Trier and his location scouts searched for the right house for nearly a year. In the end, he found it a five-minute walk from the apartment where he lives with his wife, Helle Bendixen Trier, an architect and an experimental-theatre artist, and their two daughters, who are four and one. He loved the house\u2019s big windows, which allowed him to occasionally shoot from outside, \u201cas though the house is looking in\u201d on the people within, and the way the light drifted across the interior walls in the course of a day. Even the house\u2019s actual residents were the right types\u2014one was a post-punk musician Trier admired. \u201cIt had this vibe of the family having come from old money, but then the people who lived in it later being more cultural types, with interesting curiosities,\u201d Trier said. \u201cIt had a melancholic feeling of a grand past.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s process seems to be about finding ways to buck that model. It helps, as Helle told me, that Trier is \u201cendlessly fascinated\u201d by other people\u2019s psychology\u2014\u201cpenetrating 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u201cExa-a-actly!\u201d 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.)<\/p>\n
This last tendency is one he shares with the director of photography on \u201cSentimental Value\u201d and \u201cWorst Person,\u201d the Danish cinematographer Kasper Tuxen. \u201cA lot of D.P.s are kind of super-masculine,\u201d Trier said. \u201cKasper is so sensitive and lovely\u2014he\u2019s really engaged with what the actors are doing.\u201d Tuxen told me that it posed a technical hazard to film scenes he found especially moving. Trier\u2019s 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. \u201cShooting on film, you have an actual optical-glass viewfinder,\u201d Tuxen said. \u201cIt\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
The American director Mike Mills (\u201cBeginners,\u201d \u201c20th Century Women\u201d) is a close friend of Trier\u2019s; 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, \u201ctwo very therapized men,\u201d were uncomfortably aware of film history being \u201cfilled with narcissists who maybe made great films but were horrible to be close to.\u201d He went on, \u201cIf you\u2019re 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?\u201d Like Trier, Mills has a tendency to make therapeutically savvy remarks, then worry aloud that they sound pretentious.<\/p>\n
I ran Mills\u2019s comments by Trier when I met him for coffee during the New York Film Festival. In directing, Trier said, \u201cthere\u2019s a lot of heavy lifting, both in getting your creative control and in getting everyone on board\u2014leading a big team of people early in the morning when they\u2019re tired, and half of them have undiagnosed A.D.H.D. but you love their energy.\u201d This situation \u201ccan encourage macho behavior, because you\u2019re a leader\u2014the militaristic general.\u201d When Trier needs to rally his troops, he deepens his voice, claps his hands, and announces, \u201cpolitely but sternly, like a teacher\u2014\u2018We gotta focus, everybody!\u2019\u00a0\u201d He prefers to operate in a mode \u201cof tender encouragement, because people work better that way\u2014at least, the people I want to work with.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Trier and his location scouts searched for the right house for nearly a year. In the end, he…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11356,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[85],"tags":[5007,8893,4399,157,5008,156,8892,8894],"class_list":["post-11355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oslo","tag-audio","tag-inverted","tag-magazine","tag-norway","tag-onecolumnnarrow","tag-oslo","tag-profiles","tag-textbelowcenterfullbleednocontributor"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11355"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11355\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}