The Promise of Life: Joachim Trier and Renate Reinsve on The Worst Man in the World | Interviews

The Worst Man in the World emulates Julie’s sense of self-discovery through this sensual, unfixed sense of style. Hallucination sequences, voiceovers, the outside world freezes. What changes did you each want to convey in Julie, and how did you choose the formal innovations to reflect this inconsistency?

JT: In a way, it’s a question for both of us, because I feel like it’s two parts. I can talk about my intentions, and then Renate can talk about the transformation process. Honestly, it’s my job to tell the story and come up with these formal things, set the scene. What I find really delightful is how Renate manages to transform, subtly, as we get to the end. I said to her early on, “I’d like people to feel at the end of the film as if we’ve gone through a large space of several years and someone’s life development.” And how Renate does that is still a mystery to me, but it seems to work for everyone, who watch the movie, which is amazing. There’s a great hair and makeup and clothing department, but there’s something intuitively clever about how she deals with a character’s appearance, movements, and emotional awakening over so many years when it’s not shot chronologically.

However, form is something that Eskil Vogt, myself and editor Olivier Bouguet Coute are very concerned about. We come from being fans of Hiroshima Mon Amour, the French New Wave, Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, all these films that try to talk about how time and memory can be worked with , in cinema, in a way unique to all other art forms. We can cut and layer the time layer. You also see it in Bergman in a different way, how he does dream sequences and the fantastic suddenly appears in the middle of films that are sometimes quite gritty and real, human and raw. To create films that have both a sense of naturalism and visible identification on the part of the audience, then changing that to a mushroom trip or an almost musical sequence of running around Oslo when Julie freezes time, it frees the audience to have more -great thematic scope to get a feel for the film – rather than just a kitchen sink drama with two people talking all the time. Of course, there are long dialogue scenes in this film and I am very proud of them. But the dynamic between intimacy and the larger scope of playful filmmaking is what interests me.

RR: When I read the script, I felt that every scene contained so much. It was so rich, so complex. With the mushroom travel and going back and forth in time, you feel like you’ve been everywhere: in time and space, and also emotionally, with all the characters. I was really afraid of not getting all these nuances and not having in the performance all the details that I felt were in the script.

We talked about this very early on, how her body language should reflect her state of mind. Julie goes through a path of being very restless, not being able to make up her mind about anything, not knowing what to do in life or who to be with to be and not be able to accept himself. And then she’s forced to look at herself and she goes through losing someone and losing the image she had of herself. Ultimately, you see her actually find peace and acceptance in being herself.