Joachim Trier Talks Making ‘Thelma’ & Rooting For Terrence Malick [Interview]

You’ve now worked with screenwriter Eskil Vogt on all four of your films. What is it about him that just fuels the both of you creatively?
We were film buffs, went to the Cinematheque in our late teens, and we both just loved cinema. Also, books and music and all kinds of art. When I did my first short at 21 I asked Eskil to help me and we kind of wrote that film together. Then I went to film school and I worked with some other people but in my second year I had a bit of a crisis, I didn’t know how to work with screenwriters at the school and Eskil came and helped me and we made a short film together which became the first of a string of shorts we did together.

We’ve worked together for almost twenty years now. The biggest challenge we are facing isn’t even a creative challenge, it’s just that we procrastinate too much. We meet in the morning, during writing periods at the office, and just sit there and start talking about “Oh, where is Terrence Malick going these days?” and he replies “Yes, it’s so interesting, but it’s so different.” Also we’ve spoken a lot lately about if television is the best place to explore character [laughs]. We’ll have all those conversations but I think that fuels us creatively and for “Thelma” that was great because we could watch a pile of Giallo horror films and then discuss them and see what’s cool and what’s not so cool about these genre movies. What can we learn from them? How are they cinematically original? Why is Dario Argento so purely visual in his way of working and what can we learn from him? I think that’s a great thing we have, that rapport about cinema and discussing. We have a shorthand there.

Where is Terrence Malick going these days? [Laughs]
[Laughs] That’s an important discussion. I think, to be honest with you, we are seeing a late phase of a master and I think that we should be generous and look at all these films he is releasing back to back as cinematic explorations. I think we are too concerned at the moment just about “Thumbs up” or “Thumbs down,” you know? Is it good? Is it bad? I think it’s much more interesting to look at the ambition and the moments of success that all his films have where you really feel that he’s trying to explore the possibilities for cinema to be both existentially potent but also visually explorative in terms of form. He’s trying to use the camera to be a philosopher.

I’m kind of tired of people putting down Terrence Malick because they want him to do what he did in his first few films. I watch his films with great admiration. I’m not a film critic, thank God, so I don’t have to decipher things up against each other, I can just be a human being watching another human being express themselves. Everyone is complaining that nobody is doing original cinema and then Terrence Malick is blowing the roof off in terms of trying to explore just how far you can push associative, voiceover-driven cinema without dramatic dialogue scenes in a way that nobody else has done. Whether you like it or not you have got to give him respect for the exploration of the possibilities of making movies, of what the language can be and I admire that tremendously. Who is else is doing that? Let’s root for the people that take risks, let’s root for the people that keep exploring and don’t abide by the rules of the dramaturgically constructed movies of the present moment.

“Thelma” opens November 10th in New York and November 24th in Los Angeles.

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