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May 01, 2008 Web Exclusive By Chris Tinkham

 

There appears to be a perpetual gleam in the eye of Norwegian director Joachim Trier. Although he remains politely soft-spoken and composed when discussing his directorial feature debut Reprise, his enthusiasm is nonetheless contagious as he gushes about the influence of artists as disparate as Alain Resnais and Bad Brains, whose work he both describes as punk. The gleam that emanates from Trier’s eclectic artistic appreciation is also identifiable throughout Reprise, which traces the divergent career trajectories of best friends and aspiring young novelists Phillip and Erik. Co-written by Trier and frequent collaborator Eskil Vogt, the film is a kaleidoscope of flashbacks, thoughts, memories, conditional narrative tangents, still frames and documentary-style passages. Its philosophical and romantic pondering, and breaks with narrative convention, shout French new wave. Yet, perhaps because Trier was a national skateboarding champion in Norway as a teen, there’s also a visceral playfulness that brings to mind the contemporary breakout hits of Danny Boyle (Trainspotting) and Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run). PromotingReprise on the worldwide festival circuit and also for its ensuing international theatrical releases has prevented Trier from formally starting a follow-up project. Currently, he plans to write with Vogt again, possibly an English-language film. But that doesn’t mean Trier is preparing to work for Hollywood anytime soon. “I think I still need to sustain my personal way of doing films,” he says. Under the Radar interviewed Trier in Beverly Hills a week before the U.S. release of Reprise. 

www.reprise-themovie.com

Can you tell me about the parade that’s depicted early in the film?

That’s an embarrassing parade, I find. It’s the Norwegian Independence Day, and the scene is shot in Oslo on the 17th of May. It was probably 2005, before the actual rest of the shoot. We needed documentary footage, and that’s reality for you in Norway, this little country that has this forced national day parade, which is kind of funny and a little bit embarrassing. My Danish editor saw the rushes for that, and he said, “My God, this looks like Austria in the ‘30s.” It’s like ridiculous, all costumes and flags.

During this sequence a character says, “We’ve got to get out of this country.”

Phillip [Anders Danielsen Lie] says that to Erik [Espen Klouman Høiner]. They’re very alienated. One shouldn’t underestimate the creative energy that comes out of feeling that you’re lost in the place you live, or the alienation of your close surroundings. Certainly in Norway, there’s a lot of young people that want to leave.

Joy Division’s “New Dawn Fades” is featured during the parade sequence and elsewhere in the film. Why was this song chosen?

I think it’s a very interesting song in terms of its lyrics but also just the sound. It’s a live recording from the album Les Bains Douches, which they did, I think, in ‘79. I think Joy Division, the punk comes out more in some of their live stuff than on the studio album. It’s an aesthetic thing. I just thought in terms of mood and desperation, it was a good way to set up the attitude of the film. In film, people always talk about the tangible or concrete things: What is the story, what is it about? But actually what a lot of filmmaking is to me is more abstract, about the music and the mood and the lighting, and how things just make you feel. That’s just as important as character and plot or story. It’s part of that, part of the detailing of trying to create a mood and feeling.

You used to make skateboarding music videos?

More like skateboarding movies. I’m sure you’ve seen some living out here, you know, people skating cut together in an interesting way with music. I skated myself, so we did that without any sort of grander idea of what it would be. It was just a great way to show each other, you know, the remains of a summer. This is what we did this summer. Nothing commercial about it, but just the pure wish to do something that looked cool.

How old were you?

Like 15, 16, 17, those years I did a lot of skate videos. Then I stopped skating when I was like 18.

What kind of music did you use?

This is why they couldn’t be commercial; we wouldn’t have gotten the rights. We used a lot of Descendents, Dag Nasty, Dinosaur Jr. You know, a lot of West Coast punk or indie bands. Black Flag, SST records. Like Bad Brains, aw, I’m a big Bad Brains fan.

Yeah, I saw the documentary American Hardcore that came out a couple years ago.

Sure! I was straight edge for a while. I had an X on my hand and listened to Youth of Today. I haven’t spoken about that ever, I think, in relation to Reprise. But actually I had my little moment, I had a lot of friends who played hardcore and punk.

I think it’s interesting being in Los Angeles, because Southern California has this reputation of being sunny and soft with the laid-back beach culture and Hollywood glitz, but hardcore punk came out of here as did gangsta rap.

That’s very interesting! I remember Straight Outta Compton. I bought that vinyl when it came out. I was like, “Wow, rap is cool again.” So, you’re right. Maybe we’ll create a little analogy with Norway, or an analog parallel there, because Norway’s like a safe social democracy with a very well functioning political system due to the fact that there are almost no people there, so it’s kind of easy. And there’s kind of a darkness, Oslo is the heroin capital of Europe per capita. Having said that, there’s also a progressive sort of— there’s always a good punk scene there. And people think there was just sports and skis and national day parades.

Going back to your early ideas for this film, were Phillip and Erik always writers? Did you conceive them as such?

We actually did, yeah. We discussed for a little while, like a joke we’d say, “What if they were in a band?” It would certainly be an easier plot to pitch. A band breaks up, you know. Maybe instead of Sten Egil Dahl, they meet Morrissey or something. But it would have been more conventional. I think it’s interesting with young writers in Oslo, there’s a lot of them, and many people who really long for this kind of escape through becoming an artist, particularly writers.

There’s a scene where a character says that TV is no place to discuss literature. Is it common for literature to be discussed on TV in Norway? It’s rare here.

Not as much as in France, for example. Norway’s less literary as a culture than that. But yeah, once in a while. I think it’s the old writer that says that. I guess TV doesn’t have time for proper contemplation and more complex thought. TV has to move quickly. But I understand America’s kind of different, you have these channels that people can just sit and talk.

Yeah, I don’t know. A lot of times it’s just them promoting themselves.

Exactly, you’re right.

Erik’s girlfriend Lillian is shot in an interesting manner. Was the actress [Silje Hagen] aware of how you were going to reveal her character to the viewers.

Yeah, it said in the script. Working dramaturgically with a script, in the sense that you want a script to help you indicate what the film is going to feel and look like, it’s good to give certain indications as to how you reveal characters. That was a part of the plan. She’s an amazing actress.

There are frequent flashbacks and jumps in space and time, and often these moments last only a few seconds. Watching the film, knowing that I might talk to you, I began to wonder how many of those vignettes were planned before production commenced.

All of them. With the script, it’s very much like the film ended up. Having said that, I always want there to be a creative space for improvement or change. There are, of course, things that change along the way, but it’s not like we discovered our way of structuring the editing during editing. We knew where we were going, but I also knew that I was going to be working with a great editor [Olivier Bugge Coutté] whom I had experimented a bit with before on short films with similar ways of telling stories.

A couple of the young men in your film reveal a sexual naiveté. I was surprised to see this in a Scandinavian film. I usually expect young people in foreign films to display more sexual maturity than their American counterparts.

I think some of them are. I think they’re different. I think someone like Geir, the slightly geekish guy in the group, he’s naive. I don’t think Phillip is very naive. I don’t think you can generalize about those things in cultures. I’ve had American friends, French friends, if you live in an urban environment, I think it’s quite similar. But I know there’s this rumor that Europeans are easy or something, which is kind of hilarious. Is this an experience Americans have, have you heard this?

I was just speaking from my history of seeing films. And you know, sometimes to sell a foreign film here, it might need some sex to get media attention, so maybe my perception is skewed by what makes it over here.

Interesting, that might be true. I mean, we have a sex scene that has gotten quite a lot of attention. We’re using sex quite narratively to say something about the breakdown of a relationship. I’m thinking of the scene in Paris with Kari. I think sex is used very banally. Oh, they kiss and they start making love and the camera pans out the window, and that’s seen as now they are in love. It’s overused. A lot of drama in life happens in bed with a couple. Why do people have arguments right before they fall asleep? What happens with sex that’s, after a while, not functioning the way you want in a relationship? I think there’s a theme there that I’d like to explore further. Maybe I’m rambling on about the wrong thing, but just on the note of how to use sexuality in cinema, we certainly in this film wanted to use it to tell something, not just as a gratuitous “something.”

Can you talk about the influence that Last Year at Marienbad had on your film?

Yeah! I’ll gladly talk about that. That was the kind of film that meant a lot to me when I was younger. It still does, but I always felt that it kind of had a punk aspect to it, as opposed to those who think it’s a stylized, cold, intellectual thing. Yeah, it is, but it’s intellectually punk. It takes all the chance in the world. It really stands out; there’s nothing else like it. It plays around with time and space and philosophical pondering upon identity. A very cool film, actually, quite alien maybe in a way contemporary cinema would never dare be.

There’s a scene where, I believe, Phillip translates some dialog from a movie on the TV for Erik? What film was that?

It’s a Marguerite Duras short film, whose name escapes me right now. So it’s in that landscape. Mind you,Hiroshima Mon Amour was written by her, and that was the film Alain Resnais did right before Last Year at Marienbad. So it’s kind of along the same tradition of philosophical narrative, I guess.

Another film from the same period that came to mind, because of your use of still frames and narration in Reprise, was Chris Marker’s La Jetée.

Oh great. That’s right on the money. It’s certainly one of my all-time favorites. La Jetée may be the world’s best short film ever. And it’s a great— again, it’s dealing with memory and representation and identity, and those themes that kind of give themselves to cinema, and that we should just continue to work with, I think.

At what point in the writing process did you decide to use narration throughout the film?

Very early. It’s one of the devices that we enjoy a lot. We were looking a lot at Barry Lyndon and a lot of new wave films. Jules et Jim uses narration in interesting ways. It’s easy to do it in a boring way, to make it just the character’s thoughts or something like that, which, you know, Terrence Malick’s done that wonderfully. So it’s all about how you use it, I think.

You have experience in advertising, as do a couple of Reprise’s cast members. Is it a coincidence, or are a lot of Norwegian artists also involved in advertising?

I think we have a lack in our culture of good art education. In my case, I did short films and went to film school and all that before I did some ads. I did them as stylistic exercises or a way to make some money after film school. But for the guys, the actors that have been there, one place where a lot of people go, there’s a great ad school in Norway. A lot of people want to be creative, and sometimes I’m a bit critical and think, “Why aren’t they in the proper art school?” I think maybe the arts education in Norway, that’s the problem. So, it’s not a coincidence. It’s something I’ve thought about myself. But it’s not like everyone in Norway is doing ads.

Films in Hollywood, they’re often youth-oriented because that’s the demographic that’s perceived as critical for box office. Your film is about young people. Was it important to you that Reprise appeal to viewers of the same age as your characters?

Yeah. Yes and no. Yes, in way that, if that happens, I’ll be very happy because I remember being much younger than the people in The Breakfast Club, but when seeing it I thought, “Oh, I want those problems.” I thought The Breakfast Club was so cool, and they took young people seriously. So, if it can reach people in that way around the world, as it’s being distributed in 30 countries, that’s wonderful for me as an artist, but I certainly never had a commercial target audience I was aiming in on when I was writing. It doesn’t work that way. You don’t know who your audience ultimately is going to be, with any project. But that’s up to the distributors and people like that to deal with. But, the funny thing is, this film, as I’ve traveled around the world with it, it seems to really strike a chord with people that age, like 23-year-olds, people who might want to be creative or people that are studying at university. It think it gives them comfort to see this film, or it gives them hope that someone understands their problems. That would be really wonderful. I hope it could mean something to them.