Using this location had personal benefits: on the days he was filming at the house, he could see his daughters for breakfast and put them to bed. Trier deeply understands a director like Gustav, with his art-monster tendencies and half-blundering, half-charming attempts to reach his daughters, but he hardly wants to be Gustav. In fact, much of Trier’s process seems to be about finding ways to buck that model. It helps, as Helle told me, that Trier is “endlessly fascinated” by other people’s psychology—“penetrating the top layer of big emotions and trying to understand why people are like they are. That is a constant conversation, at home and with our friends.”
Trier, who is tall and slim, with closely trimmed hair, a stubbly beard, blue eyes behind tortoiseshell glasses, and a penchant for black chinos and sneakers, looks like your favorite history teacher. On set, he bounces with a natural athleticism. He used to race down ski slopes; he has gone more slowly ever since an accident in 2019 which nearly necessitated the amputation of his foot. Trier is gregarious and emotionally accessible, prone to clasping his hands together in enthusiasm, uttering an exuberant “Exa-a-actly!” when he agrees with a comment, and tearing up while directing. (He also got misty when I recounted something kind his wife had said about him.)
This last tendency is one he shares with the director of photography on “Sentimental Value” and “Worst Person,” the Danish cinematographer Kasper Tuxen. “A lot of D.P.s are kind of super-masculine,” Trier said. “Kasper is so sensitive and lovely—he’s really engaged with what the actors are doing.” Tuxen told me that it posed a technical hazard to film scenes he found especially moving. Trier’s movies are shot on 35-mm., and Tuxen scoots in close to the actors, often on a rolling stool ignominiously known as a butt dolly. “Shooting on film, you have an actual optical-glass viewfinder,” Tuxen said. “It’s beautiful for seeing things clearly, but the condensation from a wet eyeball is a problem. When my operating eye gets wet, the glass gets fogged up. So I need to use a heated viewfinder, to cook my tears.”
The American director Mike Mills (“Beginners,” “20th Century Women”) is a close friend of Trier’s; he also works with Tuxen. Mills and Trier both approach filmmaking with an unabashed sincerity, even as they play around with winking archival montages, flash-forwards, and other arch techniques. The two have regular Zoom conversations that can last for hours, and they share preliminary cuts of their films with each other. Mills said that he and Trier, “two very therapized men,” were uncomfortably aware of film history being “filled with narcissists who maybe made great films but were horrible to be close to.” He went on, “If you’re the type of person who sees a lot of that as being a dead end, or problematic, or not leading toward happiness or a richer life, how do you react to that?” Like Trier, Mills has a tendency to make therapeutically savvy remarks, then worry aloud that they sound pretentious.
I ran Mills’s comments by Trier when I met him for coffee during the New York Film Festival. In directing, Trier said, “there’s a lot of heavy lifting, both in getting your creative control and in getting everyone on board—leading a big team of people early in the morning when they’re tired, and half of them have undiagnosed A.D.H.D. but you love their energy.” This situation “can encourage macho behavior, because you’re a leader—the militaristic general.” When Trier needs to rally his troops, he deepens his voice, claps his hands, and announces, “politely but sternly, like a teacher—‘We gotta focus, everybody!’ ” He prefers to operate in a mode “of tender encouragement, because people work better that way—at least, the people I want to work with.”
I visited the set of “Sentimental Value” last October. The shoot was on a soundstage a thirty-minute train ride from downtown Oslo. Inside was a re-creation of the first and second floors of the house in Frogner. To film a montage of the house at various historical junctures, from the nineteen-tens to the nineteen-eighties, it had been easier—though not easy, and not inexpensive—to build a replica than to retrofit the actual house. A production-design team had layered the walls of the imitation house with a palimpsest of wallpapers; when the scenes for one time period were done, the team peeled off a layer to reveal the one underneath.
That day’s shoot was set at a house party in the sixties, when the place was occupied by Gustav’s aunt, Edith, his mother’s sister, who lives openly with her girlfriend. Gustav’s mother, we’ve learned, joined the resistance during the Nazi occupation of Norway and was imprisoned by the Gestapo. She later died, by suicide, when Gustav was young. Edith likes to crank up the music at her parties when the neighbors complain—one of them, she’s sure, ratted out her sister.
