in the back­ground behind the char­ac­ters. We see a build­ing site in Oslo 31^st August when the main char­ac­ter comes out of rehab, with all these cranes; that build­ing in The Worst Per­son in the World is where Eivind works in the cof­fee shop. All this stuff is there that wasn’t 10 years ago, so I’m trac­ing the expan­sion of the city.

It’s nice to see a home­town treat­ed with such ten­der­ness. If I made a film about my home­town, I don’t think I’d be as kind.

You know, I’ve nev­er real­ly thought about it like this before, but I think it’s like the char­ac­ters in a way, hav­ing jour­neyed from resent­ment and this self-dep­re­ca­tion into more of an accep­tance. In Reprise, my open­ing line, with these guys who want to be great writ­ers, they say some­thing like ​‘We’ve got to get the hell out of here’. But I think that rela­tion­ship with the city is like how a divorced per­son treats their ex with more love and ten­der­ness after the fact.

And then there’s the fact Julie in the film has reached a place of self-accep­tance with­in the world, by the end of the film.

There’s that John Lennon quote, ​“Life is what hap­pens when you’re busy mak­ing oth­er plans,” which I feel relates to the film a lot. We had a cou­ple of quotes that come up while we were work­ing, and one I made up was ​‘To hate one­self is a life­long romance’ which is a riff on Oscar Wilde’s ​“To love one­self is a life­long romance”. There’s also the Dan­ish philoso­pher Soren Kierkegaard who said ​“Life can only be under­stood back­wards, but it must be lived for­wards” which is kind of the end­point of the film.

Ear­li­er we talked briefly about Jack­ass because of your back­ground in skate­board­ing. When I inter­viewed one of those guys, he said, ​“I will always not be ready to die,” which I thought was so pro­found. Appar­ent­ly there’s some­thing about peo­ple that put them­selves in dan­ger that makes them wise.

I did this per­son­al­i­ty test and it turns out I’m a high-risk seek­er. I’ve bro­ken every bone in my body; three years ago, I smashed my knee up and had five oper­a­tions after doing some down­hill ski­ing at high speed. I had about 32 pieces of met­al drilled into my leg, and I think mak­ing movies, a lot of us are drawn to that mad idea of try­ing to con­trol chaos. The pres­sure is so big and you’re up against lim­i­ta­tions of weath­er and then the emo­tions of 400 peo­ple on set every day. But it’s kind of fun.

What sort of on-set envi­ron­ment do you try to cre­ate for your collaborators?

Direct­ing is about cre­at­ing this feel­ing of almost a big par­ty, where we don’t want any­one to be left out. Every­one has a role, and every­one needs to feel their work is val­ued. So for me, I want peo­ple who are very pas­sion­ate, I want it to be more than just a job because it is tough. And I also want every­one to know that they are actu­al­ly part of cre­at­ing the per­for­mances in the film. Actors are sup­posed to be high­ly sen­si­tive, so they’ll pick up on it if the crew are bored or mis­er­able. It’s not that I want peo­ple to go around and pre­tend to be hap­py on set, but I want every­one to be aware that we’re part of some­thing together.

When the actors are on set, we have calm­ness, qui­et, focus, we play music that’s appro­pri­ate to the scenes and, and try to fig­ure out what the actors need. But when they get off set, it’s like a For­mu­la 1 pit stop, every­thing is very effi­cient and quick, so we can give the actors the time and space they need when we’re rolling. So when Renate says, ​‘Oh, we had so much time while we were film­ing,’ I’m so proud. I say, ​‘I’m glad we fooled you.’

When you’re work­ing on a char­ac­ter-dri­ven film you real­ly need your actors to have a great sense of the role they’re play­ing, beyond what’s on the page.

Yes, and I have to give a bit of cred­it to the Nation­al Film and Tele­vi­sion School, where I stud­ied, because we had some real­ly great teach­ers there. Ian Sel­l­ar, Stephen Frears. We had Alt­man and Mike Leigh come around and do work­shops and it was an envi­ron­ment of very, very, very sophis­ti­cat­ed per­for­mance direc­tors. I came into the school already hav­ing a lot of for­mal ideas, and I loved Tarkovsky, Anto­nioni and Bri­an DePal­ma, but I need­ed that envi­ron­ment to train and study. So cred­it to the NFTS. And now that I’ve seen Joan­na Hogg’s Sou­venir films… I fuck­ing loved Part Two, I think it’s a mas­ter­piece. So you can see that train­ing in oth­er grad­u­ates, too.

There are two Har­ry Nils­son songs fea­tured quite promi­nent­ly in the film, which feels like an unusu­al choice for a con­tem­po­rary roman­tic dra­ma. Was that down to per­son­al preference?

Yeah, I think that those are the great­est pop songs ever made. But the film is also a dia­logue between gen­er­a­tions, and I’m not even try­ing to be objec­tive. It’s my Oslo. It’s my tem­pera­ment. My music. But I’m real­is­ing right now, at the same time that these are my tastes, it’s also the taste of Julie’s gen­er­a­tion. I have a lot of friends in their late twen­ties and ear­ly thir­ties, and I DJ as well – I’m a big music nerd. Julie’s gen­er­a­tion don’t give a shit whether it’s a song from 1968, 1977, 1984, 1999. The sound­track could have been both Julie and Axel’s playlists, as well as mine.

How much of your­self do you see in the char­ac­ters with­in The Worst Per­son in the World?

Going into writ­ing, Aksel was much eas­i­er for Eskil [Vogt] and I to write because he had more sim­i­lar gen­er­a­tional con­tent, but Julie was based a lot on peo­ple I knew, as was Eivind. But I realised through­out the film that I was deal­ing with aspects of myself in Julie: her naïveté; her dreams. I wouldn’t be a film­mak­er unless I had that crazy notion deeply root­ed in me. And yet time and time again, in love, in life, real­is­ing that there are such lim­i­ta­tions to the world and real­i­ty, and nego­ti­at­ing that as you get old­er… I learned a lot from loss and things that hap­pened to me. Look­ing back in the ear­li­er part of myself, I wish I’d known what I know how. Yet the para­dox of time is that you can’t know how you’re going to act – you have to go through it. But Julie’s dreamy messi­ness, I try to sus­tain a part of that in myself.

Do you notice a dif­fer­ence when writ­ing male and female characters?

When I made my first two films a lot of peo­ple felt that I had pas­sive male char­ac­ters, that they had no sense of direc­tion. At the time I was real­ly try­ing to deal with the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of male char­ac­ters on screen and cre­ate ones more like the guys I knew and I didn’t see in film so much. Guys that are vul­ner­a­ble and lost and don’t quite live up to macho expec­ta­tions that a lot of sto­ry­telling demand­ed then. I was kind of burned by that a lit­tle bit, that peo­ple thought our men were so pas­sive, but when I look at Eivind, he’s also a vul­ner­a­ble, kind man. I know a lot of men like that. A lot of peo­ple have asked me how I can write a female char­ac­ter like Julie. I guess from day one, I didn’t want to apply any gen­der clichés. I’ve nev­er made films about stereo­typ­i­cal guys, so if peo­ple find Julie to be par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing I take that as a com­pli­ment. But I didn’t approach her with any big gen­der per­spec­tive or the­o­ry. I was just try­ing to cre­ate some­one I felt I knew.

There’s a sense with­in The Worst Per­son in the World that the most triv­ial moments in our lives turn out to be the most mean­ing­ful. Do you feel there is some sort of cos­mic order to the universe?

I’m more from a psy­cho­an­a­lyt­i­cal tra­di­tion, but in the mod­ern way of believ­ing that we are dealt some cards, through genet­ics but also through expe­ri­ence, and we play them as best we can. But I want to believe – I have to believe – that we have oppor­tu­ni­ty. We need to feel that we have choic­es which can change our lives. But I also think we are con­tin­u­al­ly nego­ti­at­ing our rela­tion­ship to mor­tal­i­ty. I am an athe­ist. I don’t believe in God, and I envy peo­ple who do because I think that gives more hope for some­thing beyond this. So my exis­ten­tial approach is to try to accept what hap­pens. I don’t believe that we have com­plete con­trol, but that doesn’t have to be a cos­mic sys­tem. It’s a cir­cu­lar motion of try­ing to con­trol and accept­ing what hap­pens. Over and over and over again. But I think Julie also has a bit of Gift­ed Child Syn­drome, where she feels like she has to con­trol things, has to reach her potential.

That’s a very mod­ern, pre­scient feel­ing for a lot of peo­ple. We’re told as chil­dren we should achieve so much, then in adult­hood it feels like all those things have elud­ed us.

I think it’s a reflec­tion of how we live in a soci­ety with a lot of trans­ac­tion­al val­ue. We are told we have to fig­ure out what our part is, and our val­ue is defined much more than it was even 30 years ago. That val­ue is at play at an ear­ly stage in everyone’s life. Just from social media, your attrac­tive­ness or worth can be defined by atten­tion. And it’s hard, because we’re forced to approach this part of our iden­ti­ty all the time. We’re being asked, ​‘Who are you? What’s your char­ac­ter? What’s your pur­pose? What are you good at? What are you not good at?’ There’s a lot of this trans­ac­tion­al stuff that applies to rela­tion­ships. Julie and Aksel are ide­al­is­ing each oth­er. They’re both look­ing for their val­ue; Aksel gives Julie a sense of def­i­n­i­tion that she prefers in the begin­ning and then comes to hate lat­er. But I think that’s what love is. It’s learn­ing how to dare to be accept­ed with­out ratio­nal­is­ing what your worth is.

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